Runner, Doctor, or Investor: Passion is important. Some thoughts on Drs. Roger Bannister and J. Harris Walker

Born to Run

This week was the 60th anniversary of Roger Bannister's run to break the four-minute mile barrier. Bannister was my grandfather Harris Walker’s hero. He kept a print of the picture below in his house to commemorate Bannister’s amazing run breaking the previuosly unthinkable 4:00 mile . He loved athletics and watching track and field athletes compete—watching the Penn relays and the Olympics with him are some of my favorite memories. He loved to watch and talk about all kinds of athletes—from Carl Lewis to ‘Dan and Dave’ to Michael Johnson. He reserved special praise for Jim Thorpe, who he called the greatest athlete he ever saw, and Jesse Owens whose performance at the Berlin games likely remains the most impressive and important in Olympic history. 

My grandfather didn’t talk as much about Bannister, but every time he did it was obvious he revered him.

Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile

I’m sure there were many reasons for the connection Walker felt. Perhaps it was what they shared in common. Bannister went on to become a doctor just as my grandfather had; both took their medical training at arguably their nation’s finest (and stuffiest) schools—McGill and Oxford respectively; they competed as amateurs when that term meant something. Maybe my grandfather simply loved his competitive spirit—I wish I could have talked to him about Bannister arguing recently that, despite the fact that the fastest mile time on record now stands at three minutes and forty-three seconds contemporary efforts have only bettered his best time by 13 seconds as modern surface is worth four seconds compared to the cinder track that he ran on.

 

Or perhaps my grandfather’s admiration stemmed from knowledge that Bannister had taken much of his motivation in achieving the world’s first sub-four minute mile from his failure to medal at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. I got a sense of his disappointment at not getting the chance to compete in the Olympics listening to an interview my grandfather gave to his son Bill. 

J. Harris Walker won a lot of races...but none in the Olympics

Speaking about attending the Olympic trials in Montreal in 1936 he was allowed to attend while serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints he received special permission from his mission president to attend he said, “It was in a rainstorm. I got second in the Broad Jump. And I got third in the Pole Vault…The fellow that beat me in the Broad Jump went to the Olympics and missed his take off every time.[i]”

Getting what they deserved

Charlie Munger has offered a strategy for doing well in life that could double as a track training program. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.”

Munger also famously argues for a discipline that allows people to be aggressive in taking advantage of favorable situations. What people need, he said, “is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.” Or, in a more succinct form my grandfather (who upon hearing from his wife that I found his phone salutations to be too terse, quit hanging up as soon as he was finished talking and started closing with, “okay, fine.” And then hanging up) would probably prefer: Preparation. Discipline. Patience. Decisiveness.

Bannister’s coach Franz Stampfl made a similar point in urging him to run on May 6, 1954—the night Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier. Bannister quoted Stampfl as saying, “Although the conditions are not ideal, if you don’t take this opportunity, you might not forgive yourself for the rest of your life.” Bannister said he was right. And he was.

At the time, two other runners, American Wes Santee and Australian John Landy were closing in on the four-minute mark. “It all came down to whoever had the first chance in tolerable weather,” Bannister said. 

Bannister took his chance. As a result, just about all of us have heard of him. 

Theory and practice

Richard Flathman studied with Michael Oakeshott. Flathman draws heavily on Oakeshott in his political theorizing. One significant area in which he departs from his teacher, though, is in the relationships between theory and practice. Oakeshott posited a sharp break between theory (or at least philosophy) and practice; he thought doing one expressly meant not doing the other. The best contribution theory hoped to offer our practice for Oakeshott was that it might on occasion remove a little crookedness from our thinking.

Flathman is more optimistic about how theory can influence our practice. He believes that the two are ‘imbricated’, that they overlap like the scales on a fish. Thinking carefully about what we do, by this view, can and regularly does change the way we do things. Often for the better.

Terry Nardin explains Oakeshott’s position concerning why the belief that science has practical value is mistaken and based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and practical activity. “Riding a bicycle may illustrate the principles of mechanics, but bike riders do not ‘apply’ these principles, and a skill in riding a bike is not to be confused with being able to explain them. A knowledge of physics may help us grasp the motions involved in cycling, but it is useless in mastering the skill.” The reason?: “scientific principles ‘belong to a separate performance, the performance of explaining’.” By this view, theory has no effect on practice, only practice does.

