Couch to 60s 400m

Good place to start.

http://www.brianmac.co.uk/sprints/tp400.htm

I found good advice in "Gold Rush" by Michael Johnson.

This is an excellent beginners article. It can help you get up to speed. I did only 6 second hill sprints to start, and it got me back into sprinting shape quickly. After that, you can look into more 400 specific training.

http://www.active.com/running/articles/beginner-s-guide-to-running

ares wrote:

Can someone suggest a training schedule for reaching this goal?

My background:

male, mid twenties, 5'10, 155lbs. Didn't do any sports in high school and college but I'm not completely out of shape, have hit the gym and jogged 1-2 miles occasionally in the last 12 months.

Do you have a time of a 400m you recently ran to tell us what time you are currently at?

Thanks for the resources everyone.

I've tried to go quick only once so far and it was about 110 seconds. The laps I'm running are on grass and there's some uphill and downhill involved, a few meters of elevation, so imagine on a track I'd probably be quicker.

A related question: I've started to get some IT band pain on the outside of one of my knees, what's the recommendation for dealing with that? Just keeping on or resting for a week?

run as fast as you can for 400m, 60s should be easy for everyone

I'm sure this is a troll, but, if not... You have no chance. 1:50 seconds? Should have used something more reasonable as bait for this troll. 1:25 maybe would have been believable and pulled in some serious responses.

2/10

Other than the Olympics, I think they ran mostly ran the 440 in the 60s :)

I like the goal a lot though! A 60 second lap is a nice running benchmark to check off for the average Joe (despite not being on the radar of the typical jogger or fitness buff).

That is a good goal.

If you can run sub-60 you can go to your local track and be instantly worshipped as a god. Even the faster distance runners will interrupt their 5-minute 1600 repeats to stare in awe as you breeze past them. If you time it right, they won't even know you only did one rep. They will wonder if it was maybe the 10th rep and they are in the presence of a national elite. You can reinforce the illusion by doing a long cooldown afterwards.

And you can tell average people that your sub-60 means you are close to running a 4 minute mile, and they will believe it. In fact you won't even have to tell them, they will figure out for themselves and be amazed.

milljum wrote:

run as fast as you can for 400m, 60s should be easy for everyone

It's probably easy for any serious runner of any distance, but, it's not easy at all for the average non-fat relatively untrained person without a high school/college sports background.

Amazing how bad people are at estimating averages when they belong to a subgroup whose average is non typical.