 The reason the myth took hold was that four minutes was a round number that lay slightly out of reach of the world record (by just 1.4 seconds) for nine years, which was longer than it might otherwise have been due to the effect of the Second World War in interrupting athletic progress in the combatant countries.The Swedish runners, Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, in a series of head-to-head races in the period 1942–45, had already lowered the world mile record by five seconds to the pre-Bannister record.Knowledgeable track fans are still most impressed by the fact that Bannister ran a four-minute mile on very low-mileage training by modern standards.