Applying theory to practice in competitive running

Running offers a couple of examples that provide some nice insight into Flathman’s and Oakeshott’s respective positions on the relationships between theory and practice.

A runner who qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials in the 400-meter hurdles (I think it was in 2000, but I’m not sure. If anyone remembers which or has video, please let me know—I’d love to see footage again) was studying physics. His technique was unusual to say the least. Unlike all of the other sprinters, this athlete jumped as high as he could over each of the race’s ten three-foot hurdles.

I can’t remember the specifics of his argument, but I do remember thinking that it was one of the silliest things I’d ever heard as NBC ran the preview piece prior to his heat. (As I recall, he didn’t qualify for the team).

Unlike the contemporary analytics movement that has numbers driving radical changes in the way executives and even coaches approach sport, this runner’s conclusions were not based in data and empirical observation, but grounded in theoretical physics. This was a prime example of what Oakeshott would call ‘ignoratio elenchi’—the runner committed a fallacy of irrelevance.

Bannister’s example is a better case of applying ‘theory’, or at least research findings and testable hypotheses, to practice. 

While a medical student at Oxford, Bannister used insights gleaned from his academic training to consider how the human body performed. I’m sure his competition in athletics helped him to formulate fruitful hypothesis regarding his studied field, too. The New Yorker piece mentions that Bannister “studied running’s physiological demands, measured his own oxygen-consumption levels, and produced papers with titles like ‘The Carbon Dioxide Stimulus to Breathing in Severe Exercise.’” 

Over time, “Bannister discovered that running consistent lap times demanded less oxygen than varying the pace. So he focused on his quarter-mile splits.” In what has since become a classic training method, Bannister would take lunch breaks with a stopwatch to time each of his ten laps. He’d take two minutes of rest in between each quarter-mile. In just under half a year, his average time dipped from 59 seconds from 63. 

Passion is important

When asked why he went into medicine, my grandfather replied, “I don’t know, but maybe my little brother dying, and nobody knowing what he died from motivated me. That might have had a little bit of influence.” From that beginning, he wound up loving what he did professionally. He continued to expand his knowledge—frustrated by getting stuck doing all the difficult surgeries as a doctor in a small practice in his hometown of Raymond, Alberta, Canada, Walker continually pursued opportunities to expand on his knowledge base. Midway through his career, he even took a plastic surgery residency in Salt Lake City, Utah, and wound up changing careers and moving countries.

Throughout his career, Walker brought the same passion for competing to his medical practice. 

J. Harris Walker war record from McGill University archives

I also wonder if Bannister was the same way. Initially intrigued by studying what the body could do and attracted to scientific investigation into what improvements might be made, he still spoke longingly about running even as a old man, after he suffered a fractured ankle that permanently robbed him of the ability to run at all. Bannister was quoted in a lovely piece in the New Yorker as saying, “I remember, as a child, the experience of taking a few steps tentatively, and then I would start running, and then I would feel a sense of magic that suffused my motion. That feeling became grafted on to competitive running and stayed with me, even afterward. I never forgot it.”

Near the end of the New Yorker piece, author Jesse Will describes Bannister, still obsessed with running, asking people lined up for his autograph at a book signing questions like, “Are you quite interested in sport?” or “Why, you look pretty athletic,” or “You run what distance?” followed by “What’s your time?” Questions I heard my grandfather ask many times over the years.

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[i] Interestingly, in the same interview, Walker also touched on the cinder tracks Bannister referenced, though, unlike Bannister, he probably benefitted from the surface relative to his competition. Walker said that the best race he had ever run was in 1932, the week after the Olympics. “I ran against Buster Brown from Edmonton. I ran against him in Calgary,” he said. “It was in the rain. That was in the days when we didn’t have asphalt tracks. We had cinder tracks, but in the rain it was muddy. Anyway, I ran against Buster Brown, who had got sixth the week before at the Olympics in Los Angeles. I knew he could beat me, or otherwise, I might have beat him. He beat me in the last stride. I was ahead of him the whole race and he beat me in the last stride. He just barely nosed me out at the tape.” He reported that both had run the 100 “in 10 flat, in the mud….That was when the world record was 9.3.” A powerfully-built athlete who would be persistently recruited to play professional rugby, Walker likely was bothered less by the muddy conditions and as a result made the race closer than it might have otherwise been.