Racing a mile

As part of my "run some short races" phase I am going to race a mile. There's a mile race and a 5K on 12/20 in Golden Gate Park, and you can do both (mile is 30 minutes before the 5K). Now I expect that this may well screwup my 5K a little but I'm going to give it a shot. Various websites indicate I should be able to do a mile somewhere around 5:15-5:30, which sounds awfully quick to me. Now I rarely run anywhere near that fast except for strides so decided I'd better see what it is like.

So it was off to the track yesterday for some 400 meter running! Planned to do 8-10 x 400m at 5:20 pace (just under 1:20 for the lap) with a walk/jog lap recovery.

Decided I wouldn't really look at the watch, just run fast.

• First one was too fast and I ran about 71! It was 4:45 mile pace, although I wasn't gonna be doing 3 more at that pace anytime soon.
• Next was 75 seconds, so a little more reasonable at 5:02 pace
• Next 5 were all between 76 and 79 for 5:06-5:19 pace
• For the final one I went for it and managed a 73 for 4:54 pace
• Average was 76.4 for the 8. So that's about 5:07 pace

I'm thinking that I'll do another round of this before 12/20 and see if I can run 10 of them consistently at about 77 (5:10 pace) with the recovery limited to 2 minutes (some were up to 2:45 yesterday) and if that works out, I will try to go sub 5:15 in the race.