Sunday, July 06, 2008

Race Report: John Wall Mile

Today I ran the John Wall Mile in Severna Park, Maryland. This race commemorates John Wall, an Olympian who apparently represented the United States at the 1936 Berlin Summer Games (the games at which Jesse Owens dominated the athletics events).

This was my first actual track competition of any distance, and I was dreading the pain of running hard for a mile!

They ran the race in heats of about 20-30 runners, starting from slowest (estimated finish over 10 minutes) to fastest. I seeded myself in the 8-to-9 minute heat.


I think I did not warm up enough close to the start of the race - I walked and jogged about 1.5 miles, but cooled down while watching the heat in front of me. Once I started running it took me over half a mile for my heart rate to get up to speed. It shows my maximum is still around 185 bpm, though. I maintained a good effort level while running - I don't think I could have forced myself to run any harder today.


Finish time: 8:44. PR! I've never run an official one mile race before, so any time would have been a PR. However, it was still 11 seconds faster than my fastest-ever Garmin-timed mile at the start of a 5K.

This gives me a good benchmark to work from. Let's see if I can beat it next year! Alas, I would have to be 1:14 faster in the mile in order to meet the qualifying standard for the 2009 Summer National Senior Games (about 7:30 for the mile for age 50-54 women, that is, 7:00 for 1500m).

7 comments:

Fe-lady said...

Congrats on your fast-ness!

(it's so HARD to run in heat and humidity! Yagh!)

KLN said...

Well done!!

jeanne said...

fabulosity! i can't imagine running anything with an "8" in front of it!

Rainmaker said...

Pretty HR data smoothing ;)

(It only comes to mind because I was just talking a friend through ST tonight and how to do data smoothing).

Congrats on your newfound PR! Now time to break it!

Amytrigirl (aka Amybee) said...

Holy smokes!

Very impressive!

Formulaic said...

Great job on the mile!

I don't think I'd have the guts to enter a race for only a mile. I'd have to seed myself in the 10min/mile or I'm sure I'd throw up midway through.

It's intense!

Wrenched Photography said...

will you be at Colonial Beach Tri this weekend? I'm covering the race