Torch Bearers

Admin note: As you've probably guessed, even after running a 5-minute mile, I still had lots of lingering thoughts about the overall significance of Bannister’s accomplishment, and whether such a momentous occasion could ever happen again in modern times. For multiple reasons, I can’t envision a scenario where anything similar would ever occur. This epilogue to the series touches on a few of those reasons.

Why I thought to conclude a series about the most famous distance runner in history with an analogy to a hockey team is still, even five years later, somewhat puzzling to me. I think I had always known about the Canadiens’ (and please don’t write to correct me on the spelling – that’s how it’s written. Apparently it's a French thing.) story, and was just waiting for a time when I could work it into an article without seeming like a complete departure from the subject at hand.

Finally … thanks again to everyone who stuck it out with this series, especially to those who commented or e-mailed me along the way. I’m sure you had no idea what you were wading into when this all started; so if you actually made it to the end, you are to be congratulated.

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Chasing Roger Bannister

Epilogue: Torch Bearers


Painted on the inside of the Montreal Canadiens’ locker room is a passage from Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae’s famous World War I poem In Flanders Fields: "To you from failing hands we throw the torch; Be yours to hold it high."

The Canadiens (or Les Habitants, or “Habs”, to its loyal fan base) are one of the most storied franchises in all of sports. The team has won 24 Stanley Cups since 1916, including at least one in every decade of the 20th Century. More than 40 of its players have been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Current champions perennially mentor and guide the organization’s stars of the future, and the tradition of winning championships is passed from one generation to the next.

Above their lockers, modern-day players see the Flanders Fields text inscribed in foot-high letters that wrap around the walls, lined atop facial profiles of great Canadiens of the past. As they suit up for each home game, under the gazes of legends such as Maurice Richard, Jacque Plante, and Guy Lafleur, the message to today’s players is clear: You follow in the footsteps of great men. Your actions should be worthy of the proud tradition.


I’ve written a lot this year about Roger Bannister (probably – if we’re being honest – way too much). More than 50 years ago, he broke through a physical and psychological barrier that had long resisted men’s efforts to overcome it. His reasons for doing so were fairly straightforward: atonement for a poor Olympic showing, ambition for the honor that came with being a world-record holder, and a competitive drive to accomplish the feat before one of his rivals.

There was one final reason, equally important but far lesser-known, that drove Bannister’s fervent pursuit of the four-minute mile: he wanted to score a victory for the amateur athlete. Neal Bascomb explains this in The Perfect Mile: “Bannister knew that the gentleman amateur was fast becoming a dinosaur…But [he] was not ready to relinquish the values he had learned…For Bannister, breaking the barrier would be affirmation that the amateur was still capable of realizing athletics’ most coveted prize.”

In the 1950s, most Britons stubbornly cherished a notion that was becoming rapidly antiquated: that athletics were purely a young man’s fancy, before he turned his attentions to the important responsibilities of adulthood. The British universities of Cambridge and Oxford took particular pride in promoting the amateur ideal, and Bannister recognized that the Iffley Road track at Oxford would be a particularly appropriate setting for the barrier to be broken.

With hindsight, we can see how Bannister’s era was a time of pivotal change in athletics, from strict amateurism to professional enterprise. With each passing decade, top-tier athletes have been able to earn increasing dollar amounts from sponsors and appearance fees, enabling them to pursue their goals without the burden of maintaining a secondary career.

The pendulum has swung so far in this direction that the notion of a world-class athlete having a day-job is anachronistic. In fact, it is probably impossible - although I hesitate to use that word in a column about Bannister - for a runner to succeed on the world-class level without devoting at least 40 hours per week to conditioning, strength training, and form drills, as well as modern-day luxuries like massage, physical therapy, and lab testing, among other things. In other words, being an athlete in 2004 is a perfectly acceptable career.

