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February 12, 2005
a pr in the mile
After a couple weeks off, I finally made it back to one of our Saturday group training sessions. I wasn’t exactly taking the previous weekends off, I just happened to be up north snowshoeing and skiing, that’s all. Anyway, today’s training was held out at a Bally’s. We first used their spin bikes to spin for an hour then did some running. It was a gorgeous day outside, and I was hoping the we’d run out there, instead we ran on their squarish indoor track that’s 1/13th of a mile.
I initially thought that it was only going to be moderately more entertaining than running on a treadmill, but surprisingly, it turned out to be a lot of fun. Instead of just running to run, our coach had us run a mile a moderate pace. Then after a short rest, we would do it again, except this time we were supposed to run harder. It was kind of a test to see where our fitness was. For the first mile I ran with couple speedy guys and we clocked a 6:25 mile, which was hard to believe since I didn’t feel like we were running that fast. What was really shocking is that me and another guy knocked off a 5:25 mile for the second one, easily my fastest mile ever, and I still had some gas left in the tank. I was more than surprised by that result. Maybe they should have their track recalibrated.
All of this has got me thinking about seeing how fast I could actually run a mile. A lot of inspiration has also come from a book I read over New Years called, “The Perfect Mile”, where three guys around the world tried to be the first to break the four-minute barrier. Now while I don’t think I’m in any danger of running a mile that fast, I do think that I could possibly dip below five minutes. I can’t wait until it warms up and we can find quarter-mile track to try it out.
Posted by ksmith at February 12, 2005 05:30 PM