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Comment by montyf | Hacker News Reader

I always liked the story about the breaking of the 4 minute mile. It shows how easily our brains can box us in to particular views of reality, and how they act to further perpetuate this "reality". I bet that if a minute was, say, 65 seconds instead of 60, we still would have hit a "wall" trying to break the 4 minute mile.

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The article states that the popular telling of that story is incorrect, it took 20 years after Bannister did it for 300 people to run sub-4 minute miles. And Landy might well have broken it on the day that he did even if Bannister hadn't done it.

I think there's actually something to the idea that 4 minutes is a real biological limit that can only be overcome through the right training, the right technique, and the right mindset, and that it took until recently to figure out how.

What's curious to me is how it lines up. I suspect that this is like something you see on Numberphile, where a seemingly unrelated geometric problem ends up getting solved through number theory. What a 'minute' is, exactly how much time it is, dates all the way back to prehistory. I don't think we should be that surprised that a biological limit should line up that neatly with our units of time.

It being a biological limit is certainly possible; your post is interesting and I don't want to discount it. But I really do think psychology plays a huge role in these stories. From my personal experience running track and field this phenomenon occurs rather frequently. All it takes is one person achieving a long-standing milestone for the rest of the team to quickly follow suit. I've seen similar things happen in non-physical competitive games, like chess and dota 2, at the highest level.

Maybe there is some kind of safety mechanism built into our brains preventing us from doing things that we've never observed or heard of being done. Brain: "No one's ever run sub-4 minutes, so I don't know for sure whether doing so would kill me or not. Better not try."

I wonder whether this may even dovetail with Tim Noakes’ “central govenor” theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor

Thanks, that's really interesting, including the Criticisms section. I think that there must be a mix of psychological and physiological factors at play.

Not sure how directly relevant this is but I used to get dead-tired if I had any less than eight hours of sleep. I had spent most of my life hearing about how I "needed" at least eight hours. Then I had a period of insomnia where I would regularly get three hours a night which challenged this deeply-held belief. My functioning was impaired, of course, but it was comparable to how I functioned on 7 hours of sleep prior. Now I can sleep six hours a night without problems, having broken through some psychological barrier.

What about the mile, is that lining-up unsurprising too?

A mile, historically, was defined as 1000 paces for reasons that were probably intrinsically tied to human endurance. So yeah.

You know I think you may be onto something here.

The human heart gets into trouble above 200-220 bpm. So a four minute mile is 1000 ‘paces’ in 800-880 beats. And for 4 minutes perhaps (for a marathon, definitely) you have to stay below your aerobic threshold which is probably below 160 bpm if you are good. That’s probably closer to 1.5 or two strides per heartbeat.

To run so fast a cheetah pumps its lungs in time with its gait. If the human leg has to, at the limits of endurance, synchronize with the diastolic pressure of circulatory system, I don’t think we would be too surprised.

In fact runners and cyclists already know that cadence matters and most amateurs start with a very low one.

And what is magical about 1000? Some very wooly thinking here.

the 4 minute mil started getting broken more often when people started using pacers.

then tracks got faster due to new materials

we started having more full time pros.

The mental barrier thing is possibly not a first order cause of any of this.

What I find the most interesting, is sometimes there a person who comes along, completely unaware of that limit, of the supposed difficulty or scale of the challenge (common knowledge among the others), and breaks that limit seemingly without effort. The story of George Dantzig is just one example that comes to mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig).

I think the vast majority of what we perceive as limits aren't real limits at all. Maybe that's a controversial statement, but there's little in the way of me doing most of I want to do except various fears and (largely) illusory limitations, conscious or not. I think this can apply to the HN crowd pretty easily -- for example, guys who don't apply to Google or who freeze up during the interview and don't know why.

Edit: I realize this sounds like a passage from a self-help book or motivational speech, but really, I've come to accept this as truth as I've gotten older, and I have many regrets over things I didn't do. I've also become skeptical over any kind of consensus regarding what is possible.

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