The Body is Subservient to the Mind

How a coach who survived 8 hours floating in freezing water led to the 4-minute mile breakthrough

The traditional story of Roger Bannister’s story goes something like this. A feat deemed impossible by some, gets taken on by an intrepid young scientist, who through cutting edge training and sheer belief, breaks the barrier and ushers in a new era of performance.

We use it as a story of belief and the power of the mind. Of Bannisters sheer mental tenacity, of which he had a lot. But the more interesting story is the one that took place behind the scenes. With a coach/advisor, Franz Stampfl, who may as well have been a pioneer of sports psychology, who learned the power of the mind far away from the tracks, when he found himself in the midst of World War 2.

Franz Stampfl just wanted to coach track. The world wouldn’t let him. In 1937, with his native Austria succumbing to political turmoil, he immigrated to England where he took up a job as a PE teacher. But as the war broke out and tensions were high, Stampfl was apprehended by MI5, classified as an enemy alien and sent on a ship to Canada.

While crossing the Atlantic, his ship was struck by a German U-boat torpedo. Leaving Stampfl grasping to a piece of furniture for eight hours in the freezing North Atlantic, before he was finally rescued. Yes, Franz may as well have been the real life Rose from the movie Titanic. (Except, he didn’t kick any poor souls off his furniture). The trauma didn’t stop. Having been rescued, he was rerouted in an overcrowded and under-provisioned ship to an internment camp in Australia.

While he eventually found his way back to England (and then Australia) as a celebrated athletics coach, the hardship he endured made him come to the conclusion that physical hardships could be overcome if there was a “burning desire from the mind to produce complete mental control.” It’s this realization that made him the perfect companion for a trio of British runners on a mission to make history.

If I’m honest, Stampl’s training was par for the course for the day, but far from the best in the world. He employed a relatively simple system of lots of interval training, with the goal to get progressively faster as the season involved. Contrast his methods to another contemporary, Mihali Igloi, and there’s a night and day difference. We can see similar complaints from other coaches like Percy Cerutty, who often derided Stampfl’s training as mechanical or mathematical. But what set Stampfl apart, and made him the perfect advisor for Bannister was the mental game.

Stampfl believed that the most physically gifted athlete would ultimately fail to reach their potential if they lacked the requisite internal landscape to process the emotional demands of competition. He understood the nuance of the experience: the discomfort, pull to quit, anxiety, but also the curiosity, willingness to try, the satisfaction of the grind, and everything in between. He stated: “I sometimes think that my ideal athlete would have the mind of a poet. He would be a man with rich imagination, capable of intensely feeling physical, mental and spiritual emotions”

“Every Viennese believes he is another Freud,” Stampfl once said. And his athletes would back this up. He was known for long conversations after practice, meetings at the local tea rooms that would stretch for hours. These sessions weren’t about workouts, they were trying to get to know the athletes unique backgrounds, to learn what they were passionate about and afraid of. He wanted to know “what made you tick” and precisely “what buttons to press” during critical moments of profound fatigue. In a time when coaches seldom travelled overseas with their atheltes, Stampfl would record pep talks on tape recordings so athletes would be primed to perform. It took every one of these tricks to help Bannister and his teammates Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher take on the barrier.

When the athletes grew weary of the relentless, punishing interval training, Stampfl would unleash a “torrent of words” to forcefully shift their perspective. When the goal of breaking the 4-minute mile became impossible to ignore, he framed it as a quest that would be “as good as painting the Mona Lisa”. By anchoring their physical suffering to the creation of a timeless aesthetic masterpiece, Stampfl ensured their achievement would be framed as a triumph of the human spirit.

A great coach helps you expand your perspective. To start to think of the impossible as achievable. To make you see the incredibly demanding as cause that is bigger than oneself. Everyone who has been a part of a championship run has seen it. You start thinking and talking different. But even with such big dreams, the doubts from our protective brains till surface. It’s the coaches job to be make sure they don’t spiral.

When the fateful day arrived to make the assault on the barrier, Bannister was filled with doubts. The weather wasn’t cooperating. It was windy and he was thinking about calling it off. On the train ride to the track, he ran into Stampfl who gave one of the most consequential pre-race pep talks in history. He gave Bannister a jolt of confidence by stating flatly, “I think you can run it in 3:56”. Then, he put the decision back on Bannister, but with a dose of perspective that made the only choice to give it a go: “If you forego this chance, would you ever forgive yourself for the rest of your life? You will feel pain, but what is it?”. As they say, the rest is history.

-Steve