Sunday, May 18, 2008

Mile Update: Good news and bad news

I finally got around to attempting another mile this season, just today, in cool, windy weather. The good news is that it was a season's best, at 5:48.3. The bad news is that in my first time trial, nearly 6 weeks ago, I ran 5:49.2, so I only improved 1 second in all that time. Now granted, it was very windy today, with temperatures in the low 50s, requiring a jacket to warm up, and long sleeves for the actual trial. I suppose I could claim 3 or 4 seconds due to the gusty winds, and even Roger Bannister, on the day he first cracked 4 minutes, looked at the wind, and voted NOT to run, but was convinced otherwise. He said that he would have to run an equivalent 3:57 to break 4 due to the wind, so he was allotting about 3 seconds.

I guess the lesson learned is that I had not really done any track work in the past 6 weeks. Perhaps this is going to be a necessity for required improvement.

Another bit of good news, though, is that my splits were negative. After a 2:58 half, I came back in 2:50, with a final lap of 83 seconds. This tells me I could have probably run a bit faster with more even timing, but I also think maybe I really wasn't warmed up well enough, and was just starting to warm up during the last quarter.

Next time, I really want to shave some time and go under 5:40. We'll see.............stay tuned.

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