1-Mile PR Training Review
When I made this website, my main goal was to provide examples of applied training. It can get lonely out there, and the more I’ve learned about running concepts, the less clear it is to see them applied at a sub-elite level.
Between April and July of 2024, I trained to PR my 1-mile. In that vein, I wanted to review my training with my training logs and analyze how I thought the train-up actually went. This should be read alongside my journal, which I’ve posted here. (A note: I did very little cleanup on this file, so weekly milage will be inaccurate until week 12).
Context:
In April, I began my dedicated training with a 1-mile time trial on April 10th. I was coming off consistent running, but inconsistent training: my milage hadn’t eclipsed 50 miles since mid-December of 2023 and I’d had no weekly plan for speed or long runs. My goal for that time period had been coaching my Best Ranger Team, which meant a lot of running with the guys when they needed it.
My weekly Milage prior to the trainup
At this point, I hadn’t run a 1 mile for time in years, and the shortest distance I’d attempted was 2 miles during an ACFT. I’d run a 5:35 pace 5k in November and a 68-second 400m, but nothing timed after that.
Below will be an anachronistic evaluation of what I did well and what I door poorly over the 18 week block. Before I get into that, I want to provide a chronological summary of what I hoped to do:
I knew I had about 19 weeks to train, so I broke that up into 4 blocks:
Weeks 1-4: Sprint training and base Prep. In this phase, my schedule was very loose but generally consisted of:
1 x 50m/100m/200m day focused on sprint form and anaerobic power
1 x 400m day focused on building anaerobic capacity
1 x hill day focused on muscle fiber recruitment
1 x threshold day focused on aerobic power
1 x tempo day focused on building aerobic capacity
1 x flex day (rest or easy miles)
One thing to note about this phase: although this seems like a lot of anaerobic volume, most of these days were low enough in volume not to affect the subsequent days. For example, I would do 6 Easy miles then hit the track for my 50/100/200 meter workouts, and even then I was only doing 1-2 miles of total sprints with lots of recovery between. The same went for my hill days, where the bulk of milage was Easy with only 6-10 x 15s hill sprints.
2. Weeks 5-12: Weeks 5-12 were my least consistent. My goal was to use my new anaerobic power to build anaerobic capacity through volume reps of 400 work. My weeks tried to look like this:
1 x Threshold day, building to 30 minutes at T
1 x Long tempo/ long run day, alternating weeks up at 13 miles
1 x 400m volume day, working up to 5 x 400 >70s
1 x Interval workout, sometimes 1200m repeats with working rest, sometimes 200m hard / 200m float
What made this phase erratic were external factors; I traveled a few weekends and raced one weekend, which left me tapering before and after. Additionally, because I’d already been doing time-based Threshold sessions, I ended up getting mentally burned out of those workouts and sought other ways to accomplish that running, or just skipped those workouts altogether. I did make one massive mistake in this block, which I’ll talk about at the end of this post.
3. Weeks 13-19: This 6-week period was built for peaking. I was the most consistent, never missing a workout. The focus here was honing the anaerobic capacity and aerobic capacity through Intervals and Threshold work. Each week looked like:
1 x Interval session of 800m, 1000m, or 1200m repeats with working rest in equal time
1 x Threshold session
1 x 400m/600m Repeat volume session
1 x Long run, usually 10-12 with tempo miles interspersed
What went well
Identifying my weaknesses: Whenever I think of long term running plans for my athletes, I think of a seesaw. It helps me to gather two pieces of data on an athlete immediately: a highly anaerobic run, and a highly aerobic run. Ideally these distances are as far apart as possible; take me, for example. In May of 2023, I ran a 2:59:10 marathon, ~6:43 pace. Up to that point, I’d struggled to break 6:00 pace for a 5k. When I started 5k training, my coach and I both realized I had a lot more potential in the 5k; I was able to run 6:43 for 26.2 miles, but barely 5:59 for 3.1- miles. I was performing to my level in the marathon, but underperforming in my shorter distances, which meant with only a little work, I should be able to raise my shorter distance ability to the level of my marathon. This is exactly what happened when in less than 5 weeks I dropped my 5k time by about 25s per mile.
