The Mile: Part 2

Today I did a bit of running...if you missed it, I'm aiming to run a mile under 6 minutes. But I'm running on a treadmill with no incline, so its not a real mile. Maybe I'll mark off a real mile someday soon.

Anyways, as I mentioned, I'm going to be using the same plan as Adam Campbell over at Mens' Health. Here it is, but visit his blog (see my links section) as well to track his training.

"Training Instructions from Bill Hartman, CSCS:
Increasing endurance is a matter of training your body to put out higher amounts of energy for a longer amount of time.
Figure out the time you want to achieve for a certain distance—say, two miles in 12 minutes, which is a six-minute per mile pace.
Then break it down into the longest distance in which you can maintain that pace.
So maybe you can’t run one mile in six minutes, but you can run 1/2 mile in three minutes, or 1/4 mile in 90 seconds.
Run the appropriate distance, and then rest for 1.5 times the amount of time you spent running.
Repeat the process until you can no longer maintain the target pace.
This is known as your performance drop-off.
To progress, reduce that rest period by 15 seconds each workout.
Eventually, your rest period will be down to zero, and you'll be able to complete your entire run at the desired pace."

I actually forgot the instructions and rested less.
So I did:

3 intervals of 3 minutes at 10.0 mph with only 2 minutes rest in between.

That would suggest I'm not really that far off from running a 6-minute mile (on the treadmill) already.

I'll train again this way later this week, and then maybe test myself again next Saturday.

Also of note, before I ran, I did some bodyweight exercises as well as some of the dynamic flexiblity exercises from the Turbulence Training for Athletes e-book. This includes the 1-leg RDL, pictured above right.

Train smart,

CB