The New Road

45 minute mile

I did the mile in 45 minutes this morning. Yes! My rascal scooter running on a half-drained battery rocks!

Seriously though, this was in the pool, and for me that's pretty good. I've refined my approach a little bit. Instead of looking at it as 72 laps I now look at it as 36 sets of 50 meters each. So I never do a single lap, I'm always doing a set of two. And I either do one, two, three or four of those in a row. So either two, four, six or eight laps at a time.

I'm able to keep my heart rate down by breathing more often. With some laps I breath after every stroke set, while with others I go for two stroke sets between each breath. To work the endurance there I think I'll try laps where it's 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2, then move on to 1-2-2-1-2-2, and so on. Gearing towards continuous laps where I have one breath for every two stroke sets. It's a lot faster if I can manage it.

To put this in perspective, the world record for 1500 meters (a little less than a mile) is around 14 minutes. So I'm at 3x that pace. But I also run a 10 minute mile, which is 3x the current world record of 3:43. So I think it evens out.

I definitely think I can get my time down to in the high thirties. I still have some small recoup time at the end of each lap, and at the end of each set. Plus if I can reduce the breath count and work on my form I can get the lap speed up.