Be honest. Do I have any chance of breaking 5 for the 1600 in a year's time?

You can definitely break 5 in a year’s time, as I had similar PRs to you as you do right now last year (5:26 1600m and 11:39 3200m, but the 11:39 was an out of nowhere fluke, was mainly running 12+) , and now I am a 4:50 miler and 10:20 2 miler. And I am no middle distance runner, long distance is more my style. (Im slow with a 2:15 800m and 62 400m). For me, it took a slow but steady build up through the summer to 60 miles per week, and 50-60 miles per week throughout the winter and this spring with additional quality thrown in to increase the intensity.

For lack of better terms, you can do it, but it will likely require immense drive and consistency to reach your goal, as improving my running has been a massive part of my life over the past year.

Your 2:30 800 time is pretty slow. You’ll probably want to be sub 2:18 to have a realistic shot at sub 5 for 1600

Need more speed wrote:

Your 2:30 800 time is pretty slow. You’ll probably want to be sub 2:18 to have a realistic shot at sub 5 for 1600

Thats beside the point. Its not like he’s running into innate speed problems here to run a 2:18, its that he doesnt curently have the aerobic conditioning. That can easily be improved in his case, making it likely he can go sub 5 in a year

Yes with proper coaching and training yu will run 4:56 your senior year. I ran 21:1X my freshman year and by junior year ran 17:48/4:56. Run hard and you can do it... or better.

OP - For many reasons (some of which have already been posted), I feel 90% confident that you could go sub-5 in a year's time, even with a minor injury, if you work up to 50 mpw.

If I saw your 100m, 200m, or 400m ability/times, I think I could bump that percentage higher.

I have only ever run the 100m, 200m, and 400m during practices for fun. If I recall correctly, my best times are 13.4, 26.8, and 59 seconds, respectively.

Obvious! wrote:

Runs like 29's at a crappy college wrote:

Sub 5 is not like a ridiculous time that only genetics can achieve, most healthy males could get close if they trained hard enough for long enough.

OP, more likely than not is a female.

Clearly OP is a guy, he refers to his team which has 4 other male runners read the whole thing again.

Besides, 5:28 would be a pretty fast time for a high school girl running low miles so if OP was a girl this post would not have been created

Just thought I would give everyone an update. Tonight we had our final meet of the season and I achieved personal bests in both the 1600m and 800m with times of 5:27 and 2:26, respectively. Now I can begin ramping up my mileage in preparation for Cross Country in the fall. I have a good feeling about senior year.

You can definitely break 5 off of the weekly milage you are doing. You need to increase the paces of all of your runs. For an event like the 1600, quality is more important than quantity. A good workout is 8x400 @ 5:00 pace. Build up to maybe 10 or 12. During the season when I first broke 5, we would do 1000s @ 1 minute slower than current mile pace (if youre a 5:20 guy, the 1000s would be at 6:20 pace) and 400s @ goal mile pace. This was my freshman year. This training worked really well, as my goal was to run 4:58 and ended up running 4:46 by the end of the season. Good luck.

Update:

I averaged 30-35 miles per week last summer and on into XC season. During the season, I ran 18:44 twice on what I would consider fairly difficult courses.

I also ran 18:07 at a turkey trot after the season was over.

Since then, I've been on a fairly steady diet of 35-40 easy miles per week. I've even done as much as 45-50 miles a couple of weeks. I've done no speed work with the exception of 8-10 x 100m strides once or twice a week.

This past Tuesday, we had a 1600m time trial to kickoff official team practices, and I ran 5:15.

For some reason, I finished with way too much in the tank. Aerobically, I felt as though I had a lot more to give, but my legs simply weren't used to sustaining that pace for several minutes.

I feel confident that, with some workouts under my belt, 5:00 will be achievable this season.

You certainly will get down to sub 5 by May with workouts. I ran 5:17 early in January during my freshman year and ended up getting to 4:35 by the end of track. Good luck!

