Was Bannister really the first sub-4 minute miler?

Here's an interesting article about a home grown talented American Indian distance runner. I'm not trying to imply he had sub four potential but with specific mile training, who knows. If you're not too busy please read the link.

en.wikipedia.org

Deerfoot

Deerfoot (1828 – 18 January 1896, Cattaraugus Reservation) was an American Seneca runner. His most noted achievements took place in England. Biography Deerfoot–Red Jacket, or Hut-goh-so-do-neh in his native tongue, was born i...

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A side-note to this thread. Glenn Cunningham did run a 4:04 indoor mile in the 30s up at Dartmouth. Little known fact. It did not count as a world record 'cause it was indoors. His world record outdoors was 4:06 point something.

Time is weird, it is relative. It is interesting how Kip Keino came from a different cultural view of the world, and up-ended elite distance running in the 60s. Did Keino have a different perception of time? A guy like Bannister was likely obsessed with seconds, minutes, yards and quarter mile splits, whereas Keino probably was more focused on winning. Kip came up with strategic solutions to running fast and winning, with injections of fast pace early. He blew up the game, grabbing gold medals and world records. Perhaps he recognized an opportunity to take advantage of a rigid "western" mind set about the nature of time.

Both physicists and psychedelic explorers will tell you that time is not an absolute (time is relative, time is circular, time can act in ways uncoupled from space, etc. and so on) but of course most people who have ever raced a mile will have a different take on that.

As a high school miler, I would try to squeeze out a PR by trying different combinations of splits in advance, and settling on a plan. Rigid thinking indeed! Sometimes it worked, sometimes not...

Who was the guy--post-collegiate elite, American--who ran a sub-4 one night in Berkeley a few years back, a long gentle downhill? It was posted here. A fantastic public-roads bandit sort of thing.

Yeah, when I was 14 (year 10, or 9th grade in the US) I ran a 2.09 800m. I trained for that at a very good athletics club.

During a PE lesson at school we ran 800m in three heats. In the first heat the all round freak athlete in my year ran and won it easily. He then, with 3 minutes recovery, ran in my heat and beat me. 3 minutes later he ran in the third heat and won that one too. And this was off tennis training by a guy who wasn’t a fast developer or anything. A couple of years later the kid medalled at the junior British Indoor Rowing Championships 3 months into taking up the sport.

It’s also difficult to believe that the Ancient Greeks, as empirically driven and analytical as they were, across 700+ years of specialised athletic training, weren’t producing some absolutely phenomenal athletes.

Just came across this. Hell of a race.

I doubt that any ancient Spartan or cavemen had the motivation to give it their best for 3:59.99 and thus, sadly, sacrificed The Gift

life was pretty awful for most people - at least according to Thomas Hobbes -and everything else I’ve read. Nutrition was inconsistent at best. Not a lot of time or energy or freedom to be running in circles when you’re trying to survive - unfortunately still true for a lot of the world today. There were also a lot fewer people.

It is likely that one or both of them would have broken 4 officially well before Bannister but WW II seemed to impede progress on that front for nearly a decade.

Big Hawk Chief ran a 3:58 mile on a steel tape measured course.

This was chronicled in detail by a US Army officer at the time.

Pretty hard to argue this wasn't accurate or legit, especially since they are openly giving credit to a Native American in 1876.

Why would you doubt things the ancient Spartans or Cavemen couldn't do because they had no motivation to try to do since the mile was not yet invented? This mile thing wasn't ingrained in our craniums yet. But our ancestors were smarter and way more savvy than what humans are today.

They could make a fire without using matches, just using pieces of wood found in the forrest. The could make stone tools and weapons only using a piece of leather and one tine from a deer antler. Almost every ancient human could master one or both of these skills. How many humans do you know today who can do this?

Also, human evolution is an interesting subject to consider. Humans, by observation are one of only a few mammals that aren't covered in fur. This is by design/natural selection, whatever you believe in, not wanting to leave anyone out of the discussion.

The reason for Humans losing their fur and also growing taller and more bipedal than their primate ancestors was faster cooling by not being covered in fur. Evolving to become bipedal allowed you to run faster chasing game and over time evolving to become faster and with more endurance than what todays humans think is/was possible.

One thing I have read, no I don't have a link, sorry, that a fit human, aka an athlete/distance runner can, if you chose to do so, run down a North American White Tail Deer to exhaustion because even though deer have speed, they don't have endurance.

Our ancient cousins were chasing after meat daily. I'm sure some of them were running as fast or faster than current humans. The only difference between then and now is, back then there were no stopwatches or shoe contracts.

That's the one I was semi remembering. Thanks.

Embarrassing article. Claims to be the first man to break 4:00 for the mile but didn’t really think it was a big deal. Also says the guy holding the stopwatch would remember. Guy holding the stopwatch says , “Yeah, I don’t remember a sub-4:00 time.”

No human being can a sub 4 minute mile without training. Very few elite, generally athletic people throughout history could have probably managed a sub 4:30 without a lot of running training.

The idea of running a sub 4 minute mile wasn’t even in the minds of people probably until the 1900s.

There was no significant leisure time prior to the 20th century. More free time, led to more exercise, like running.

Running as a sport didn’t hit critical mass really until the 1970s with the “jogging” movement.

Base stamina in England. Weren't they mostly shovelling coal or working in factories?
That's nothing like the kind of training schedule that i imagine has been perfected over for decades that allows you to build a base. Without what today would be known as exercise science, I have trouble seeing it happening

90% of these posts are irrelevant to the discussion. It doesn't matter if humans had the capability to be fit at any given moment in time, the question is did anyone run sub four before Bannister. Have the the ability to run sub four is not the same thing.

his argument is absurd. He repeats over and over that the text says the guy ran 4 minutes and not 4:30 (tjat was the bet). So even if we grant that the mile was accurately measured back, then, our margin for error is 15-30 seconds. I’ll grant that this is marginal evidence that someone may have run under 4:30, but nowhere is there an indication that he ran 359 or under. Probably 4:15.