"Magic mile" run

Today I had a short run instead of the usual weekend long one, which was good, because it's a packed day. I was supposed to run an easy mile to warm up and then run a hard, faster mile and time it. So I did my usual run 4/walk 1 pace for the first mile, and then I ran for the full second mile, which turned out to be not difficult to do at all -- I actually felt pretty good running without stopping, except that it's a little boring. My time on the mile was 8:35 but I realized after I got home and re-read the magic mile information page that I wasn't running as hard as I should have; you're supposed to finish so tired that you couldn't have kept the pace going for even another hundred yards. I definitely had at least that much in me.

I don't usually have any kind of a consistent pace to my running, so for the first couple of weeks of this, being told "easy run" and "hard, fast run" was a bit of a joke. But I'm getting regular enough in my running that I'm finding it hard to slow down when it tells me to go below my race pace, and I don't know how to push it to the limit, either. I knew I was going faster than usual, and for the first quarter mile it felt tough. But once I got moving I really could have gone harder.

The other difficulty I ran into was the course. I didn't want to drive over to the high school to use the track (which is probably occupied on a Saturday afternoon anyway) and there was NO way I was going to do this on the elevated track at the gym, which is boring as all get-out. But I'm supposed to find a flat stretch. So I ran the flattest portion of the Huckleberry Trail, but it's only truly flat for (it turns out) 0.85 miles, so I had to do an abrupt about-face late in the run and the GPS was slow to record it -- so I might actually have run a bit more than a mile. It would definitely screw up the results if I kept running on the trail; the next 100 yards or so is very abruptly, steeply uphill. (When I got home, the mapmyrun data said that there'd been a 40 foot descent and climb on the portion I did run, and I couldn't figure that out at all, because surely I'd have noticed that much of a hill? I finally realized that their data shows the natural contours of the land, which is what the roads follow; the trail is built up above the land for the first mile, with a bridge high over the road!)

The good news is that I now have a baseline "magic mile" for the Jeff Galloway site. At this pace for the magic mile, I'm predicted to finish a marathon in 4:52, which assumes a race pace of 11:10 per mile. That's right on target for the five hours I estimated for the registration.