Miles and miles

Miracle Mile in Daytime
(Wiki Commons)

There are all sorts of miles. Miracle Miles. Longest Miles. Green Miles. Miles to go before I sleep. And Magic Miles. Clearly, not all of them are 5,280 feet in length. Not all of them can be easily visited. Not all of them are our own cup of tea. Still, the mile continues to hold a special allure in literature, film, song and sport. Even in a world where eventually all of us are doomed to measure distance in kilometers. No matter how prevalent the metric system becomes, there will be those who will forever hold onto the nostalgia that is the mile. Indeed, they will bring it back from the dead, if needs be. The mile will forever continue to be magic. Take yesterday's, for example.


The timelapserunner has written before on the Galloway idea of the Magic Mile - a method for predicting marathon pace based on completion time from a carefully prepared individual mile run. At that writing, it was all future-talk and plans. As of yesterday, we've added existential input to our collection of information.

LSU Mississippi River Levee Access
(Courtesy Google Maps)

The training schedule calls for three of these Magic Miles: November 10th, December 1st and December 22nd. In addition to the measured mile run part of that workout, each of those workouts would include 4 or 5 additional miles of easy running. Given the need to put a total workout together around the Magic Mile run, the timelapserunner had planned on trying to find road races of a suitable length in which he could both run that mile AND complete the needed weekend workout. That's not so easy to do.

Instead we found a great substitute: the Mississippi River levee, near the LSU area. Turns out that the levee has a nice asphalted jogging / biking path that heads both north and south from the LSU location. Even better that than, if one selects the right portion of that path one can get an entire mile run in without any major change in elevation or direction. That's about as good as it gets for finding a course with a great one-mile stretch within it.

After a 10 minute or so warm-up, the timelapserunner pressed the "begin lap" button on his Garmin and headed south down the levee path in brisk fashion - perhaps a bit too brisk to start. Glancing at the watch and seeing a pace that began with the number "6," we backed off a bit and completed the run in a very nice 7:48 timing - not far off from the 7:50 predicted by one of those online calculators from our October 2011 5K PR time.

So, we survived Magic Mile one. The idea is to try to go a bit faster each of the next two tries. We'll see. This one felt pretty fast to me.

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For you music fans that prevail against the long odds of slogging through posts here, we present for your pleasure a cool tune (see lyrics on the YouTube page) by Circa Survive ... The Longest Mile.