Do you belive the 1770 sub 4 minute mile?

Running started at 6a.am and Barclay was expected to exercise beneath a mountain of clothees, to work up a powerful sweat. He wore two pairs of breeches, two waistcoats and an overcoat. The run was followed by a massage, and half an hour rest in a bed heated by a warming pan filled with red-hot coals, under blankets and a feather quilt. The moisture lost by all this sweating would be replaced by a tankard of strong malt liqour.

The afternoon brought yet more running, and Jackey Smith would make his athlete sprint repeatedly up a grassy hill. The old famer would throw stones and abuse at him t pget the adrenalin flowing. Barclay's diet was predominantly protein - undercooked beef, mutton and raw eggs - and to break the monotony a glass of port, mornning and evening.

But beyond all the quaint talk of emetics and sweating, the trainers of the professional pedestrians built up an enormous store of expertise and knowledge about physical conditioning. (Though much of this knowledge would be lost when the 'amateurs' took over the sport some time later.) They knew the value of big mileage training and they knew about speedwork. They had to know their business. With fortunes wagered on heir men, they could not affoprd to get it wrong.

When it came to betting on mile races, the gamblers as well as the athletes had to know what was a likely time, and from the earliest contest in Britain there were indications that four minutes might be close to the limit. The references to the 'even' four-minute time are too frequent to be ignored.

to be continued...

So the Sporting Magazine reports that for a 15 guinea bet on 9 May 1770, James Parrot, a costermonger, ran the length of London's Old Street, from the Cahrterhouse Wall in Goswell St to Shoreditch Church gaes - a measured mile - in exactly four minutes. Seventeen years later, the stakes on a 'four-minute mile' had risen enormously. In 1787 Jackson's Oxford Journal reported that a wager of 1,000 guineas was made that a man called Powell could not run a mile in four minutes, and that in trainining for it he ran 'entirely naked within three seconds of the time'. Whether he ever won his wager was not recorded.

Such distances, of course, may be have been hopelessly inaccurate, but the idea that the mile might be run in something around four minutes, by these full-time professional athletes, was evidently part of early pedestrian lore. The first book on running, in 1813, Walter Thompson's Pedestrianism half history and half coaching manual, treated all record claims with care. It reported that in 1803 John Todd ran from Hyde Park Corner to the first milestone on the Uxbridge road - a measured mile - in four minutes 10 seconds, and clearly believed the performance was authentic.

Was the length of a mile changed in the last 50 years to slightly shorter distance? I remember reading theat the inch was set by law to equal 2.54 cm. exactly. The old conversion was different and just longer so does that mean that all the old records will stand forever and that there are new records for the "new mile"?

The international standard for the mile was set at 1,609.344 metres in 1959. However, there was very little difference between global understanding of the term and the distance agreed upon was the one already in use in most countries - including the US and Britain. The 'British mile' has existed since Queen Elizabeth I of England who redefined the mile from 5000 feet to 8 furlongs (5280 feet) by statute in 1593.

Did Bannister run the 1609.344 meters or the old longer mile?

Bannister ran the old mile - 1609.344metres - which is the same distance as the new mile.

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The Hyde Park Corner milestone was a famous one and was used by mapmakers to calculate distances for coach travel, but by the 1850s the professional runners wee moving off the roads and on to the even more accurately measured running tracks. Again, the driving force behind the move was commercial. Promoters could enclose the tracks and make spectators pay, and soon track running was a full-time business. To keep up interest among the public and make sure the gate money rolled in, the early athletic impresarios also quickly learned how to put on a show.

When an American runner named Louis Bennett turned up to run a series of races in Britain in 1861, the promoters had a great idea: they made him run in fancy dress. They made sure that when he appeared on the track he did so wearing feathers in his hair (he was part Seneca Indian). They wrapped him in a wolfskin blanket and put moccasins on his feet. They announced that he spole no English, that he had done all his running on the hunting field, and that his name was deerfoot. Despite some very mixed performances, and many charges of race-fixing, the tour was a sell-out succes. Deerfoot's backers got their money back many times over.

But time was running out for the promotes, for such stunts and for the old professional pedestrians, however fast they might have covered their miles. The professionals were about to find their performances deliberately written out of history and the record books by the generation of athletes and their chroniclers who followed. For with Victorian self-confidence at its height, there was to emerge a new creed of athletics, dedicated to amateurism, and bringing with it a powerful backlash against the 'evils' of betting and professionalism that had haunted the sport in the past.

i heard that every one of those brit runners from 200 years ago that went sub 4 were not on foot but instead did it on "shank's pony" and that does not seem fair.

The first locomotives at this time could barely move at a 4 minute mile pace. The early steam ships of that time where lucky to travel at more than 4 knots.

cool

Are there any people on here who have run 4 minutes or close to it mostly on natural ability and little scientific training? If so, is it hard to believe that say an Indian messenger who also runs down deer, plays lacrosse and races his tribe mates at the yearly Corn and Squash festival might have a reasonable shot at sub 4? Of course it could have happened.

There was also an Irish runner about 50 years ago who was good for about 4:07 and he apparently never actually trained.

how do we know that the first sub 4 minute mile wasn't 2000 years ago? The greeks and Romans were very big on sports. Additionaly their messangers ran hundreds of miles, with all this aerobic and the high popularity of sprint events, how do we know that it was never combined even once and someone ran a four minute mile or 2 k in under 5 minutes? It can certainly be possible.

