Monday, July 05, 2004

Four-Minute-Mile of July

I sat wondering what to post for July 4, the day we celebrate the signing in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence, and it occurred to me that I’d written something about another date I wanted to commemorate two months past but I never got around to posting it.  Well then, in recognition of the grand tradition of Declaratory Independence, I’m going to spurn all mention of patriotic matters from here on out and talk only about an incident that happened fifty years ago in the mother country, that I heard about again two months ago, then thought about it for a month before I wrote anything about it, and then took another month to post.  Hey, being fast isn’t the only thing that matters, right?  And so:

The short-term anniversaries should certainly be observed on the proper date, but once you get up to 50 years of history, exactitude becomes less critical.  It is in this spirit that I, untimely, take this occasion to honor Roger Bannister, who broke the 4 minute mile.

Roger was a medical student and doctor at Oxford, which is a status that is not lightly bestowed - even way back in the nineteen-and-fifties, you had to demonstrate extraordinary academic excellence to get into that program.  Roger was on the track team, a rising star at 19, and his country pinned its hopes on him for the 1948 Olympics.  Roger declined to participate, however, preferring to concentrate on his studies.  Upon completing his degree, he resumed his pursuit of the four-minute mile, generally conceived to be a physical impossibility but a goal that his medical and physical training convinced him could be achieved.  His athletic gear was crude.  His stopwatch had a second hand.  And he never used a stairmaster, cybex, freemotion machine - or steroids. 

A mile is 5280 feet.  A foot is exactly 0.3048 meters, in that it consists of twelve inches of equal length, each of which 25.4 millimeters in length.  Do the math and a mile is equal to 1609.344 meters.  A meter is the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.  A mile being 1609.344 of these, it represents the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during the interval of 5.3681937522257481207215693197992e-6 seconds, a duration which represents a tiny fraction of a second.  A second is the length of time required for a cesium-133 atom to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times.  Let the atom vibrate that many times, sixty times over, and you have a minute; multiply these by four, and a cesium atom has vibrated 2,206,231,624,800 times.  And Roger Bannister’s goal, a goal he shared with hundreds of driven men around the world, was to run the same distance that light could travel in that tiny fraction of a second, in less time than it would take that cesium atom to vibrate that many times.  A more arbitrary goal cannot possibly be imagined.  It’s a meaningless conjunction of conditions.  Who in the world would pursue such irrelevancies?

Someone who seeks to exceed the established limits of human performance.  Roger Bannister personified these qualities when he ran a mile in 3:59.4 on May 6, 1954.  Afterwards, he garnered no sponsors, earned no residuals, didn’t go on to do bit parts in movies or to own a successful string of auto dealerships that capitalized on his fame.  He gained international renown, was named sportsman of the year, and then pursued other goals and allowed his name to slip from the communal memory.  Continuing to run until 1975 when an injury knocked him out, Bannister also became an eminent neurosurgeon, a leading administrator of British hospitals, and was knighted.  He did what he did not for fame or fortune, but because he knew he could do it and he couldn’t let it remain undone. 

Since him, uncountable others have matched and beaten his arbitrary record - in fact, it lasted only 46 days before someone else ran it even faster.  Of course, all records are arbitrary - but the particular concatenation of arbitrary quanta that represents the four minute mile bears, for us, an elegance and pungence, an entirety, a satisfying wholeness.  Men on the moon.  Around the world in 80 days.  Four minute mile.  These are the major landmarks in the geography of the possible.  They resonate.  Roger’s record resonates yet - even fifty years later, even though it stood for less than two months. 

I know I’ll never run a four minute mile. But that’s a barrier I don’t have to break - it’s been done, and done to death.  My responsibility is to find another arbitrary concatenation of quanta, some accomplishment I know I can achieve that, till now, has been beyond the pale of the possible - humankind’s, or even just my own - and, by dint of absolute conviction and brute effort, to achieve it, see it done.  To find my own four minute mile, and to leave it in my dust.  Bannister didn’t just run the distance, he broke the barrier. That is inspiration for all manner of accomplishment.