The F-Word

Roger Bannister. What a man, and what a failure.

We know him for his lung-busting 3 minutes 59.4 seconds of running on the Iffley Road athletics track on that breezy May day in 1954. The celebrated finish line moment caught on camera, his chin aloft, shoulders back, trackside timekeepers with fingers on clocks.

And there is a lesser known part to Roger’s story, before this great F-is-for-Finishing moment.

Two years previous to becoming the first ever known man in the world to run a whole mile in under four minutes, Roger was dealing with another F-word. F-is-for-Failure.

It was such a monumental let down, in his eyes, that it caused him to seriously contemplate hanging up his running shoes for good. He wanted to call it a day. “I came, I ran, I missed out”. Hardly a speech to rouse the troops.

Before the two year intense battle to run the first ever ‘sub-4 minute mile’, a battle between Roger and his two rivals – Wes Santee of the U.S. and John Landy from Down-Under - there was the small matter of the Olympic Games in Helsinki.

Even five decades ago the press were well versed in hype-over-hope and supercharging expectations. But when it came to it, however much the British press had all but guaranteed Roger the gold medal in the 1,500 metres, Roger didn’t deliver. He finished in the worst place possible. F-is-for-Fourth. He was crucified in the press.

Demoralised, defeated, down trodden. “I can’t do this anymore” were the words ringing in Roger’s mind. He had given years of his life to intensive early morning sprint training alongside the rigorous demands of training as a medical doctor in Oxford. He had other aspirations he could pursue.

But he did ‘do it anymore’.

The Japanese have a saying, ‘Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight.’

On the verge of hanging up his running spikes, Roger made a decision. A decision he had no way of knowing would be a landmark in history. A decision when His-Story became History.

We rarely get the privilege in advance of knowing that our brave decisions to Stand Up Again when we have Fallen, will yield our desired result. Perhaps it’s a matter of F-is-for-Faith.

As the apostle Paul once said, ‘We walk by faith, not by sight.’ Most of the time we have to live with the ‘sight’ in our heads of the dream we are working towards, before we see it materialise.

We’ve all Fallen. We’ve all Failed. We’ve all lacked Faith at times. It’s human and normal.

And what happens next is a choice. “Fall Down Seven Times…”

What if there is no such thing as failure? Only feedback. What if failure is just information on how to not do something?

Seb Coe, another running-hero of mine, once said ‘The paradox of excellence is built on the necessity of failure.’ That’s right, the necessity of it. However much we may not like the taste of failure, it can – if we embrace it – give us something firm to build on. F-is-for-Foundations.

Not many of us will break a world record or be the first person to achieve such and such. But our choices become part of our History, and our failures can become a rich part of our Story.

We have all failed. And we are not failures. Perhaps we are all just finding our way to run our race a little better.

Chin up, shoulders back, keep running…