I applied the same concept to my mile trainup. I knew I was able to run a 1- mile in 4:58, but I could barely run 1 lap around the track at 68 seconds. I knew if I focused heavily on my anaerobic system, I could quickly get under 60s for a 400m, and since the 1-mile is ~15% anaerobic, I would see quick gains. Additionally, it would help improve my mechanics, which would lead to some faster running. My thinking here was pretty simple: how can I expect to run 70s for 4 consecutive laps if I can’t run faster than 68s for one?
For the first 5 weeks, I tried to get 50 miles a week while also running 2-4 ‘Repeat’ sessions a week. The goal was to get my 200m below 30s, so I attacked that with lots of short uphill sprints, 50m and 100m dashes with enough rest to fully recover. Although I kept poor notes, I think this was one of my smartest moves; I quickly saw my uphill sprint speed go from >4:00 to <3:45. I also put in so much volume of 200m sprints that I was able to practice accelerating quickly while also knowing exactly the leg speed and power needed to get under 30s for a 200m. When I finally did do a 400m test, I crushed it with a 56s.
The Power of a Pacer: When I first ran my 1- mile, I ran it solo on a track. As you can see from figure 1, my pacing was inconsistent. I ran a total of 4 x 1-mile trials during the 18-weeks, including my initial. Figure 2 was another un-paced trial in week 16 where I ran a 4:44. As you can see, my pace was erratic, at one point dropping to 5:11/ mile. At this point, I did a lot of research into the merits of pacing; you can read about this in my previous post but suffice it to say I knew I needed a pacer. For my last trial, I got one of my buddies on a bike to pace me, which in 2 weeks shaved off 3 seconds.
My second-to-last 1-mile time trial, run without a pacer. Take a look at that pacing; all over!
My last time trial, with a pacer. In just 2 weeks, I shaved 3 seconds. Our slowest pace was 5:01 on a windy turn. You could put a teacup on that line!
Consistency: As I said before, I’ve struggled to maintain consistency. Looking at my logs this past 18 weeks, I hit at least 1 Interval session of 800m – 1200m and 1 Repetition session of 400m-600m every week. In the 6-weeks before that, I ran at least 15 minutes of Threshold milage and 1 repetition session every week. I’d never been that consistent, and by the end of the training I felt very comfortable running 3-4 broken miles in a warmup at 5:35-5:45 pace and was able to decrease my 600m pace to 70s/400m
Journaling: You can see that when I started my 18-weeks, my journaling was poor.
Looking back, it’s hard to sort through what I was doing. I might talk about overall pace and give a general workout. I never talked about how I felt, what went right or wrong, or how I would change the workout next time.
By my last 6 weeks, I would sit down for 5 minutes the night before and write out exactly how I wanted execute the workout and how I wanted decrease in pace. I gave myself pace range and converted all the times to 400m splits so I could track it on my watch. I would then cooldown and drive home from the track without music so I could think about how the workout went. By the time I got home, I would dedicate 5-10 minutes to sit quietly and write everything about the workout: my evaluation, any pain I had, when I got fatigued, my exact lap splits, weather and humidity, and what I would change next time. Journaling helped me to be completely present in every workout and I began to look forward to that 5-minutes every day.
What Went Wrong
I didn’t set an overall goal for the block. The 1-mile focus was born out of a realization that to run a faster marathon, I would need to run a faster 5k and to run a faster 5k, I would need a faster 1-mile. I also didn’t want to eclipse 50 MPW. It wasn’t until my week 12- time trial when I ran a 4:49 that I decided to shoot for 4:40.
In the end, I think the mileage is what prevented me from meeting that 4:40 goal. Firstly, I lacked consistency in my mileage. It took me 3 weeks to build to my goal range of 45-50, but out of that remaining 15 weeks, 5 of them were under 45 MPW. Although I was certainly more consistent than I’ve been in the past, mileage unless encumbered by injury, just comes down to discipline, and I lacked the discipline in at least three of those to put in the work I needed to.
