The 18th Century four-minute mile | Hacker News Reader

The 18th Century four-minute mile

bbc.com

37 pointsdang13 comments

Hmm. I have a hard time believing that anyone ran a sub 4 minute mile before Bannister. I'm not saying it definitively did not happen, but I think the probability of a distance measurement error is much higher than someone actually running that fast in the 1700s.

For people who are good in a certain area (running, piano, etc.) one thing that amazes me is how the average person does not realize exactly how good these people are at what they do. It is only after years of training yourself that you begin to realize how extraordinary the very best are. Someone a while ago created a series of large video screens that allowed people to race Ryan Hall (http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665449/video-screen-lets-you-ru...). The funny thing is that the average person cannot hold for 60 feet the pace that Ryan Hall can hold for 138,000 feet.

An ordinary person in any century does not have the genetic capability to run a sub 4:00 mile. There's very few that even have the potential. So the probability that out of the tiny fraction of people in the 18th century who did have this potential, one of them just happened to have the free time to train themselves to their genetic limit for this purpose? I doubt it.

There was a very long period where physical training and activity was considered rather out of fashion and basically had to be entirely reinvented for modern sport. But long before that people did look like [1] [2] [3]

1 - http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/image08/080319heracle...

2 - http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_14.130.12.jpg

3 - http://www.hulu.com/watch/612331

Indigenous peoples who never grabbed onto the rather Victorian "don't exercise" attitude maintained excellent running speeds over incredible distances. [4]

4 - http://www.canyonsworldwide.com/Tarahamara/ApacheTarahamaraR...

My guess is that it's only in the 20th and 21st centuries that the "developed" world is bringing back latent talents and skills in the population that were left to rot for a few centuries. The Tarahumara run an easy long distance (100 miles!) pace at around 7:30. Again, my guess is that the lack of a 4 minute mile before Bannister is more likely due to lack of observation than lack of ability.

http://www.runnersworld.com/minimalist-shoes/study-running-f...

I think if you consider the outliers on the "talent" scale, such as Jim Ryun, Sebastian Coe, current record holder Hicham El Guerrouj (3:43.13) compared to the entirety of humanity over the past few centuries, you've got to assume there have been other outliers of equal or greater "talent".

So the question is, how fast can an outlier in talent run with minimal or suboptimal training? Or what kind of training can one get "by accident"?

Jim Ryun [1] (along with a handful of others) ran under 4 minutes as a high-school student (a junior in Ryun's case). He didn't exactly fall out of bed and do that, but neither was he a professional having many years of training leading up to the achievement. Ryun's training was probably not optimal. Running enthusiasts often complain that his coach was a former swim coach who did not use training routines commonly recommended today.

Many sports played on foot involve lots of aerobic running combined with occasional sprinting. Also consider Cliff Young [2] who claimed to have "run for two to three days straight rounding up sheep", presumably as a routine-ish part of his job. He went on to win an 875km ultra marathon.

It's all speculation of course, but given all that and the fact that modern mile record is quite a bit faster than 4 minutes, I think it's plausible that a highly talented individual got enough training from work, sports, or perhaps even dedicated training to run a 4 minute mile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ryun

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_%28athlete%29

I have an easy time believing that no one ever ran an accurately timed sub 4 minute mile before Bannister... but I find it hard to believe that it had never been done at all.

Well, consider that the first modern Olympic games were held in 1896, and Bannister didn't set his mark until 1954. There would have been no issues with time/distance measurement accuracy during that period and yet no one did it. But, as soon as he did, tons of people started doing it. And it's not like they didn't have amphetamines back then, either. So it doesn't sound implausible to me that Bannister really was the first.

Interesting thought. In the history of man, I wonder how many people have ran or came close to running an impromptu 4 minute mile due to being chased by an animal or other human beings and having their life on the line? Perhaps zero. Even if a human had the genetics I doubt anyone would have anywhere close to the world class training it takes. Still, something to think about.

This guy's book seems to espouse the "paleo" lifestyle but it might not be utter bullshit. If the research quoted is to be believed human beings haven't been steadily getting better. Lifespan is only one measure of human achievement.

http://phys.org/news175332184.html

Asics also has a treadmill they use to demo Hall's 4:46 marathon pace - http://youtu.be/ziQEsdXMbi8

Here is a related TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_g...

There's a similar account in "Farmer Boy", one of the Little House series, of an American Indian running a surprisingly fast mile versus horses at a county fair.

Someone pointed out that this was posted a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731094. I don't have an easy way to change the submission credit, but can at least transfer the karma from this submission to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=001sky. I'll do that tomorrow.

This might be a good place to mention that we're working on some pretty big changes to the story submission mechanism, one goal of which is to smooth the time decay curve for new stories. That would have prevented the above problem.

A four minute mile is under four minutes.

From the OP http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27298505

>"Then in 1796, the Sporting Magazine reported that a young man called Weller, one of three brothers, "undertook for a wager of three guineas to run one mile on the Banbury road, in four minutes, which he performed two seconds within the time." In other words, a mile in three minutes, fifty eight seconds."

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