Apparently, running a four minute mile is still pretty hard. The other day I ran a mile as fast as I could in order to find my baseline. I won’t give the exact time, but let’s just say it was faster than I ran in it eighth grade, but slow enough to virtually guarantee that even with years of training, I’d never end up with a time under four minutes, and likely not under five minutes. When Roger Bannister ran his baseline time after only a small amount of training with Oxford foot-racing team, the shocked clock read four and change. In his book, The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It, Neal Bascomb details the peculiarity of Bannister’s physiological gifts that put him in a better position than most, including myself, to achieve his seemingly unattainable goal. He writes: “In 1953 Bannister had a pulse rate of fifty beats per minute—twenty-two beats lower than the average man. His lungs absorbed 5.25 quarts of oxygen a minute—twice the standard. In other words, when he ran, his body was operating nearly 50 more efficiently than that of the average man.” So, perhaps a four-minute mile is not in the cards for—I haven’t had my cardiopulmonary system officially tested, but I’ll venture to guess it doesn’t work this way. How about a marathon?
These days, it seems like everyone I know has run a marathon. A friend of mine, who looks like he wouldn’t even be able to run, much less do it for five hours, regularly runs marathons with his wife. Most recently, they finished a Disney-themed one–she was in her second trimester at the time. I’ve never run a marathon and probably never will, as I just don’t enjoy running extremely long distances. Recently, I had the strange urge to do something physically strenuous, something that would feel like a physical accomplishment equal to the intellectual accomplishment of a Ph.D. I have friends doing mud races, but that just seems like the outdoor equivalent of a drinking game (how can we make running more interesting?); I’ve met people but am not friends with people who have done triathlons, but those just seem way too hard; another guy I know runs supermarathons–50, or 75, or 100 mile races. I went to a parkour session on campus, but it didn’t stick. Might have had something to do with the fact that the group leaders were having us do pull ups over a ten foot drop to cement, for about an hour, in the rain.
Perhaps I am more of a great appreciator of great physical feats than an aspirant. And though humans (and one human in particular—Usain Bolt) run the 100-meter dash faster and faster every few years, and it’s amazing every time, there is something exceedingly elegant and haunting about the achievement of the four-minute mile. I think of it nearly the way I would think of an engineering feat, or a daredevil maneuver that pushes the limits of machines whose invention demanded the most of human minds. Bannister’s accomplishment was akin to breaking the sound barrier. The footage of other shattered records also astounds me—Bob Beamon’s leap to gold in 1968, for instance, but it happened so suddenly, and surprised everyone so much (including Beamon himself, who collapsed into a kind of seizure when someone translated the meters into feet for him) that it doesn’t carry the drama the race for the four-minute mile did.
In the spring, I’m teaching a course called “Heroines and Heroes,” and I’m considering using sports to think about the permeable line between humans and gods in our ancient and contemporary mythologies. How does one become god-like? What are the physical acts and traits we must witness to bestow demigod status upon a Bo Jackson, or a Jim Thorpe, or a Venus Williams? And, of course, there will be the inevitable discussion of performance-enhancing drugs, the downfall of the hero or heroine, the loss of divinity or superpowers. There are thousands of great athletes, but within the broader athletic pantheon of modern sports, there are a few who stand out to me. Roger Bannister, Bo Jackson, Venus Williams, Muhammad Ali, Jack Johnson, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Ty Cobb, and a few others. They stand out for their still unmatched achievements in some cases—Bo Jackson is the only two-sport All Star; Cobb still holds the highest career batting average record, though his career ended 87 years ago—he hit over .320 for 22 consecutive seasons. The film Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones, reveals the shadowy side of the man, the vices and covered-up crimes that would have been rich fodder for Twitter and Instagram, and likely undone the baseball great with serial scandals and distractions had he been born in our moment. Others, like Johnson, stand out for their accomplishments as well as the fact that they lived and played in an environment so hostile to the possibility of their success that there was literally a death threat hanging over their heads at all times, as they trained, as they played, as they attempted to rest.
Even though the gods we create often fails us, it seems we can’t stop creating them, and in the arena of sports we gather up every tension within our society—race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality—and weave them into a narrative about a singular achiever, one who paradoxically gives us a new sense of the possibilities of human bodies and suggests that certain reaches of those possibilities will only be known by a few, and to those few, we give the name gods on earth.