Training in sub-optimal environments: I spent a lot of the first 8 weeks doing threshold work on various long runs. The issue on all of these was elevation; I was constantly attached my 5:45 Threshold pace to routes that might have small rolling hills or long stretches on gravel or dirt. For much faster runners this isn’t a problem, but I was missing out on consistency. A 5:45 mile on 100 ft of elevation won’t produce the same amount of lactate as a 5:45 mile on flat asphalt, but I saw them as equal. It wasn’t until week 8 that I started doing my threshold work on a track. I think it made a huge difference, simply for the consistency; I was able to stay between 5:35-5:45 every mile and see and feel the difference in heart rate and Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). This helped me to judge my progress week to week rather than taking guesses at my fitness.
Kill Yourself, Rest, Kill Yourself, Rest: Going into my final 6 weeks, my training changed to 3 quality days: 1 x Interval, 1 x Repetition, 1 x Long run. Because I was taking better notes, I paid more attention to how I felt. I was going hard on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, but I thought I could inject some more speed in there, so I added a 2nd repetition session on Friday.
Mike Scanelle, whose athlete Grant Fischer medaled in both the 5k and 10k, calls this the ‘kill yourself, rest, kill yourself, rest’ method; a hard day followed by an easy day in a never-ending cycle. The problem is, for this to ever have a chance of working, you need a large aerobic base.
I ended up both a) getting sick and b) stagnating in progress. It was a good reminder that sometimes the recovery you think you’re getting isn’t what you're getting. I struggled to get my interval paces faster despite adding more training, which should have been the first sign of overtraining. I then got sick, which was textbook-signal #2. Lastly, I started to lose my appetite, especially after training. At this point, I was already at the end of my cycle, so I started to deload anyway, but it was a good learning lesson. I wear an Oura ring every night and even looking back, my HRV and resting heart rate showed no signs over overtraining.
Poor Periodization: In tandem with the above, these combined to be my #1 failure. The scientific and conventional knowledge for training aerobic events is to build a large base in milage and aerobic capacity over a long period, ideally 2/3 of your training block but sometimes even more. With that aerobic capacity, you then transition into a period of 4-6 weeks of ‘sharpening.’
How to ‘sharpen’ is up to debate and dependent on the athlete, but in general, we’re focused on anaerobic improvements through lots of VO2 Max Intervals (ie. 1200m repeats with 4-minute jogs) and 400m/600m repeats with walking or static rest. In rare cases, this chronology can be reversed, but 99% of us will see improvement through simple aerobic base building into anaerobic sharpening.
I failed in my planning because I moved too quickly into anaerobic sharpening. Although it was unintentional, you can see on Wednesday of Week 5, I did a 200m on/ 200m float where I PR’d my 2-mile. I thought this was a good footspeed workout, but in reality, it was targeting my VO2 max. The following week, I did a heavy interval workout on Monday followed by a 1200m interval workout where I PR’d my 5k at 16:50 to my surprise. I remember feeling like I was floating on both of those workouts and could have gone faster, which I wrote in my notes.
Thinking my peak was yet to come, I then did interval work for my next 12 weeks. In week 6, I ran a 5k for time and slowed to 17:00 feeling terrible the whole time. As my Interval workouts progressed, they got slower and slower while my 400m/600m workouts stagnated. The harder I pushed, the worse it got. Looking back, it’s painfully obvious that I instituted Anaerobic capacity work too early, and with such a small base, I peaked in week 6 off the small amount of Interval work I did because, with such a small base, it only took a little to push me over the edge.
Going Forward:
I’m already signed up for the Tucson Marathon in early December. Rather than do anything sexy, I’ll be taking a very basic approach to the train-up. In 14-weeks, I’ll spend the first 10 doing
2 x Marathon Pace workouts
1 x Tempo/ Fartlek
1 x long run
The last 4 weeks will include VO2 Max and Threshold work; however, learning from this 1-mile train-up, I’m willing to push this to 3 or even 2 weeks to ensure my base is higher.