Welcome to Mile Club: Week 2 - Timed Mile

Back at it for my Mile Club. After last weeks 4 x 400 session, my key workouts were a 5K race on Saturday and an easy 11 miler on Monday. Yesterday I went out to the track to do another mile specific workout. Rich Stiller, who publishes the Last Chance Runner blog (see my sidebar for link), has given me some amazing training advice over the last 6 months or so. When he was 50, he alternated a series of 4 different weekly workouts and in a 6 month span lowered his mile time from 6:07 to 5:19. The workout I opted for this week was to do a single timed mile at about 10-15 seconds slower than what I could do an all out mile in on that day, so basically 2 mile race pace. The winds were especially strong and the temps were a bit on the cool side (about 40F) when I ran so I knew I wouldn't do anything blazing. I ended up hitting a very evenly paced 5:33, not killing myself but hitting it decently hard. The weird thing was that my heart rate only got up to 90% of my max -- I'm guessing it was due to the wind as it was very hard to push beyond a certain effort. In any case, that felt right for the day. Funny how my 5:38 opening mile in Saturday's 5K felt so much easier. Shows how different it is in a race as a opposed to training by yourself. The key though is to continue to work on the mile once a week without sacrificing my 5K - 10K training.

Next up is the Meteor 10K in Michigan on Saturday. The video above is of Filbert Bayi's 1975 mile world record race where he edges out Marty Liquori. I'm pretty sure I saw this as a kid on ABC's Wide World of Sports. What an amazing show that was.