sub-5 mile

The plan was to get up at 3am on Sunday to drive 2 hours to the spectacular Garden of the Gods 10-miler, race 7 in this year's 16-race Colorado Runner Racing Seies.

But common sense - actually tiredness - prevailed, and instead I found myself chasing glory instead of series points as a late entry in the Sunrise Stampede at Longmont. The race was on Saturday, a mere 30 minutes up the road, and was TWO miles instead of ten.

I must be getting better; I've started dreaming again.

All three races -- all 5ks -- that I've run this year have been weird in some way. The Oatmeal was my first race for 5 months; I'd forgotten what to do and practically jogged the first mile. The President's Day 5k in Washington Park was so cold I had to warm up in the car. Last weekend's Sharin' O' the Green was unexpectedly cold, so I ran in a tracksuit -- AND the course was a tenth of a mile long.

A Sub 5 minute mile at age 50 or beyond is indeed pretty hard as I found out in March. The short story is I just squeezed in under 5. The full story follows.

I still don't know how this works, but after 3 weeks of easy running (apart from the sessions with Patty), I turned up for our second sub-5 miling assessment time trial and saw a massive improvement.

The object of the day (after warm-up and drills) is to run the same distance at the same heart rate -- 80% of heart rate reserve, or around 153 bpm for me -- as we did three weeks ago. Back then I ran it at 8:00 per mile pace, or even a bit slower; today I ran at 7:30 pace for the same effort. This stuff works!

More good news: both Kyle and I did 100m strides in 16 seconds. OK, it was wind-assisted, but it was nectar to our ears to hear Bobby saying, "Too fast, guys."