When I heard the news of Roger Bannister’s death last week at the age of 88, I recalled the first time I ever heard of Bannister, in the spring of 1963.
I was rattling back to Wichita from Kansas City in an old yellow school bus when my high school coach, Bob Timmons, said, “I think you can be the first high school boy to break four minutes in the mile, just like Roger Bannister became the first man to break four minutes in 1954.”
Having just scratched out a 4:21 mile to win the Washington Relays that afternoon, I wasn’t sure how to digest what he was telling me. My first thought was, “Who is Bannister?” I knew more about baseball and Mickey Mantle than I did about running and runners.
Months before I had been a gangly high school sophomore in search of meaning, something to define myself by. I had been cut from the baseball team when my throw from third to first developed a hop (to add insult to injury, this was the church baseball team). My search for a life calling continued to come up empty after I was invited out for the junior high basketball team and then asked to turn my practice jersey in that same day.
But something eventually clicked that sophomore year. Slogging through the late summer heat of Kansas, I survived the first few grueling weeks of cross country practice and made my first team. I was the 21st man on a three-squad, 21-man team. But I was finally on a team. Then, very quickly, I moved up from the C team to the JV team to leading my varsity squad to a state championship that fall, placing sixth overall in the Kansas High School Cross Country Championships.
I had found my calling. I was born to run.
That spring of 1963, a whole new world opened up before me, and in that moment on the school bus, my coach challenged me to reach a goal that no one else had achieved. The ensuing summer, fall, and winter, I knew the work that it was going to take to run a sub-four mile in high school. I became increasingly aware of the trail blazed by Roger Bannister nine years before. There were times I would sit slouched in a chair in Coach Timmons’s office, complaining, “Coach, I don’t think I can do this. I am tired, it’s hard. . . . I just don’t know.”
“Jim, I can’t make you do this,” he would say. “You have to be the one. This has to be your goal.”
There is a unique quality to the one-mile run. Those who excel in it have a blend of footspeed and endurance. Both have to be honed weekly. Roger Bannister was famous for his 10×440 yard workout, where, over his lunch breaks as a medical student, he would try to average under 60 seconds per 440 repetition. He and his coach, Franz Stampfl, reasoned that if he could run under 60 seconds for ten 440s in a workout, then stringing together four in a race would be easy. While the rationale behind the workout was sound, there is nothing easy about ten 440 reps done in under 60 seconds. The body becomes awash with lactic acid early in the workout, sparking a painful skirmish between the body and the mind and a deep desire to just stop.
Taking a page from Bannister’s training, I ran endless repetitions of 440s under the watchful eye of Coach Timmons and achieved my goal a year early in 1964, when I ran 3:59.1 at the Compton Relays in California. Little did I know that my race caught the attention of Roger Bannister himself. He began following my career with avid interest, but our paths did not cross until 1967, when, after having just broken my own world record in the mile with a time of 3:51.1, I won the Emsley Carr mile in London. Eager to see me race, Bannister had purchased a ticket and sat in the stands, seeking me out afterwards to introduce himself. I don’t recall much of our first conversation other than his attempt to pry training details from my shy, 20-year-old self. I do recall there was something genuine about him. He was in awe of my training. I was in awe of him.
A year later, our paths crossed again when my friend Rich Clarkson arranged for a dinner for me, my then-fiancée (now-wife) Anne, and Dr. Bannister during the Mexico City Olympics. We talked about running, of course, but we also talked about life. Anne and I asked for ideas about building a healthy marriage and family. Dr. Bannister did not disappoint us, offering insights into his family’s life, like the fact that they had taken the television out of their home and had more family walks, more conversations, and more time to read books as a result. These were among the many lessons Anne and I employed in raising our own family.
It is hard to put into words the impact Roger Bannister had, not just on me, but on the world. After he hung up his track spikes, Dr. Bannister had a distinguished 40-year career in neurology, claiming it, not his sub-four-minute mile, was his greatest achievement. Records are there to be set and then broken. All six of my world records have long since been beaten, but what Bannister did on May 6, 1954, showed the world what was possible with singular purpose. For that, he holds a place alone in history.
Jim Ryun is a three-time Olympian and former world record holder in the 880-yard, 1,500-meter, and one-mile run. After serving 10 years in Congress, he spends his days with grandchildren and helping run the Jim Ryun Running Camps (www.RyunRunning.com).
