When Ed Caesar, author of Two Hours, The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon, wrote in Wired magazine that Nike’s new project to crack the time will be “the most significant moment for running since Roger Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile in 1954”, my initial reaction was that it could not match the romance of Bannister’s record. Imagine if the biggest sportswear firm in the 1940s had created a downhill mile race won in 3:59. That celebrated image of Bannister falling exhausted and Christ-like into the arms of onlookers would surely not have the fame it does today.
The Wall Street Journal describes the quest for the two-hour marathon as the “ultimate arms race” between “sportswear makers” and as the “last frontier” of running. But what is so significant about the two-hour marathon? Why does the two-minute kilometre not have the same draw?
The mile is four-and-a-bit laps, a messy 1,609 metres. The marathon is a completely arbitrary 26.2 miles, a distance arrived upon by chance to accommodate the British royal family’s viewing preferences in 1908. The attraction, then, seems to be to running uneven distances in nice even times, and the similarities between the four-minute mile and the two-hour marathon do not end there.
In fact, in spite of the romantic image we have of Bannister’s mile, which Chris Chataway (one of his pacemakers) referred to as the “last hurrah” of amateurism, there are many parallels between it and Nike’s more hi-tech approach.
A closer look at the historical context of Bannister’s run reveals that concerns about legitimacy were just as prevalent. In fact, Bannister recalls in his book, The First Four Minutes, that the British Amateur Athletics Board (BAAB) failed to ratify a British record 4:02 mile he ran in 1953 at Motspur Park on the grounds that it was run under “artificial conditions”. On that occasion, Chris Brasher practically walked the first half of the race, allowing Bannister to lap him after two-and-a-half laps and subsequently pacing him to the finish line. The record was not ratified on the grounds that the run was “uncompetitive”. A year later, however, when Bannister wrote himself into the history books at Iffley Road, Oxford, under similarly artificial circumstances, his time was allowed to stand.
Why was this? According to Richard Holt’s Sport and the British: A Modern History, the run provided “reassurance for the nation” and “gave England hope for the future”. The nation’s press were hardly going to allow bureaucrats from the BAAB to take that away from them. During the 1950s. the quest for the four-minute mile was seen very much in nationalistic terms; Bannister’s 1953 run was, in fact, hastily arranged to take place five hours before his American rival Wes Santee made his own attempt.
Much speculation has surrounded Nike’s announcement that its attempt on the two-hour marathon will not take place on a record-eligible course. While it has not yet released the details, this presumably means it will be run on a sprung track, on a point-to-point course or downhill. Again, this would seem at odds with Bannister’s run on the cinders of Iffley Road. Yet, in fact, Bannister had such a supportive infrastructure at Oxford that he was instrumental in redesigning the track to accommodate four laps to the mile rather than the awkward four laps and nine-and-a-bit metres.
So while it is tempting to see Bannister’s run as a low-tech triumph of sheer physical prowess and willpower, it certainly would not have been seen like that at the time. As sports geographer John Bale points out: “Several of Bannister’s rivals in the 1950s were trained by scientists. But Bannister was a scientist – one who was prepared to apply scientific principles to his own body.” In fact, he was not the only runner-scientist: Rudolf Harbig broke the 800m world record while doing the first research to measure the effects of exercise on the heart in the 1930s. Sections of Bannister’s book read like they could have been lifted from a science textbook. He was one of the first runners to use a treadmill, and worked alongside the maker of his running shoes to reduce their weight by 30%.
And yet even Bannister found that this scientific approach meant that “sooner or later, the moment came when [he] almost hated athletics” because, “it left [him] no freedom or joy to run as [he] pleased”. Many of the most compelling sections of his book come when he describes running amid nature, freed from the stopwatch, struggling against the elements. “I felt I was running back to all the primitive joy that my season had destroyed,” he writes of running on the coast at Kintyre, “the gulls were crying overhead and a herd of wild goats were silhouetted against the headland.”
In his book, Bannister is very conscious of the tensions between an overbearing scientific scrutiny and running “on feel”. It seems to me that a crucial difference between his sub-four attempt and the sub-two hour marathon is that Bannister was at least both scientist and subject, whereas the east Africans who will run as part of the various two-hour projects are presented rather as objects of innovation rather than innovators themselves.
In spite of the rhetoric of Nike’s project, of “unpacking performance at the molecular level”, the tension between running as scientific experiment and running as experiencing nature still very much exists over 60 years later. Ed Ceasar notes in his latest dispatch from Nike headquarters that the star of the Sub2 project, Eluid Kipchoge, still prefers to train without a watch. The assumption shared by all the rival attempts is that the two-hour marathon will be run as a result of innovative science and medicine, and yet it seems clear that all of the athletes involved are still spending the vast majority of their time doing notably low-tech training in Kenya, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
In Bannister’s day, innovations in training – even if they were sometimes made by athlete-scientists – were very much athlete led. We may assume that by the 21st century this trend would have been reversed; that the science is done in the lab and applied to the athletes. This at least is how the various two-hour projects present their work.
Given Kipchoge’s “natural” approach to training, however, and my experience of living alongside Ethiopian runners for 15 months, perhaps we are looking in the wrong places for our innovations. Every runner is, in a sense, an athlete-scientist, carefully monitoring their body and altering their training accordingly, tinkering away with training plans and searching for their own frontiers.
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