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June 10, 2005
The Four-Minute Mile
It's been a little over a year since I spent a whole two weeks hanging out in Oxford. The so-called "City of Dreaming Spires" has a ton of centuries-old University-related sights to see, a lot of very impressive architecture, and some really fun pubs. But while I was in town, I also made it a point to venture out to the Eastern edge of Oxford in order to see the site of one of the great sports moments of the 20th Century.
This is a picture of the Iffley Road track on which Roger Bannister became the first person in the world to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. Bannister ran his milestone time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds on May 6th, 1954. As athletic accomplishments go, it was more than just a new world record. Prior to Bannister's run, many people thought that the four-minute-mile barrier would be impossible for humans to ever break. After Bannister's run, some compared his accomplishment to Lindbergh's groundbreaking trans-Atlantic flight.
What's kinda cool about the Iffley Road track fifty years later is that, like a lot of other things in Oxford, it's not just a mere historical site - it's actually being used in the same sort of way that it's probably always been used. University students have free privileges there, and anyone else can actually go and pay a small fee to run the track and/or use the attached gym. I went a couple of times to run the track and measure my own mile time. There was some Bannister-related memorabilia near the locker rooms, but for the most part, the place seemed just like any other university track facility. Well, except for the fact that this one dude was running around the track in a shirt and tie:
Perhaps this an Oxford-only phenomenon that I don't quite understand.
Over the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of stopwatch-timed jogging of my own in preparation for tomorrow morning's Race for The Cure. If anyone feels like sponsoring me with a last-minute donation towards breast-cancer research, please do so here. I won't be getting anywhere near a four-minute mile, of course, but I think I can definitely average a seven-minute mile. Or maybe just a few milliseconds under...
Posted by Tim at June 10, 2005 07:19 PM