Published May 6, 2011 12:00AM
Fifty-seven years ago today, Roger Bannister ran the first-ever sub-four-minute mile. Traveling 15.037 miles per hour, Bannister recorded a time of 3:59.4 on the track at Oxford University. “In Oxford, I had been told, a man without a sport is like a ship without a sail,” Bannister wrote in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile. “Of all the sports, running seemed to me like the only one for which I had any aptitude.”
Watch his record-breaking “aptitude” here:
The current world record for the mile is 3:43.13, set by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco on July 7, 1999. The women's record is 4:12.56, set by Svetlana Masterkova of Russia in August 1996.
–Whitney Dreier