"How fast can we run?"

"Marathon-ready Daniel Lieberman offers evolutionary perspective on Bannister 4-minute mile, human speed limits, and ‘Man Against Horse’".

"...He did talk about the kinds of shoes that he wore back in the day, and was fascinated by — and not particularly approving of — how running shoes had gotten so built up. He, like any fast miler, was a forefoot striker. We published a few years later the paper in which we made the argument that, essentially, prior to shoes pretty much everybody ran the way Bannister ran. He felt that was clearly the best way to run.

"I remember him describing how he had his shoes made by a cobbler in London. You couldn’t go to a shoe store back then and buy a pair of running shoes. He basically had to have his shoes custom made. I remember he discussed how hard it was to get the right kind of material — light but durable enough not to fall apart...."

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