With Roger Bannister Inwards London

I can't permit this calendar week unopen without reporting what a process it was to acquaint a newspaper inwards the Roger Bannister Audtorium at Imperial College London.  Here's the setting (above).

The seminar was organized past times Susan Burnett at the NIHR Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre.  My championship was "Being willing to encounter things clearly: Looking at the essential purpose of transparency inwards clinical procedure improvement."

Many thank y'all to Susan!  It was a lovely eve amongst a nifty audience, but the highlight for me was to live able to stand upwardly at that topographic point at gaze at this famous painting demonstrate of Roger breaking the four-minute mile:

It's difficult to holler back today, but many people reckon that the human torso was incapable of this feat--that if y'all did it, y'all would keel over as well as overstep away right away afterward.  There is a spectacular majority most the bespeak called The Perfect Mile, which I heartedly recommend.  Here's the summary from Amazon:

There was a fourth dimension when running the mile inwards 4 minutes was believed to live beyond the limits of human human foot speed, as well as inwards all of sport it was the elusive holy grail. In 1952, after suffering defeat at the Helsinki Olympics, 3 world-class runners each gear upwardly out to interruption this barrier. Roger Bannister was a immature English linguistic communication medical pupil who epitomized the ideal of the amateur — all the same driven non merely past times winning but past times the nobility of the pursuit. John Landy was the privileged boy of a genteel Australian family, who equally a man child preferred butterfly collecting to running but who trained relentlessly inwards an almost spiritual endeavour to sort his torso to this singular task. Then at that topographic point was Wes Santee, the swaggering American, a Kansas farm man child as well as natural athlete who believed he was merely evidently ameliorate than everybody else.

Spanning 3 continents as well as defying the odds, their collective bespeak captivated the globe as well as stole headlines from the Korean War, the atomic race, as well as such legendary figures equally Edmund Hillary, Willie Mays, Native Dancer, as well as Ben Hogan. In the tradition of Seabiscuit as well as Chariots of Fire, Neal Bascomb delivers a breathtaking even out of unlikely heroes as well as leaves us amongst a lasting portrait of the twilight years of the golden historic menstruum of sport.

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