Breaking a 7 minute mile

I made a small goal for myself to break seven minutes for a mile.

I've run pretty close to 7 minutes on occasion (heck during a 10k I ran a 7:03). But never under it. I was always holding something back for more laps at track workouts etc.

But today was the day and I am so proud. (I don't care if I am bragging. I worked hard. This is exciting).

Today was a track workout: a ladder—1600, 1200, 800, 400

It was pouring rain—all day. It didn't look like it was letting up so we went to the indoor track to do the workout. The plan was to the workout WITH Matt. We're about the same speed.

Gym hair, (mostly) don't care

My plan was to run 7:10-7:20 for the first mile (5k pace). But Matt took off. I was at least 20 seconds behind him. I left him go and focused on running even splits, and as easy as I could (I still had the whole workout to do). I looked at my watch to see I was running 52-54 second laps on the 1/8th of a mile track. (55 seconds was the goal). I didn't look at the total time until the end 6:55:7.

I thought I was running at 7:10. but then again Matt was so far ahead of me, he must have run a 6:35 or so.

And I still had enough left in the tank to do the ladder progressively faster. (Thought since it was an indoor track my Garmin wasn't tracking the distance correctly )

I broke 6 minutes during my second year of running track. So it was something I was pretty sure I was capable of doing. But 34-year-old Sara and 17-year-old Sara aren't the same. (15 pounds)

Garmin splits for the workouts. First four splits are .25 miles, 2 laps on an 1/8th of a mile track. So fairly even splits (split 3 is a little slow).

1600: 6:55.7
1200: 5:06.5
800: 3:22
400: 1:26.5

And then a 9 minute cool down.