Book review: The First Four Minutes, by Roger Bannister

Following on from my recent post about brain training for competitions, a.k.a mental toughness, I thought it would be fun to review The First Four Minutes, by Sir Roger Bannister (affiliate links: UK, US).

After all, Bannister’s breaking of the four minute mile in 1954 is often seen as a triumph of an athlete’s self-belief in the face of what had become a rubicon that many athletes were intimidated from crossing.

And, well, I really, really love this book.

Bannister breaking the record

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Why I love this book (in reverse order)

#4: Writing quality

Least important but still important to me is that Bannister can really write well.  Which is what you might expect of someone with such an academic pedigree.  After his successful athletic career, he went on to have a successful career in medical research, specialising in neurology, and ultimately ending up as master of Pembroke college at Oxford University.

Following a typical story arc for sports autobiographies, Bannister starts with the most prestigious race of his athletic career, the European games at Berne in 1954, where he took first in the 1,500m in a come-back performance that silenced the critics of his fourth place finish in the Olympics in 1952.  He then takes us right back to the beginning.

In the beginning, we learn enough about the young Bannister to establish his nervous temperament and strong will.  We learn about his love of running and his academic excellence.  As time passes, we dwell more on his races and the gradual progression towards the elusive four-minute mile.

The story arc culminates perfectly in a double finale: the paced four-minute mile at Oxford and the consequent race against arch-rival John Landy, where Bannister experiences the benefit of perfect judgement and luck, as Landy chooses the wrong shoulder to look over just as he kicks into his sprint and comes around his outside to take the win.

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#3: The outsider

Throughout his athletic career, Bannister was an outsider who trained largely alone and took personal responsibility for his training routines and performances.

He took a great deal of flak from the press for his unusual training methods and refusal to be coached.  At no point did he rise to the bait and merely allowed his performances to speak for themselves.

In many ways, Bannister reminds me much of the amazing Scottish track cyclist, Graeme Obree, who took the World Hour Record in the 1990′s, and who similarly captured the British imagination with his homemade bicycle, jam sandwiches and amateur training tendancies.

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#2: Interval training

As noted above, Bannister received a lot of criticism from the press, who saw his opponents doing very different training from him.

In this book, Bannister describes how he focused on quality intervals at high speeds with medium rests between them (quarter miles with 2 minutes rest) and eschewed doing large volumes of training and long, slow runs.  He also found that good quality rests between training sessions helped enormously.  Who’d have thought?

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#1: Athletic fulfilment

This book is all about athletic fulfilment.

Athletic fulfilment is important to me.  For me, it will be achieving something that few other people can do.  At the moment, my mind turns to things like Jasper Benincasa’s Close To Impossible or John Gill’s One Arm Front Lever.  Whether they or another achievement lie in my future I do not know but the quest remains worthwhile nevertheless.

Mark Twight recently tweeted that “fulfilment” might not be the right description and suggested “what now?” as more appropriate.  I think that’s probably right.  For Bannister, the twin achievements of the four-minute mile led to a “what now” moment that was a successful medical career.

But what an amazing pair of “what now” moments.  The four-minute mile and the race against Landy.

Reading Bannister’s descriptions of these two races is an emotional experience.  You live with him the first three-quarters of a mile pacing himself.  The quiet before the storm.  Then, as he changes up a gear, you feel the desperation build.  Flinging himself down the final straight, his will-power drives his body harder than anyone else was capable of doing.

Obree used to say he was more afraid of failure than he was of dying.  He could push himself that hard.  Bannister writes in the same vibe, and, although his restraint makes his prose less dramatic, I believe he was every bit as driven.

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So is there anything I won’t like about this book?

Well you might not appreciate Bannister’s disdain for strength training, which include the following absolute gems:

• “The waddling gait and breathlessness of a muscle-bound weight-lifter are salutary warnings of the dangers of over-specialisation and of what occurs when muscular development has been carried to excess.”
• “Given the choice between a solitary run and a series of meaningless and, for me, difficult exercises in the gym, I always chose the run.  The result is that I still cannot touch my toes, but then runners never have to.”
• “The sprinter’s performance is seldom transformed by training, except in starting practice.  The sprinter is born not made.”

Myself, I can forgive Bannister these small half-truths and appreciate him as a great (British) athlete in that peculiar mould that we Brits so appreciate: the lone outsider, driven by internal demons and bound to do great deeds.

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