On Sunday morning the running community awoke to the news that Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four minute mile barrier, passed away peacefully at the age of 88 in Oxford, the same city that propelled him to fame nearly 64 years ago when he displayed that limits

are just a creation in our minds.

That's the opening paragraph to a piece that I wrote for SI.com

on Sunday.

It's some really sad news that hit the running community and over the

last couple days it's been really cool to see all these sort of tributes pop out.

You know there's Malcolm Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker. Let's Run, I think, put a splash page for Bannister.

There's a bunch of really good stuff out there in archives.

You know, S.I. Vault has a ton of really good articles from over the years on

Bannister. He was the 1954 sportsman of the year, the very first one, and he was also featured

in the 2011 Where Are They Now Issue with a profile written by David Epstein.

So I decided to give David a call to kind of just get his thoughts on what these last couple days have been like

just reflecting on the career of Sir Roger Bannister and he's got some very

interesting stories because after you know the profile was published in 2011, he still stayed in touch

with Bannister and they became friends of sorts and stayed in touch up until you know about a year ago.

So David's got some really good stories.

This is a bonus episode of the Citius mag podcast,

so there's going to be a transcription online on Citius mag.com.

But yeah, enjoy this conversation with David Epstein. All right, I'm joined now on a little mini bonus episode of the City Smack

Podcast by David Epstein, he's the author of the Sports Gene, former Sports Illustrated senior writer, he wrote a ProPublica for a bit.

He was actually someone I look up to a lot actually being here at a, at a side, go back and read a bunch of year old stuff but uh...

David thanks a lot for for taking the call

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