Consequently, today’s world-class runners barely resemble - in either appearance or lifestyle - their counterparts of 50 years ago. Their talents are so highly evolved, and race strategies are so different (for example, the mile has almost become a prolonged sprint), it’s almost like they practice a whole different sport. In general, this remarkable evolution is a good thing - but one downside is that the sport of running loses some of its connection to the past that is prized in other long-established sports like hockey or baseball.

Today’s Montreal Canadiens are essentially playing the same game that their forbearers knew; sure, they may skate a little faster and benefit from modern advances in equipment, but the fundamentals are the same. The same thing can be said (putting aside the unspoken elephant in the room that is drug abuse) about baseball’s storied traditions from one generation to the next.

Yet somehow, it’s hard to imagine that Alan Webb or Hicham El Guerrouj are inspired in any way by Roger Bannister or John Landy as they lace up their shoes every day before heading out to the track. After all, they certainly can’t identify with the off-track burdens and expectations their predecessors commonly faced. Nobody ever pressured Webb to quit running so he could begin a real career, and El Guerrouj probably hasn’t worried about feeding his family for quite some time now.

And while these changes are understandable, they might also cause those links to the past to be eventually forgotten. That’s where you and I come in.

Perhaps the amateur athlete that Bannister worked so passionately to glorify hasn’t become extinct; perhaps he just looks a little different now. He’s no longer the guy competing at the Olympics – instead, he’s competing for an overall win or age-group award at the local 10K. Maybe he or she sits in a cubicle all day, or drives a backhoe, or coaches a soccer team, or raises children at home, while also training for a marathon. The same ideals that Bannister embodied on the world stage can still be found, only now they’re on the much smaller scales of local running clubs and all-comers track meets.

It’s likely that those of us who attend to jobs, families, and other obligations beside running can identify with the heroes of the past far more easily than the athletes who are competing on television today ever could. By these standards, the torch of Bannister’s era has, in fact, been passed - not to the modern-day elites, but to us.

Those of us who diligently train for no recognition other than personal satisfaction also follow in the footsteps of great men. By persevering with our training, by striving toward new personal goals, and by repeatedly testing the limits of our abilities, we hold the torch high. Hopefully, through the years, all of our actions will continue to be worthy of this proud tradition.


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The Beautiful Race

Admin note: If you’re surprised that I can muster so much infatuation for one race, perhaps you just haven’t read my blog for long enough. The bad news is, it only gets worse from here. I described a previous article as a love letter to the marathon; in that case, consider this one the romantic ramblings of a starry-eyed runner toward his new obsession.

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Chasing Roger Bannister

Part 5: The Beautiful Race

Is it possible for a race to be beautiful?

I’m not talking about a situation where the course is in a scenic location, or the athletes who run it are particularly good-looking, or a winning strategy by one particular runner is admirable in its execution. I’m referring to a case where the race distance itself, and the format in which it is contested, are models of intrinsic beauty, consistent at every level of competition.

Brazilians frequently refer to soccer as joga bonito, “the beautiful game”. They speak of the fluid motion of the game and the constantly evolving tactics of the players as living poetry that transcends the actual participants involved - meaning that the game is just as beautiful to observe when played by amateurs as by the legendary Brazilian national team.

If an equivalent event exists in the track and field world, it would have to be the traditional one-mile race. Roger Bannister termed the mile the “classic Anglo-Saxon distance.” Coaches consider it to be the ultimate test of strength and endurance, requiring both pure speed and remarkable stamina to succeed.

The unit of measurement dates back to the Roman Empire, and was used throughout Europe for many centuries. The mile was also the standard measure for determining plots of land and establishing road networks in the New World. In the modern era, America has stubbornly (and many of us would say, thankfully) resisted global conversion to the metric system in nearly every facet of life – with the notable exception of track and distance running.

Prior to the 1970s, most tracks in America and Europe were 440 yards per lap - exactly four laps per mile. The one-mile race lent itself to dramatic execution, much like a four-act play, or a symphony in four movements. A successful race required a strong opening, a solid, thoughtful effort through the second lap, and perseverance and determination through the third. The final lap then built upon these with a climactic final crescendo toward the suspenseful – sometimes tragic, sometimes inspirational - conclusion.

