Bannister's Four-Minute Mile and the Two Friends Who Paced It

A flag on a church near the Iffley Road track in Oxford had been whipping around all afternoon on 6 May 1954. Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student who had worked a morning shift at St Mary’s Hospital in London and taken the train up, had already decided twice that he would rather not attempt the record that day. Winds had been reported at up to 25 miles per hour. Then, just before the race, the flag went slack, and he told his friends he would run.

His friends were Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, and their job was to run a mile at a speed they could not hold, so that someone else could finish it.

What role did pacemakers play in the first four-minute mile? They set the speed for the first three of four laps so that Bannister could save his energy and spend it on the last one. Brasher led through the first lap in 57.5 seconds and the half mile in 1:58. Chataway took over and led through the three-quarter mark in 3:00.7. Bannister passed him on the back straight, roughly 300 yards from the finish, and ran the last lap in just under 59 seconds. The clock stopped at 3:59.4, two seconds inside the 4:01.4 Gunder Hägg had set in 1945. Those splits come from World Athletics’ own account of the day.

Who were Brasher and Chataway?

Brasher was a steeplechaser who would win Olympic gold in 1956 and later help found the London Marathon. Chataway was a distance runner who would go into broadcasting and then Parliament, and later served as a government minister. Bannister described Chataway after his death in 2014 as “one of my best friends.” Neither was a pacemaker by trade. Both were athletes with their own races to run, who agreed to burn themselves out on someone else’s.

Bannister’s own book is warm about this. Of an earlier attempt in 1953, he wrote that Brasher “proceeded to encourage me by shouting backwards over his shoulder.” Of a 1951 match he wrote that it “was the first of many occasions when Chris Chataway helped me with the pacing in the early stages.” After the 1954 race came a line that has outlived most of the statistics: “We had done it, the three of us!” (all three lines as quoted in a Hektoen International essay on Bannister’s book, from pages 176, 123 and 193 of the edition it cites).

There was a fourth presence. Franz Stampfl, an Austrian coach who worked with Brasher and coached Bannister and Chataway at weekends, was standing trackside. According to World Athletics, Bannister learned afterward that a voice calling “Relax!” in the final lap was Stampfl’s. Stampfl, too, was a volunteer on the sidelines of someone else’s moment.

Was pacing considered cheating?

By the standards of the day, partly yes. The year before, in a race in Surrey, a pacemaker jogged along and let Bannister lap him, and the Amateur Athletic Association refused to accept the 4:02.0 as a British record. Bannister said he felt “great relief that I did not run a four-minute mile under such artificial circumstances.” The objection was that a lapped runner is not really a rival.

The 1954 arrangement was different, because Brasher and Chataway ran in the race itself. Still, the question did not die. Pat Butcher, an athletics writer, argued in a piece marking the sixtieth anniversary that pacemakers “clearly do not fit” the IAAF’s requirement of “honest competition,” and that the first sub-four mile was a manipulated one. Butcher also quotes Chataway as saying there was “no immediate criticism of the sub-four pacing,” followed by “a couple of months later, there started to be some questioning of the tactics.”

Bannister never claimed to have done it alone. In his own telling the achievement belonged to three men, and he said so on the page.

Did Landy’s record 46 days later prove it was just a barrier?

John Landy of Australia had been running about 4:02 repeatedly, six times by himself, according to Butcher. On 21 June 1954 in Turku, Finland, he ran 3:57.9, later rounded to 3:58.0 under the timing rules of the era. His record stood 46 days after Bannister’s. Bannister’s book, in the lines the essay quotes, treats the weeks before it as the time when “my four-minute mile was secure.”

It is tempting to read this as proof that the four-minute mile was a psychological wall and Bannister knocked it down, after which everyone else walked through. The numbers say otherwise.

By the end of 1954 the club had two members, Bannister and Landy. The third, the Hungarian Laszlo Tabori, ran 3:59.0 at White City in London on 28 May 1955, three weeks more than a year after Bannister. In that same race Chataway and Brian Hewson also broke four, both timed at 3:59.8. That means Chataway, the man who had pulled Bannister through the middle laps, got under four minutes himself.

