OK, so I understand that running a mile in 7 minutes is pretty mediocre.
But occasionally I hear that some people on the forums ( this is anecdotal, of course) claim "Yeah, it took me about 20 miles a week for 6 months to run a mile in 7 minutes."
But even...running a 7 minute mile in 2 months, off 9 MPW is completely normal, right? I mean, you can't tell if someone is talented or anything unless they ran a 5 minute mile off of 9 MPW.
That seems generally pretty normal, knowing nothing else about your age or activity history (or even your gender). For example, in 5th grade I ran a 6:31 off 3 weeks of training 1 MPW (just running a mile as fast as possible once a week). Doing that on hardly any running training sounds like great talent, but in HS, I ended up as nothing special (4:43). In 5th grade, however, I had already been playing soccer for several years which certainly made me more trained beforehand than the average 5th grader. Guessing talent/results off of a few weeks of training will only lead to making wild projections that are almost certainly inaccurate, so give it a few months, as it seems like you're progressing alright.
I think most of us ran under 7 off nothing as kids. For adults getting into running i imagine you would need to run a bit
I'm a 24 year old, 5'11" 120lb guy. I exercise sporadically, running a few times a week in the past couple months. But couldn't being underweight make a me a lot slower/weaker, as well?
I agree, yes, baseless speculation doesn't mean a whole lot.
is there something making you be underweight, or are you choosing that?
Lol why would I choose to be underweight? I'm not consuming enough calories though
I think if you run 5-10 miles per week, about half of that being strides, and are a male between 14 and 40, otherwise healthy, all other things being equal, you should be able to gut out a 7 minute mile within a couple months... Likely sooner. If you train 20 miles per week, you should be able to do it off the couch in about a month. A 7 minute mile indicates a certain level of strength, not necessarily endurance. I ran a 5:45 or so in 8th grade off of no training or sports, but I was pretty physically strong from doing odd labor jobs over the summer time. I felt like death during and after. But the fact is I had no cardio training.
The first time I ever tried to run farther than 600 yards for time was as a high school freshman (girl). I ran a mile in about 8 minutes on the first try. It took me almost a year to get down below 7 minutes, but I was running only 1 mile per week, as hard as I could.
I eventually ran a 2:43 marathon at age 33, but I never did get my mile time much below 5:30.