Roger Bannister (born 1929) was the first person ever to run a mile in under four minutes.

"I just ran anywhere and everywhere-never because it was an end in itself, but because it was easier for me to run than to walk," Roger Bannister said of his childhood, according to Cordner Nelson and Roberto Quercetani in The Milers. When he was 12, 13, and 14, he won his school's cross-country run three years in a row. At the age of 16, he decided to become a runner. However, when his studies in medicine began at Oxford University in the fall of 1946, he had never run on a track or worn spiked running shoes.

Bannister's only training that first winter at the university was a weekly workout and a seven-and-a-half-mile cross-country race. However, he was so immensely talented that even on this meager schedule, he ran a mile in 4:30.8 in March of 1947; by June...