We all know what track and cross-country runners look like: lean and mean. It always needs to be said, though, that weight loss needs to stay within reason. There is being athletically trim, and then there is being unhealthily fixated on losing weight. Too much weight loss can substantially hurt your running, not to mention health in general. Another thing that can unfortunately impact your mile time is recovering from an injury.
It might take you some time to build back up to the mile time you had before if you take some time off due to an injury or something else in your life. Then we can push ourselves to reach them — and you might be thinking about how you can run a faster mile.
Then you can start thinking about ways that you can slowly improve and do a little more each workout so that you get stronger. New runners, and runners with paces in the range are, believe it or not, the most able to make huge improvements in time. The best thing you can do is run regularly.
This will help your body get used to running. You also should focus on running a mile without stopping. If you need to take multiple breaks to walk during that mile, try to lessen the time that you spend walking so that you eventually get to running a full mile without any breaks.
Because you are already at a certain level of fitness, gains in mile time are harder to come by. But there is hope! Adding new facets to your training can make stronger and fitter.
So change things up to get your mile time down. Your level of fitness usually matters more than your age or sex. A noncompetitive, relatively in-shape runner usually completes one mile in about 9 to 10 minutes , on average. Elite marathon runners average a mile in around 4 to 5 minutes. The current world record for one mile is Age can influence how fast you run.
Most runners reach their fastest speed between the ages of 18 and The average running speed per mile in a 5K 5-kilometer or 3. This data was collected in the United States in and is based on the run times of 10, runners.
Differences between the sexes can influence running pace. One of the reasons why elite male athletes often run faster times than female elite athletes has to do with muscle mass. Having more fast-twitch muscles in the legs can result in a faster speed.
But at a longer distance, women may have an advantage. One large study found that, in a marathon, non-elite men were more likely than women to slow their pace throughout the race. In a distance run, pace is important.
Pace, or the number of minutes it takes to run one mile or kilometer, can influence how fast you complete the run. Most of the research to date has used beetroot juice. However, researchers are unable to determine the exact amount that people need to consume to perform better. Researchers agree that athletes can easily include 5—9 millimoles of nitrates in their daily diet, although there is currently a lack of evidence to suggest that this will result in better exercise performance.
Researchers have been working with elite athletes to break the 2-hour marathon time. They have studied other factors that may improve running economy, such as:. Researchers suggest that wearing running shoes that are g lighter, alternating between leading and drafting behind other runners, and racing on a course with a meter elevation drop could make it possible to run a marathon in under 2 hours. Another study tested the theory that people run faster while listening to music, which can influence both movement tempo and motivation.
In the study, the researchers asked recreational runners to run to exhaustion on a treadmill under three sets of conditions:. The researchers believed that motivational music with a tempo equivalent to a faster running cadence would have superior effects, compared with just a metronome beat.
However, the findings did not support this belief, with time to exhaustion being consistent across the metronome and music conditions. Runners ran for more time under both of these conditions than under the control condition. However, by boosting mood and arousal levels, motivational music may help people feel less pain and fatigue when running, allowing them to last longer before they reach exhaustion.
People can try listening to music during their training to help motivate them to run faster. By choosing motivational music with a beat that matches their preferred cadence, the person may run more efficiently. People who want to improve their average mile time can do so by training. Including endurance training, hilly workouts, and high intensity interval training in an exercise schedule can help a person improve their average mile time.
Some research indicates that including caffeine and nitrates in the diet may help with running performance. A person should be careful to take these substances at the appropriate time for their effects to influence running performance.
Besides training and supplementing the diet, other factors may also help, such as running with a tailwind and on a downhill course. People may also wish to invest in a lighter pair of shoes, which can improve running economy. The same differences show up in other training variables.
Of the roughly to training hours that milers rack up annually, 90 percent of them are running, with the rest focused on strength and power, drills, plyometrics, and stretching. For meter runners, it can be as little as hours, with just 70 to 80 percent of those hours spent running. One of his key insights: across endurance sports, elite athletes tend to do about 80 percent of their training sessions at low intensity and just 20 percent at high intensity. Milers seem to follow that rule, but runners do just 60 to 70 percent of their sessions at low intensity.
That said, their high-intensity sessions include lots of jogging, so if you look at the total time spent in different zones rather than the total number of workouts, even runners spend 90 percent of their training time at low intensity.
Haugen and his colleagues propose two scales: a detailed nine-zone scale for when you need that extra push over the cliff, and a simplified five-zone scale. You can read the full details here , but the basic five-zone structure is as follows:. How you put these ingredients together in a coherent training plan is where things get really tricky.
The paper has a nice table defining the various workout types you might use, to help clarify the characteristics and purpose of things like anaerobic threshold intervals and lactate tolerance training; another nice table outlining the historical progression of concepts like interval training, periodization, and polarized training; and some sample training weeks from champion athletes.
What none of the theory can tell you, though, is what it feels like to race a mile.
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