In middle school, I ran a 6:05 mile. Who cares. What matters is, I haven’t beaten it since I got out of school or since “I got older”. About 4 years ago I set out to try to beat the record again, I ran 3 miles every other day for a while (not long enough apparently) and only got to a 07:40 time. I thought I was going to have a heart attack, it was bad.

Since then, my wife bought me a Nike+ ipod which keeps track of how incredibly non-moving I am. I run maybe once every two weeks on average (more in the summer and spring) and my pace is right around 9 minutes. It doesn’t help to have a desk job etc.

This week I took a week off work, I decided to get some things done (buy a suit for a trip, build a new server, get my car inspected, etc) and also try “unemployment”. It’s good. I’ve been recently running everyday and my times have sorta come down consistently (above just shows distance). Today I didn’t pace myself right and ended up not tired enough with a slow time. It’s definitely easier even after just four days of running 2.7 miles every day. A few days ago, I went running and left Tim knocking at my door (oops). The morning runs seems to leave me very, very sweaty afterwards. I don’t know if it’s a lack of food or if I’m just not used to the morning runs.

But one week isn’t going to cut it. The instant gratification culture of today doesn’t mean jack to the human body. It needs more than a week’s worth of work and a blog post. So here I am trying to beat 06:05, which is a lofty goal. First, I need to calibrate my ipod on a real track. The ipod lets you job a mile and declare that “an official mile” for calibration purposes. Since school is out, I think I can find a track to calibrate it on. I forget if my old high school still has a mile track (it’s been a while).

So what do you think? Is a 31 year old in moderate shape able to run 05:59? I wonder how long it will take to get there. Three months? A year?