Friday, March 19, 2010

Mile Challenge

There’s some sort of marathon taking place in DC tomorrow that is not the Marine Corps Marathon. While I don’t understand why anyone would wake up extremely early in the morning to run 26.2 miles, I certainly admire their determination and fitness level. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to run one mile.

Back in high school, I consistently ran a mile in just over seven minutes with a fastest time of 6:49. While this was not close to Roger Bannister’s sub four-minute mile, I thought it was pretty good. Recently, I decided that I want to see if I can get back to running a seven-minute mile. Actually, I just wanted to know how quickly I could run a mile. Although I feel like I’m in decent shape due to soccer refereeing, this is a different type of running. While working as a ref, I sprint, stop, walk, sprint, jog, etc. There’s no continuous rhythm or pace as there is for a longer run.

So two weeks ago, I hopped on my treadmill and ran one mile. The time: 8 minutes and 38 seconds. Not bad, but not really good. When I ran in high school, I ran at my own speed on a track. In this case, I attempted to adjust the treadmill to keep up with my increasing or decreasing speed. This was definitely not the most efficient way to time myself. Last week, I tried again, but did worse. My time was 9 minutes and 15 seconds largely because I started the mile too quickly and needed to slow down to walk for part of the time. Again, the treadmill isn’t my friend for this challenge. I need to find a track and just run.

So if you don’t mind, I plan on sharing my times over the next few months (or until I get bored with this).

3 comments:

carissa said...

Good for you sean! Regardless the time, it still takes effort to even attempt to run!

Brendon said...

If you're really serious about running, this is the best thing I've ever bought for running.

Sean said...

Thanks Carissa and Hand of Godard! I have to write though that I'm not really serious about running. As I mentioned in the post, now that it's spring, I'm back in soccer referee mode. It's hard to do consistant runs when I do my running on the soccer field over multiple hours.