Sara Hall on her way to a 4:31 and earning $10,000
May 2011
Foto Friday
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Category Archives: Mile
TC 1 Mile – Tomorrow
If you haven’t heard yet, tomorrow is the TC 1 Mile and the USA Men’s and Women’s 1 Mile Road Championship in downtown Minneapolis. The first wave of runners heads up Nicollet Ave at 6:50pm with the Championship waves scheduled for 7:53 (women’s) and 8:03 (men’s).
This is always a great event and is the 2nd largest road mile in the country. When I last ran it in 2009, David Torrence broke the 4 minute mark and won $10,000. This year, marathoner Ryan Hall will be competing and will try to break the 4 minute barrier. It should be a fun race to watch! (Has he run a 4:01 or 1500m equivelent? or did he get an invitational entry?) His wife Sara Hall will be competing as well in the women’s race. She is a favorite to win, while Torrence is hoping to win his 3rd straight championship.
No matter what happens, it should be another exciting night on the Mall!
The 2008 race wasn’t quite as exciting!
Quarter-Mile Speed Test
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How fast can you run a 1/4 of a mile, 400 meters, or once around the track? My 400 meter PR is 52 seconds which I obtained in the last race of my college career in the middle of an 800 during a 4×800 meter relay, the second 400 didn’t go quite as well! If I had been able to continue that pace it would have been a 3:28 mile!! Or a 1:30 marathon. That would be amazing, too bad I couldn’t even hold it for a second 400 meters!
The current marathon world record is 2:03:59 by Haile Gebrselassie which is a 4:43 mile or a 70 second 400. The current 100 meter world record is 9.58 held by Usain Bolt, this is a 2:35 mile pace or 1:07:19 marathon, impressive!
What’s the point of all these numbers? A writer for the Star-Tribune decided to try and match Jason Lehmkuhle’s Boston Marathon pace (5:03) for 400 meters. Lehmkule ran a 2:12:24 for ninth place. Can you run a flat out 5:03? My TC 1 Mile time is 5:26 from last year, so I couldn’t even keep up with Jason for a mile. So Lehmkule’s average 400 meter time was 75 seconds. The Strib writer, Michael Rand (athlinks), ran a 76 second quarter and was in his own words “spent”.
It was an interesting experiment that shows how amazing the elite runners really are. Rand is in training for a marathon and has a PR of 4:30. I like what he says:
I could not quite even run 1 percent of a marathon distance at a world-class pace — let alone conceive of actually running the other 99 percent or so that fast.
How far can you run at a world class pace?
Be sure to check out the full article and video.
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TC 10 or 26.2
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A few weeks ago I ran the TC 1 Mile race in Minneapolis which is hosted by the Twin Cities Marathon as part of their annual series of events. Part of the deal is that every 1 mile runner is put into a drawing for a guaranteed TC 10 mile entry.
You see the 10 mile race takes place on the same morning of the marathon, but has a lottery entry system which caps at around 6,000 entrants. To encourage runners to compete in the 1 mile and the 10 mile they offer 1,000 guaranteed entries to the 10 mile race drawn at random from the 1 mile finishers. This year only about 2,300 runners finished the 1 mile race which means almost 50% of the field received entry into the 10 mile. Including me.
This was the e-mail I received on May 12:
Congratulations on being one of the 1,000 randomly drawn finishers to receive a guaranteed entry to the Medtronic TC 10 Mile! We’d like to offer a special ‘thank you’ for joining us on a beautiful May 7th evening for a great downtown race, and hope the excitement of two national championship races and a sub-four minute mile is still high.
Sadly, all TC Marathon, Inc entries are non-transferable, including this guarenteed entry. Don’t worry, even with this entry you still get to pay the full $60 plus processing fees to race.
Even with this “great prize” I decided to get an e-mail that said this:
Congratulations! You are officially registered for the 28th annual Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon on October 4, 2009.
So I have officially registered for the 2009 Twin Cities Marathon, which is currently just over 75% full (pdf).
[tags] Twin Cities, Marathon, Twin Cities Marathon, 1 Mile, 10 Mile [/tags]
Race Review: 2009 TC 1 Mile
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The mile is an interesting race for a post-collegiate, non-elite runner. You don’t really do much “race specific” training for that distance. Training for a 5k doesn’t even compare for training for a mile, let along half-marathon training! Yet, on May 7th I lined up with about 2,100 other runners and raced 1 mile down Nicollett Mall in downtown Minneapolis.
The multi-wave start meant that there were probably closer to 20-50 runners in my wave – the USATF-MN Team and Open Wave which went off at 7:53pm. Over an hour after the mass wave. I probably should have raced with my age-group so I would have had more competition around me and wouldn’t have gotten passed by a swarm of almost sub-elite women!
This year’s TC 1 Mile also served as the US 1 Mile Championship, featuring runners like Shannon Rowbury, Sara Hall, Jon Rankin and David Torrence.Torrence actually broke 4:00, winning $10,000 and Rowbury missed her money mark by 2 second running a 4:30. Both were great races to watch. I did see Ryan Hall right after the elite women ran by, but he was on his way to see Sara so I didn’t stop him. This also means Flotrack was there so be sure to check out their coverage.
My official finish time of 5:26 is a 1 second PR over last year’s performance so for that I should be happy. I am pleased with that. Asked about my expectations I said “I’m not as fresh as I was last year, but I’ve done more speed work. So somewhere between 5:15 and 5:30.” I hit that pretty well.
I began feeling by quads about a 1/4 into the race – maybe at the top of the initial incline, and maybe because of my 1:17 split. A little aggressive but I was trying to take it out a little easy! My body quickly reacted to the pain of moving so fast and then my mouth became really dry and my throat started to burn. It was 74, dry, with a slight cross-breeze. I came through the 1/2 mile in 2:39 having run a 1:22 second 1/4. I really struggled to keep myself together passing through a ton of cheer zones and cheering people. Half-way through and feeling it. The third 1/4 was 1:26 and the flow of passing women had stopped except for this one wearing green. We ran past 3 guys wearing full green suits who let out a huge cheer and screamed for her. We fought back and forth for most of the rest of the race until I dropped the hammer (albeit a small one) for a final surge into the finish. My last 1/4 was 1:19. For a 5:26 official time.
My throat continued to hurt until mid-day on Friday. We were all coughing and hacking for the rest of the evening we spent relaxing downtown.
Here is a map of the course which is mostly downhill but as you can tell with the below elevation chart it isn’t exactly all downhill. According to my Garmin it does have a net elevation loss of 6ft!
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Updated: In the comments Nathan disputed the elevation data from my Garmin. So I looked at MapMyRun.com’s data for the mile stretch and it looks pretty similar. Here is a chart I created from their information.
Check out the Twitter tag #tc1mile for more fun. And @tcmarathon for more information about TC Marathon related events.
[tags] TC1Mile, TC 1 Mile, Mile, Hall, Rowbury, Road Mile, Torrence, Minneapolis, Nicollett Mall [/tags]