Sub 3

RWH: apologies for not having paid attention, but what is your book about....if you're not at liberty to say yet, then I'll understand.

Hopefully you'll be good soon RWH - congrats on the book deal.

As the SEO was doing a 1500 down at Eltham last night I figured I might as well give it a whirl. Managed to lug myself around in 4:14.9 which I'm fairly pleased with and whilst not wanting to break frediquette confirms I'm almost exactly twice as slow (or half as fast!) as Marders. SEO unfortunately didn't have a great run.

Achilles fine after race but got a bit sorer afterwards - is 95% fine but clearly not perfect so am going to be aggresively strengthening it so it's 100% for when marathon build up starts.

Relatively easy day - 4.35 miles at 6:48 pace with a heavyish backpack AM and 7.35 miles at 6:38 pace tonight progressively with last 3k including 6 x strides.

 Sorry for not contributing a lot on the cycling! - don't know a lot about it but you all seem to be doing a lot.

Congratulations on the book deal RW-H

Joolska, I'm also doing the London 10000 on Monday.

Hobbling Harrier,  that sounds like a fine 1500 time from you. Slightly confused though - are you really saying that marders ran 2:12.45??

Philip_M_Jones, that's interesting what you say about about marathon recovery which is something I've been trying to understand recently. My experience of the last few weeks has been roughly that low mileage = surprisingly tired legs, higher mileage = surprisingly fresh legs.

I'm trying to get some miles in at the moment, 5 miles @ 7.22 pace this morning and 12.5 miles @ 7.28 pace this evening.

More doubling the distance but not slowing down FilthyRich! Nice miles there - big day.

Nice pace HH

I have of course been cycling :¬)

HH - good run considering I guess you've not really been training for that kind of speed. Nice run by marders - he broke 8:30 then? 

New wheels put on bike and tested this morning. Took a bit of fiddling to stop some rubbing but once sorted I did about 17M steady. All ready for tomorrow now, and actually felt quite good on the bike.

To keep the runners happy I should also report that I did 7M last night at about 7 m/m!

MtR –  good that the Sciatica is easing

Padams – new TT bike wheels or road bike wheels ?

Not much to report here either except kids cricket matches coming out of my ears, my 2 have something like 10 matches between them over 7 of the next 9 days.
Still got sore ribs but have been swimming everyday (only just though on Tuesday) and I got back in the saddle today with Gordo’s hill reps in the TT position session (the ride totalled 21M). I only have 69 running miles to my name in May so far but 17.2 of it had numbers on. Unfortunately next Wednesdays 5k is a DNS as I’ll be in the New Forest for the S E Hants U10s cricket. 

I’m currently looking for another Tri to tergat before the Sept ½ IM too.

Well I'm running! Got my 3rd race in 5 days tonight..a 10k by the sea followed by a night of camping (the tent kind ooo err!) hardly text book training but what the heck, running is supposed to be fun!

HH good speed in those legs, but watch that achilles.

In marathon talk style, if you could train for a mile what time do you think you could do?

I'm going to one in July/August reckon beating 5 is the target.

Any tips for training for a 1 mile race anyone?

Good news on the literary front, RWH. Did I imagine it, or are you a mover and shaker in the world of African religion / ritual, torso-in-the-Thames, etc..?

Sharp stuff HH. Saw marders' result too. I expect he'll already have worked out that it is (just) inside 2hr marathon pace.

Keeping it real here too, Ginger. 15 lovely miles in to work today, fine conditions. I have a HM and a 10k in the next couple of weeks, but unlike some of you boys, I simply get around the injury risk by not running fast enough to do any damage. #mustdosomespeedwork

Half a dozen of us in the office appear to have blagged VIP tickets to the horse racing at Down Royal tonight. What with the luck of the Irish and all that, I expect the bookies will be delighted to see an Englishman show up .

Any tips for training for a 1 mile race anyone?

Yeah make sure you start training 5years before you want to be any good and that you're still at school when you make that decision. Simples.

As you were.

TR - race wheels for the TT bike. Looking forward to using them tomorrow, just slightly worried there might be some wind - I'm bigger/heavier than your average triathlete though so hopefully will be OK.

Crab, I only want to beat 5 minutes!

Ginger N wrote (see)

 Any tips for training for a 1 mile race anyone?

