Doctors and scientists said breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.
I’ve always been very impatient. At age 10 I frankly found life boring, and I can remember age 9 having the awful thought, as it seems now looking back on it, A war! That should liven things up a bit!
I was involved in music, acting, and some running, but my firm wish was to become a doctor. That was the formative age when I had decided on the pattern of my career.
I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event in which races were run, and I won these by a considerable margin.
My athleticism was really the core to social acceptance, because in those days the overwhelming number of students came from more of a public school background than I did.
My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.
Life was very simple. My parents had come from the North of England, which is a fairly rugged, bleak, hard-working part of England, and so there was not the expectation of luxury.
My concentration was really on getting to university and becoming a doctor. My parents let me know that school marks were important. Achievement was something which came by hard work.
Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn’t work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science.
I came from such a simple origin, without any great privilege, and I would say I also wanted to make a mark. It wasn’t until I was about 15 that I appeared in a race.
If I faltered, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would be a cold and forbidding place.
Without the concentration of the mind and the will, performance would not result.
I couldn’t disappoint people. I did not want to fail and exhaust myself, because I was the kind of runner who trained so little that I couldn’t race again within another 10 days.
Every time I ran the mile I was aware of my own weakness, there was some opponent who could give me a hell of a fight, so I never went into a race with a sense of invincibility. I always had that feeling of fragility and nerves which made me run faster.
I found longer races boring. I found the mile just perfect.
May is a very early time in the year and the weather is usually bad. You cannot run a fast mile race if there is a strong wind, because it makes your running uneven.
The essence of sports is that while you’re doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it.
I was always a great bundle of energy. As a child, instead of walking, I would run. And so running, which is a pain to a lot of people, was always a pleasure to me because it was so easy.
It is a paradox to say the human body has no ‘limit.’ There must be a limit to the speed at which men can run. I feel this may be around 3:30 for the mile. However, another paradox remains – if an athlete manages to run 3:30, another runner could be found to marginally improve on that time.
Our concept of a family holiday was going to a guest house in the Lake district or Wales where walking was part of the holiday.
The man who goes on, even when it’s the hardest to be the winner.