Ears2Yoo wrote:

As late as the 1780's, there was no uniformity for measurement anywhere in the world. The US finally set a standard at the end of the 18th Century.

Hardly, the statute mile was established in British law in 1593, the US adopted the previously standardised Imperial measures in 1836. The first US law establishing legal measures was the Metric Act of 1866 which made the metric system legal for all purposes.

In 1876, Big Hawk Chief (Pawnee) was the first person in history to be recorded as running a mile in less than four minutes. U.S. Army officials not only marked off the course, they also timed the race twice. Despite this official documentation of a sub-four-minute mile race, Big Hawk Chief never received official credit. In fact, in 1954, seventy-seven years after Big Hawk Chief's run, a man named Roger Bannister was officially credited with running the first four-minute mile

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In 1835, a correspondent to The Spirit of the Times newspaper told of a Native American who had run 100 miles in a day carrying a sixty-pound bar of lead. Another wrote of a member of the Osage tribe to skeptical members of the Indian Commission. Seeking to prove his veracity, he proposed a wager. An Indian was to take a message to Fort Gibson at sunrise and return with an answer before sunset, a round-trip journey of some 80 miles. The wager was won.

In 1876 Big Hawk Chief ran from the Pawnee Agency to the Wichitas, a distance of 120 miles, inside 24 hours. His claim to have run such a distance was not believed. The Wichita chief arranged to ride back with him, sending a relay horse to the 60-mile point so that he could change horses there. Before the 60-mile point, the Wichita chief's horse was forced to stop and rest, but Big Hawk went on. The Wichita chief eventually reached the Pawnee village before sunrise, less than 24 hours after their start, and found Big Hawk asleep. He had come in around midnight, covering the 120 miles across mountains, hills, and streams in about 20 hours.

Other writers recorded similar feats. The Hopi Indians particularly have many stories told of their running prowess. Walter Hough described a Hopi Indian running 65 miles in eight hours, from Oraibi Pueblo to Winslow, before turning around and running home. George Wharton James wrote in 1903 that on several occasions he had employed a young man to take a message to Oraibi to Keams Canyon, a distance of 72 miles, and that he had run the entire way and back within 36 hours. Another Hopi, Letayu, carried a note from Keams Canyon to Fort Wingate and returned, covering over 200 miles in three days.

The greatest feat attributed to an Indian runner was by Charlie Talawepi in the early 1900s, when reportedly he ran from Tuba City to Flagstaff and returned to Moenkapi, covering around 156 miles in about 24 hours. Charlie was apparently reduced to a walk by the finish, and took days to recover. For this feat he was given a twenty-dollar silver piece.

The most famous of the Hopi Indians was Louis Tewanima, who won the silver medal in the 10,000 meters in the 1912 Olympics, and finished ninth in the 1908 Olympic Marathon. In his younger days he would reputedly run from his home to Winslow and back, some 120 miles, just to watch the trains pass.

Sub-Fours in the Old West

Our report of the amazing, and surely incredible, 3:45 mile run by Confederate corporal W.H. Green in 1865 inspired reader Scott Hubbard to send us another classic clipping. Hubbard, a writer for the Michigan Runner, noticed that Sport magazine credited the first sub-four-minute mile to Big Hawk Chief.

When Hubbard prodded the magazine for evidence, Sport produced an entry from "Who Was Who in Native American History." It seems that the Big Hawk Chief, a Pawnee whose birth name "Kootahwecootsoolelehoolashar" was as good a reason for a nickname as any, is reported to have run a 3:58 in 1876. The story goes that in the final years of the Plains Indian wars, Big Hawk Chief, who helped the U.S. Army in its war against the Sioux, twice broke four minutes in time trials set up by a Captain North at Fort Sidney, Neb.

Understandably, I'm waiting to see the FinishLynx photo before I pass judgment on this one.

I 'm not sure if it has already been mentioned (I looked briefly), but I am absolutely sure (in my own mind)that Cunningham broke 4 minutes well before Bannister. I heard the man talk about it and he was as sincere as any man I had ever heard.

Mtn Dew wrote:

wags wrote:

i think it is quite possible. i have always had a theory that some native american ran a miles distance in less than four minutes chasing down a deer or somthing in the 1400's.

I doubt that too. If you are chasing something down you're not going to pace yourself, you're going to run all out. There's no way they sprinted a mile under 4:00.

Actually, people have been running down deer for countless millennia. You can't sprint while doing so--you'll miss its tracks--and what you mostly do is a mix of running at a medium-slow speed and walking.

Deer get exhausted. Humans can keep going. Even now there are a few "hunters" who run down (on foot, that is!) deer for the sport of it. They "score" by touching the deer or by taking a photo of it.

It's a more time-consuming version of how dogs bring down deer. A deer can outsprint almost any dog, but the dog (or usually dogs, in a pack) will just keep going until the deer drops.

[Note: When dogs do this, it's known as "harrying" deer...whence the term "harriers" for cross-country runners.]

No its true they timed it with a sun dial, official result was 3:59.99

People have been running sub 4 miles for thousands of years.