On 6 May 1954, at Iffley Road track in Oxford, he became the first person to run a mile under four minutes, a feat many had deemed impossible.
I didn’t have to tell you his name. We all know Roger Bannister for breaking the four-minute barrier, even some 70 years later. But did you know that he was a neurologist, and that he was prouder of his contribution to medicine than his running career?
“I wouldn’t claim to have made any great discoveries, but at any rate I satisfactorily inched forward in our knowledge of a particular aspect of medicine,” he told the Associated Press. “I’m far more content with that than I am about any of the running I did earlier.”
At the time of the record, Bannister was a part-time runner but a full-time medical student at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. After he retired from athletics that same year, he devoted the next 40 years to medicine as a clinical neurologist and researcher. He published more than 80 papers and edited standard neurology textbooks.
The world will forever remember Bannister for his four-minute mile achievement, even though he would rather be remembered for his work in neurology than his running.
“I worked in medicine for sixty years. I ran for about eight.”
The thing that people remember him for was not the thing that gave his life its meaning. One famous afternoon meant less to him than the decades of slow, unglamorous progress in his real work.
Keep this letter in your book, and it will come back to you.