Update:

We had our first meet today. It was something of a rust buster. I ran three events:

3200m - 11:07.93

1600m - 5:12.64

800m - 2:21.43

Wow! Three PRs in one meet and off of fairly low mileage during the winter! I definitely think that 5:00 is achievable on fresh legs if I get placed in a heat with other people who can run that time. I was in the second heat of the 1600m (first heat was the fastest), so my competition wasn’t stellar. I also believe I’m cabable if a lot better in the 3200m. My pacing was really crappy today. The whole field took off at sub 10 pace, and I got pulled through the first lap in 75-76 seconds! (I had been hoping for an 82.) I ended up beating all but 5 of them though. I must have passed 10-15 people in the last 800m.

That’s awesome, man! I didn’t go through all the posts but seems like you’re definitely gonna run sub 5. Your PRs are really similar to what I ran during my junior year. I started off running 5:10 and got down to 4:58 in May. I think once you get into championship season and start running with a whole heat of guys aiming to run under 5, you’re gonna start seeing a lot of improvement. Do you know what your splits were when you ran that 5:12?

short shorts and shorties wrote:

That’s awesome, man! I didn’t go through all the posts but seems like you’re definitely gonna run sub 5. Your PRs are really similar to what I ran during my junior year. I started off running 5:10 and got down to 4:58 in May. I think once you get into championship season and start running with a whole heat of guys aiming to run under 5, you’re gonna start seeing a lot of improvement. Do you know what your splits were when you ran that 5:12?

I do, in fact.

1:17.422 (1:17.422) 2:36.743 (1:19.321) 3:57.660 (1:20.918) 5:12.637 (1:14.978)

Thank you for your encouragement. I'll be racing the 1600m first in our next meet (3200m was first today), so I think I'm going to lay down a 75 for my first lap and do my best to just hold that pace to the finish.

I feel really bad for you. Your training is not to be mean, but terrible. Bump up the mileage to 35 miles and you should improve. Add speed work on your own such as 400s and 800s. A long run would also help. Just keep working hard and you can do it.

I think you have a sub-5 in you for sure. With doubling back from a 3200 at that pace I bet you could do it if you were fresh and paced optimally.

Good Luck!

Thanks. That's good to here. Congratulations on your recent sub-5, by the way!

I came into HS with a mile PR of 6:27 and graduated with a PR of 4:32. Crazy things happen

Sub5Hopeful wrote:

think about it wrote:

i believe the common wisdom is to increase mileage by no more than 10% in a week. so from 30 mpw you could safely bump up to 50 mpw in 2 to 3 months. but at that point it's really important that you're paying attention to good form and having the rigth shoes, etc or injuries are sure to follow.

can you describe the kind of workouts you're doing, or what an average week looks like?

An average week with no meets looks like this:

Monday: 5.5 miles at about 7:20 pace

Tuesday: 5km tempo run on the track at 1:36 per lap/20 minute finish time

Wednesday: 16×200m, each one in 33 seconds or less with a jogging rest

Thursday: 12×400, each one in 1:25 or less with a jogging rest

Friday: 8 miles at about 8:00 pace on a very hilly route

Admittedly, I am just perusing this thread, but I just saw this sample training week. Couple of things..... Little too much quality. Your 200s and 400s have quite a bit of volume for your level of ability. I would do less volume and focus on keeping the rest short and active (very specific). Eliminate one of those faster workouts and do the other one the following week. You need to just run more. The 1500m (1600m in your case) has increasingly been shown to be more aerobically dominated than we once thought. For a 5:00 1600m you need to get more aerobically fit. Your speed is probably not your limiting factor, but rather the breakdown of your efficiency over the course of the 4 laps. That's an issue of general endurance. You spend a lot of time each week doing fast work but the back-to-back workouts will wear you down over time. Being tired going into workouts will also prevent you from doing faster running with "skill" which also impacts teaching your body to be efficient over the course of 4 laps.