How to lower my Mile time

I'm no expert but my plan right now is this: I have a 5k tuneup for track in 2 weeks, so right now my training is race specific for 5k, then in February I will start doing race specific work for the 2 mile, and in March when I finally start racing the mile I will start doing 400 repeats for that, and finally in April I will do 800M race specific work to get a nice peak going for league championships and hopefully prelims. Does this sound like a good plan?

XCMiler wrote:

I'm no expert but my plan right now is this: I have a 5k tuneup for track in 2 weeks, so right now my training is race specific for 5k, then in February I will start doing race specific work for the 2 mile, and in March when I finally start racing the mile I will start doing 400 repeats for that, and finally in April I will do 800M race specific work to get a nice peak going for league championships and hopefully prelims. Does this sound like a good plan?

No, it sounds like the plan of somebody who is new to the sport, impatient, and lacks understanding of what it takes to get faster in an endurance based sport. You seem to looking for people who will justify what it is you want to do. I can say with confidence based on experience that you are devoting almost all of your energy to working on your anaerobic capacity, which is fruitless. Your will make progress despite your training, due to being young and new to the sport, but you will not make the progress that is possible if you continue to waste your limited resources doing anaerobic workouts. Getting faster is an extremely simple equation for an endurance athlete that is new to the game; get out and do high level aerobic workouts without significantly dipping into your anaerobic capacity.

please give me some examples of good aerobic workouts, as I have no problems breathing doing my 2 mile run at 5k pace, or my 1 mile repeats in the 530's

Get as much volume in as possible, spread out evenly through the week, at a pace that's within about 20 seconds either way of 6:30. Ramp up to that pace during your workout, paying attention to the sensations.

For instance.

Warm up, followed by miles in - 7:00 - 6:50 - 6:40 - 6:30 - 6:30 - 6:30 - Cool down.

If you can't do that workout 3 days in a row, then back off on the intensity just slightly. The third day your legs should't feel like you have much snap, but you should be able to get through the workout. On the fourth day you rest. Then repeat another 3 day block of 5-7 miles at that pace. As you get to understand yourself better, you can cast away your watch and run by sensations, which is a much more advanced way to train. You want to slowly bring up the mileage you can sustain week in and week out at a level that corresponds closely to your threshold.

By "threshold", I refer to a specific sensation that corresponds to a fairly narrow mode of thought. That is, when right near your threshold you are forced to concentrate on the task at hand, or rather, your mind is drifting very little on anything not associated with running. You may be feel as if you could run at that pace for a very long time, even if the reality is that after an hour at that pace you would be hurting. As you increase the intensity beyond your threshold your mind goes into a form of thinking which tends towards "I'm flying...I feel good...but this pace is not sustainable too long...my legs are starting to burn a bit...etc."

I don't expect this to be of much insight to you now, but I believe you'd be well served to slightly alter your goal while running. Don't go out there so that you can run faster in the future. Get out there to find a pace that silences your mind, or what is more likely, brings your thoughts down to a minimum, such that your brain is not racing from one thing to the next. That is the higher goal of exercise, to bring our minds and our lives a greater level of serenity. It just so happens that the pace that corresponds to the mind tending towards silence also allows for maximal long term volume at training intensities that elicit substantial amounts of aerobic development.

When you are sure of the race you wish to peak at, being racing once a week at a comparable distance, and allow yourself to go all out in those races, but, and I stress, do not cut back your volume whatsoever so that you might be fresher for that race. You taper when you are ready to pop a big result, and in time you will see that only then does a taper really allow you you produce a result that is a cut above the B-level racing you had done leading up to it.