Yesterday I ran a 6’37” mile. This is my fastest mile ever. It was the third of the “magic mile” runs in Galloway’s marathon training program. These runs are three weeks apart, and each run is seven miles total, during which you run one mile about as fast as you can. Each time you do this, you are trying to beat your previous magic mile time. After three or so of these, multiplying your time by 1.3 is supposed to give you a fairly accurate estimate of the pace you can successfully take on the marathon. It’s basically a time trial with a special calculation Galloway has worked out to help runners plan their training.
I used Galloway’s calculator here. It suggests that I could run a 3:45 marathon, or an 8:36 min/mile pace, which incidentally is exactly what I have been training for. *
Meanwhile, I ran my fastest mile ever! My first magic mile was about 7:20 (this is an estimate, since I got confused trying to track the pace). My second was closer to 7:04. So I improved in the second one by 16+ seconds, and yesterday I improved by an additional 27 seconds. Yee haw!
*Though not what I’m presently intending to go for on December 4th. More about that another time.