Lots of very hard, short reps, pyramids, etc. If you are serious then there are a lot of articles on the internet, just search for 1500m as it is far more common than 1 mile. The idea is not to do a lot of distance but what you do is hard. It isn't uncommon to see intervals such as 400m hard and then a 5 or even 10 minute rest before the next one, so in an hour you may just do 8 laps hard.

If you want a 5 minute mile you should be able to belt out a 400 in about 1 minute, and train at not much over that pace for 400m reps, say 65.

As an example the sessions I have done recently with a middle distance group are:

All cases, warm up for 1 mile or more, then streches and drills and sprints. Warm down and stretch at the end.

2x2x400m with 1 minute recovery, 1 lap jog between sets. Aim to do each 400m at the same pace.
3x3x300m with 1 minute recovery, 1 lap jog between sets. Aim to do each 300m at the same pace.
Funny session that is 3x1500, even pace for all, but each 1500 is in more, smaller pieces.
1000, 500 
800, 400, 300
600, 400, 300, 200

Any tips for training for a 1 mile race anyone?

Run 25.2 miles with your opponents first.

Rarity for me, out the door at 5:20 for 7 miles.  Not planned, but I woke up early and realised that getting anything in later would be tricky.  Surprisingly decent once I got going, back before anyone else was up.

I seem to remember doin 10x400s with 60 sec standing rest, all reps had to be done in under 60 sec. My best was 4:30 ish, but I was about the age that CRAB alluded to above

Padams -  could be windy, so best eat plenty of ballast !

CD - good work

special mention to boy wOnDEr as he is doing some little jogette thing in S A this weekend

The key element of 1500m training is that it is anaerobic. You are training the body to run without oxygen, utilising stored energy sources. The pace is obviously that little bit faster than your V02max (the point at which you are just about to enter oxygen debt). The specific type of training you do is determined by how seriously to want to take the distance as it is a very different animal from even a 5k.

If its just something you want to do as part of your summer running at generally shorter distances, you could just adapt one of your VO2 max sessions. Ie short reps 300m or 400m with 45-60secs recovery to total about 3000-3200m of fast running. The speed should be target 1500m race pace. As a guide if you can run 36:00-36:15 for 10k then you should have no difficulty running a mile in 5:00. If you want to work out what pace you think to need to do the reps at divide your 10k time in seconds by 25 and subtract a further 12secs to give target 400m rep speed. Eg 36mins 10k is 2160 divided by 25 to give 86secs less 12 to produce 74 secs for target 400m pace.

If you want to take it a bit more seriously you would drop any tempo type running from your training and add another session of the type described above, possible extending the length of rep out to 600m. In addition you could also introduce a really fast session - same structure as above but less reps run about 4 secs a lap quicker off the same recovery eg 4x400 at 70secs off 1 minute or 5x300 at 51secs off 45secs if you are targeting a 5 minute mile. Though realistically if you're really going for it you should be chasing at least 4:30-4:35. Also recognising that these are demanding sessions the days in between really are recovery and the running here should be SLOW.

Mile racing - have good genetics and do it while younger :¬)

I'm 800 metre training at the moment which means lots of maximal of 400/500/600 metres. It does make running at 75 second lap feel slow.

If you can run 4 x 400 in 74 seconds a lap off 1 minute recoveries you have a chance.

Try 2 x 800 in 2.29 off 1 minute.

These are just benchmark session though really.

I have been running !!!

Quick one for Tom - I ran 33.xx in 2008 and struggled to run 4.58 for a mile.

Just to agree with CRAB and Gobi, fast miling does come much easier the younger you are. Even a reasonable standard can be achieved with out being to precious about what type of training to do.

My debut 1 mile was run at age 16 of about a month of 3 interval session of 400s a week (The school summer term). Time was 4:48

My college debut 1 mile was run at age 18 of three months cross country training incl one session a week of 25 reps of javelin dodging 200s. Time was 4:35

It then took 6 more years of proper MD training to sneak under 4:00 for 1500m, and that was hard!

As you can see nearly 40 years ago I was even then complaining about it being hard work for my age.

I used to do reps with a 3:41 1500 runner, now that was hard work (even as an ex-1500 runner myself). I think I ran 4:13 or so for 1500 when I was 16.

I do have a certificate signed by Cram, Coe and Ovett for running a sponsored mile in 6:53 as a 12(?) yr old when they were raising money to go to the '84 Olympics. Little did I know that 4 yrs later I would be having my Sunday dinners with Ovett himself (long story)....

Like a few on here I'll be running the marathon on Monday, not sure I've really got my head around that yet.