Body Work

Mission: Barely Possible Sometimes Setting an Unreasonable Goal Is the Only Way to Jump-start Your Fitness

- Charles Bethea

I WAS watching the 1,500-meter Olympic final last summer at a bar, a few months before my 35th birthday, when I first wondered if a middle-distance runner lurked within. It was a strange thought. At six-foot three and 175 pounds, I have the look of a runner but not the legs. In my early thirties, some half-assed training led to an unimpressive 22:39 5K, a 1:49 half marathon, and an almost four-hour marathon. Usually, it was a girlfriend who’d goaded me into racing. Now, in my mid-thirties, I was managing bad back pain.

Still, the mile in trigued me. It sounded short, simple. Training would take much less time than distance racing (or so I assumed). And everyone runs a marathon these days, right?

I’d never run a timed mile. Never even been on a track. My personal best in the 5K suggested that a 6:30 mile was possible, but that time would be nothing to brag about.

Sub-six seemed too pedestrian, 5:30 too random. Hicham El Guerrouj’s 3:43 world record, set in 1999, was safely out of reach. I decided to go for a sub-five-minute mile. More than 23,000 high-schoolers break five minutes annually. But at twice their age, I’d be OK with that company.

On an early August morning, at a track near my home in Atlanta, I laced up my cushiony New Balances and managed four very tiring, uneven laps in 6:19. Not bad, I thought, sprawled on the grass. But what now? A former college miler told me to “train until you can click off 74-second 400’s in your sleep.”