Faster Mile

A couple of weeks ago I had a good one-mile run at the track, felt fine,  but the next day had a serious case of bursitis in the right hip.  I couldn’t do much more than walk for most of the next week, but it’s fully recovered now.  That mile was 10:27, and I ran another four laps before  walking.  54 right turns, maybe the cause of the bursitis.

Last Wednesday, Feb 14 (Valentines Day), I decided to run a bit faster.  The track is 9 laps per mile (or so they say), rectangular, around and above four basketball courts. The long sides are maybe twice as long as the short sides, and the corners are pretty sharp and not at all banked.  The best way for me to run faster but limit the risk of injury is to speed up on the long sides and maybe a little on the short sides, but slow down for the corners.  I did finish in 9:20, which was just fine for Valentines Day, the fastest mile I’ve done on this track.  (The track opened last October).

Today I didn’t feel especially strong, but I followed that same procedure, though not pushing too hard, and was a little surprised to finish the first lap in about 61 seconds.  Note: 60 seconds per lap is a 9-minute mile.  As usual, during the first few laps I tried to think of some excuse to stop and walk, but nothing hurt and I didn’t need to go to the bathroom, so I had to keep going.  It gets easier when I’m more than half done and can start counting the laps down instead of up.  When there are only three left I look forward to the last two.  In the next-to-last lap I see if I can pick up the pace just a little, and that lap seems to go by fairly quickly, and then I feel that I can push to the limit in the last lap, because there is nothing to conserve any more.  That’s actually kind of fun.

I must have moved faster in those last two laps because I know that I was slightly behind the 60-second pace somewhere in the middle, but finished the whole mile in 8:57.  That’s another new record for me on this track.  I really want to run the 200m event, not the 1500, but that is how I got injured.  Since I don’t know how to heal the injury, I might as well train for longer instead of faster.  A mile is actually 1609 meters, so it’s a good distance for training to run the 1500m track event.

Just a very slight complaint from my right hamstring injury after today’s run.  Bend over once to stretch it a little, and it goes away.  I’m not sure how to deal with that, actually, but my instinct is to go ahead and bend over, stretch it just that little, so that it will heal correctly.

Mile splits: 13:10, 8:57, ... I failed to record the time of the third mile.  Oh well.