By July 1957, Sports Illustrated counted the membership at 15, after four men (Ibbotson, Delany, Jungwirth and Wood) went under four on a single day. World Athletics’ obituary of Landy notes that when he toured the United States in 1956, “only five men had ever bettered four minutes for the mile.” World Athletics statistics, as cited by Wikipedia, now put the total at just over 2,000 athletes. So the story that the barrier fell and a dam burst is not what happened in the first few years. The more accurate version is that a handful of people were bunched within two or three seconds of the mark, and one needed help.

Pacing did not stop mattering after May. Three months later at the 1954 Empire Games in Vancouver, Bannister beat Landy 3:58.8 to 3:59.6, closing a gap of about 15 meters and passing him on the final bend, per World Athletics. In the essay’s reading of Bannister’s book he writes of that race, “I had to force John Landy to set the pace of a four-minute mile for me.” Even a rival, it turns out, can be conscripted. On the question of whether other runners count as help, Bannister wrote that “other competitors must be ignored, unless they co-operate wittingly or unwittingly.” Brasher and Chataway were the witting kind.

The training behind it was also a shared project. World Athletics says Landy’s string of runs near 4:03 pushed Bannister into interval work, starting with ten 400-meter repeats with two-minute recoveries, averaging 66 seconds a lap and eventually getting down to 58. The man he was racing against and the friends pacing him were both, in different ways, setting his speed.

What do studies say about running with a pacer?

Less than the legend suggests. In 2017, Christopher Fullerton, Andrew Lane and Tracey Devonport ran 19 well-trained distance runners through two 1600 m time trials, with 10 in a paced condition and 9 self-paced. The paced group did not finish significantly faster, and they reported more anxiety before the run. The authors suggest that following a pacer is a skill with a learning curve, and that worrying about falling off the back may eat into the benefit.

That is one small study of 19 people, and elite pacing for a record is a different thing from a lab time trial. What it does suggest is that a pacer is not magic. Brasher and Chataway helped because they had trained with Bannister, knew his stride and had agreed the splits in advance. Pacing is a relationship before it is a tactic.

What’s the friend version of running the first three laps?

The part of the story that carries over is the unglamorous one. Brasher ran two laps that nobody remembers him for, and Chataway ran a third, so that Bannister could have the fourth. Neither could have shared Bannister’s time. A record is one person’s name in a book.

You cannot pace yourself into someone else’s record, and the reverse is also true: nobody can pace you into your own. The only version of the arrangement that works is the one where both sides know which laps are theirs. Some concrete ways to do it:

• Run a parkrun together. Pick a friend who has never done one and run beside them at their speed, even if that means finishing four minutes slower than your own best. The weekly 5K at parkrun is free, and the plan is easy to repeat.
• Pace someone’s first 10K. Ask for their target time, work out the split per kilometer, and run at that number. Your only job is to hold the speed they asked for when they get excited at kilometer two.
• Be the Stampfl. If the friend is training for something, stand at the same spot on the course with a bottle and a shout. It costs you an hour and it is what they will remember.
• Run the middle laps. If a friend is attempting a personal best at a track night, agree before the start that you will drop out at the three-quarter mark, and then actually do it.
• Fix the day. The difference between helping once and helping for months is a standing plan, the same time and the same place every week, so nobody has to ask.

None of these requires being fast. They require showing up for the part of the effort that does not make the highlight reel, which is also the part most likely to be skipped when it is dark outside.

Where does an alarm fit in?

The early lap of any plan with a friend is the one where somebody has to be awake at the agreed time. DontSnooze, the alarm app, gives you 30 seconds after the alarm to record a short video proving you are up, and if you miss it, a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends. That makes the people you are meeting at the track the same people who would notice if you did not get there, which is closer to how a doorman at a building works than to how a motivational app does.

What did Brasher and Chataway do next?

Brasher took the steeplechase gold at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and died in 2003 at 74. Chataway broke four minutes himself the following year and died in January 2014 at 82. Bannister became a neurologist and lived until 2018. Landy’s 3:58.0 stood for just over three years until Ibbotson ran 3:57.2 in 1957.

A shared project does not have to be a race. Matt Cutts’s 30-day talk describes a month-long challenge small enough for a friend to join.

On a Saturday morning at the start of a parkrun, somewhere, one person is checking the other’s shoelaces and agreeing to go out slower than they want to.