Dividing the race into four equal segments gave the mile a mathematical symmetry: with each lap, runners knew precisely how they stood in relation to their target finish time - and just as importantly, so did the crowd. During the chase for the four-minute mile, track stadiums around the world would reach a fever pitch whenever a runner passed the half-mile under two minutes, or the ¾ mile anywhere close to three minutes.

The four-minute mile had an especially elegant symmetry to it: four laps, one minute per lap. In Bannister’s day, races were timed by those old-fashioned sweep-arm stopwatches, where the second hand made one revolution per minute. Thus, a runner keeping four-minute pace would circle the track in perfect synchronicity with the arm of the watch. The aesthetic appeal of a man doing such a feat contributed to the race’s mystique during its heyday in the 1950s.

Now compare the stylishness of the mile to the 1500 meters, or the “metric mile” that is most commonly raced today. Whereas the mile is aesthetically perfect, the 1500m is a complete hodge-podge. The distance is exactly three-and-three-quarters laps around today’s 400m tracks. It starts along a strange arc drawn across the curve of the track. It doesn’t finish where it starts.

Spectators and runners alike are often confused by split times: is the first split given at the first full lap? Or the initial three-quarters of a lap, when there are three even laps to go? Can either of these lap splits tell anyone what kind of finishing pace the runner is on? Can metric splits (at 500m or 1000m) give spectators an appreciation of how fast the runners are moving?

Sadly, as the metric system became the international standard, the 1500m rapidly grew in prominence - despite fierce resentment from elite athletes of the day. John Landy, Bannister’s Australian rival, has said, “That’s not a race at all. It’s shame we’re stuck with the 1500m. It’s a tragedy. It’s awful. There’s nothing graceful about it. It’s ugly. It has no elegance. The mile is a vastly better race.”

(Not only that, but for Americans, the mile has a stranglehold in the popular conscious, especially among runners. Split times are always broken into minutes per mile. Pace groups at every major race use minutes per mile. In my whole life, nobody’s ever asked me how fast I can run a K. With the exception of my one Canadian friend, kilometers are simply meaningless – it’s a measurement to which nobody can relate. If that makes us lazy, so be it.)

Now that almost all tracks have been converted to meters, the closest we can get to capturing the beauty of the mile is the 1600m - exactly four laps around the 400m track. (As an aside, shouldn’t this be considered the metric mile? It’s only 9 meters short of one mile. It’s as close to equivalent as you can get. Why arbitrarily make the race another 100m shorter? Europeans really frustrate me sometimes.) And yet, it’s not quite the same. Most runners will agree that the mile adds an additional 2 to 3 seconds for those extra 9 meters, so mile times are often extrapolated from the 1600m - but shouldn’t mile times actually be accomplished instead of estimated?

To their credit, most American high schools favor racing the 1600m over the 1500, but these races still lack the historical comparison to their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Part of the excitement over Alan Webb’s 3:53 mile in 2001 was that he was the first high school student in more than 30 years to go under 4:00, and he broke a schoolboy record that stood for 36 years. Nobody kept track of 1600m times 35 years ago - and even if they did, would anybody care? The mile is a benchmark that resonates much more clearly.

So as I’m training and racing around the track this summer, monitoring my progress with 400m and 800m split times, in the back of my mind I know that at some point, I’ll have to actually mark off those extra 9 meters before I time myself in the mile. With all of the time and interest I’ve dedicated to Roger Bannister and the mile, there is no way that I would be satisfied with racing 1500m, or even 1600m.

In a perfect world, this beloved event would remain unchanged through the generations - much like futbol in Brazil – and all over the world. Sadly, the track and field landscape has driven the one-mile footrace to the brink of extinction. However, I can still dream of finding a 440-yard track someplace, where I can run not just the same distance as Bannister, but also the same “beautiful race.”


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