For years people said running a mile in under four minutes was beyond what the human body could do. Roger Bannister was a 25-year-old medical student who trained around his studies. On May 6, 1954, on a windy late afternoon at the Iffley Road track in Oxford, two friends, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, paced him through the first laps. On the final lap Bannister took the lead and ran with everything he had. The time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. He wrote that he felt “like the moment of a lifetime had come.” Then, he said, “I grabbed Brasher and Chataway, and together we scampered round the track in a burst of spontaneous joy.”
