Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Roger Bannister
Today we would like to pay tribute to a moment in running history - the sub 4:00 min mile, by the legendary Roger Bannister. He did what others said couldn’t be done. Doctors predicted that a runner’s heart would explode if he ran a sub 4:00 min mile. Bannister decided to do it anyway. Doing so he correctly predicted that after he broke the momentous benchmark many would break it, many more times after him. He was right. Bannister was a truly amazing athlete and person with an accute intellect.
Analyzing Bannister’s form we will focus on his cadence. While it may look like he has an average turnover, it is averaged at 197 throughout the race. This is largely due to his height, in comparisson with his pacing partners who are shorter, run the same speed, yet have a higher turnover. However, if you pay close attention to what the clip’s announcer calls the “Bannister Burst,” you will see that in order to increase speed Bannister first leans much more, as well as increases his cadence to 217 spm. Taking all of this into account, his sudden burst of speed can be attributed to leaning more, and the secondary factor being a higher cadence. This is due to the hierarchy of acceleration; a cadence above 180 succesfully utilizes the body’s elastic components in order to move more efficiently. A cadence significantly higher than that at an average speed is unnecesary energy expenditure - what we call in Pose “too much range of motion.” It basically means your legs are moving too much in relation to the speed you are going. Following this logic, we can conclude it is not the cadence or frequency of “pushing off” that accelerates the body, but rather leaning does so. A higher cadence is a bi-product of more lean, due to the body’s need to maintain falling much faster. So today, we look at Roger Bannister’s monumental run, his incredible lean, and cadence!
A Window’s Media Version of this week’s video is available here.
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