Outside: 'How Our Totally Average Runner Broke the Sub-Five Minute Mile'

Kind of a fun little piece. Kind of motivational, too. The writer, a 36-year-old who appears to have written about track pretty extensively for some pretty big publications, decided to embark from nearly scratch on a quest to break five minutes. He started at 6:30, from how I read it.

How Our Totally Average Runner Broke the Sub-Five-Minute Mile

Yours truly, as noted in the Take Care of Yourself thread, busted a PR of 5:49 this morning.

 

Always about you.

I'm perfectly fine with the tortoise approach. Slow and steady. Speed is fascinating to me, though, as I've always been painfully slow. Even when I was young and skinny.

 

I'm curious if I could do it. I was always a slow kid. I still am, really. Fifty seconds is a looooooooooong way from 4:59.

 

Even when I was running three 5Ks a week, I never broke 8 minutes.

 

Headline is wonky. You don't break the sub-five-minute mile.
You either run a sub-five-minute mile, or you break five minutes in the mile.

 

Better than 5-inning Jake's ERA!

 

4:38 1600 in high school. I don't know if I could break six now.

 

I don't know what it would be like to move that fast. I feel like I would start breaking apart into pieces. At some point during today's mile, I looked down at my app and I was at a 5:35 pace and thought, "Better slow that shit down quick."

 

Don't think I ever broke a 6-minute mile, but a few years ago when I was working out religiously, I got pretty close. My PR was like 6:12, which was pretty good for someone who only a year earlier weighed 233 pounds and started at 12-minute miles. Right now, I'd be lucky to do a 10-minute mile.

 

It was a long, long time ago. At the end of my sophomore year I qualified for State in the 3200 and when I got my time I thought it had to be a mistake. It was like 40 seconds faster than I'd ever run before. I had no idea how to actually push myself until that point. But it was the competition and winning races I liked. I don't think I will ever be a serious runner again.

 

5:57. I had never done it before and shot my mouth off one night saying I could. I was in jeans so I ran in my underwear. I thought I was having a heart attack when I was finished.

I doubt I could break 7 minutes now.

 

When I was a junior in high school, I ran the first mile of a 5K cross-country race in 4:42. To be fair, it was mostly downhill. My best 1,600 on a track was 4:58.

After high school, I embarked on a strict policy of not running unless being pursued, which I stuck to for 27 years before getting back into semi-serious running a few years ago. I've backed off the training a bit in the last year or so, but I did manage to do one 5K in the 25s. It stuns me beyond belief to think that I ever could have run a 5K in the 16s, but I still have the agate to prove that I did.

Given three weeks to train, I MIGHT be able to break 7 minutes in a mile on a track.