This is Invisibalia, I'm Elise Spiegel, and I'm Lula Miller, and we are here today with a podcast

bonus, that's the official sound of the podcast bonus. Okay, this is a piece that compliments our show

in personality and more broadly this idea that personality is less stable than you think. And it

takes place on a racetrack. It's about a young man who always thought he had it in him to break

the four-minute mile until this thing that happened to him made him question if he was the same person

with the same personality and therefore the same runner. Take us away Lula.

All right, so our contestant is a young man from Rhode Island named Mike Marcella.

Wait, Lula? Yeah, since this is about like a guy who's running the four-minute mile,

can you just see if you can do the whole story in under four minutes?

Well, I would, but it like it has all these characters and it spends many years.

But like, come on, Lula. This is a story about the four-minute mile. Just do it in under four minutes.

It'll be meta. On your mark, get set, go. Okay, okay. So Mike Marcella grew up in Rhode Island,

and he's always been really, really competitive. Like any board game I'd play with my family,

I couldn't lose without flipping the board. So you were that kid? Yeah, I was that kid that

was like, aw, crap. He got into running his freshman year of high school and by his junior year

of high school, that kid had almost already broken the four-minute mile. Four minutes and nine seconds.

Wow. I remember like sitting there and I'd count to nine. Nine seconds. What's nine seconds?

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi,

eight Mississippi, nine. And yeah, he just skipped seven. I did? Yeah, we'll get to that. Okay, again.

One, two. So he keeps running. He gets a running scholarship to college.

University of Virginia. He buys a moped. There's a little red Yamaha. And one night,

he's driving down the hill over the bridge. There was a lot of blood. This is his dad. Please

...