On May 6th, 1954 Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute per mile barrier. He finished a mile in 3:59:40. Prior to that the record was 4:01. That record stood for 9 years, and experts were starting to believe it was just no humanly possible to achieve a sub 4 minute mile. Of course we know that is not true now. Soon after Bannister broke the barrier, the 4 minute mile is a routine thing. Many high school track athletes run 4 minute miles all the time. A year after Bannister broke the 4 minute mile, many people started posting race results below that barrier. What changed?
Bannister himself attested that it was his mindful visualization technique that he included in his training. He had an absolute certainty that he would break the barrier and he trained both body and mind to believe so. So he convinced his mind it was possible, and it was. Once other athletes knew this for a fact, they began to also achieve this same feat. The World Record now stands at 3:43:13 by Hicham El Guerrouj from Morocco. He broke the record on July 7th 1999. BTW, A woman has not broke the 4 minute mile yet. The record stands at 4:12:33 for women. Any one out there going to break that mental barrier?
On October 12th 2019 (yesterday), Eliud Kipchoge broke the 2 hour marathon limit running 4.4 laps around Vienna’s Prater park. The official record is 2:01:39 held by himself when he won the Berlin Marathon in 2014. In an interesting coincidence, Eliud broke the record with a time of 1:59:40 – the same 20 seconds that the mile was broken by. Eliud’s amazing feat will not count in the record books. The race was controlled, no competitors were allowed. They used lazer guided pacing counters that lit up the street where the runner needed to be. His fluids were handed to him by pacing car. They even crafted ways to give him better wind breaks with an arrangement of pacers that ran with him. I am sure that even his shoes were custom made for the occasion.
So why did he do it? Well perhaps there was a financial reason. Perhaps he is the only one right now that could. However, I will go with what he said moments after the race was finished. He said basically that now that he had done it, he expected the world to do it because the mental barrier had been broken.
Breaking the mental barrier. Interesting concept. I think about somethings that I am working on. Do I have a mental barrier? Who has achieved what I want to do? If the path has been trod before, perhaps I could learn to visualize my success through their lens.
Guy Reams
