Three Haikus and a One Mile Time Trial

I'm still here.

I was on vacation -- and chose not to blog (took a break from a lot of things). And now I'm back at work -- and until now haven't had time to blog (catching up on things). But now that I have room to breathe, and write, and ramp up my training -- here we go...

The One Mile Time Trial

Thank you to everyone who provided suggestions on my training. As it turned out, I didn't follow any of the plans to the letter, but wanted to single out three of you who made an effort to provide some guidance -- thus, three haikus.

First of all, for Joshua "Flash" Gordon, who provide the most detailed, and intense, training regimen. I'm sure it would been a great program, and he obviously thought about it quite a bit, but it was more than I was ready to do at the time. Thank you for your effort! Here's a haiku:

warm summer night
transformed in a flash
- clouds pour out

For Tammy, who really, really, really wanted a haiku, and put some good effort into a training schedule with lots of good supplemental exercises (plyometrics, etc.). Sorry, too many directions to go -- but here's a haiku just for you:

river surges with
summer rain cycles
- fluid power

And finally, for Love2Run, whose schedule I most closely followed, at least the beer-drinking parts! He really made the most valid point -- in one week, all I could really do is try and sharpen my leg turn-over. And that's basically what I did. I missed quite a few runs, but when I did run, I tried to put in some strideouts -- and one day I ran on some (not too steep) hills. These days, we're looking forward to another refreshing blast of cool Canadian air from the North:

coastal breeze greets
fresh canadian air
- our summer relief

And the 1 mile time trial? I delayed it from Wednesday until last Sunday. Sunday morning I did a 3 mile warm-up. First mile slow, second mile gradually speeding up (to about 9 min mile pace), and third mile with four strideouts in the first half mile (each one faster than the previous, the last going up to about 6:30 mile pace) and very easy in the second half mile. I then rested for several minutes to cool off and drank just a little bit.

I ran the mile with negative splits, each quarter faster than the previous. When I finished, I felt like I could have gone faster. My early quarters could have been a bit faster and overall I could probably have run a good 10 seconds faster. But I'm not complaining too much. My time?

6:34

Unbelievably, I actually TIED my best mile over the last 25 years. I'll be trying this again in a couple months. I should be well under 6:30 for sure -- shooting for sub-6:00.