“Your Brandeis “lacrosse” shorts are ideal for running. However, since you are a professional runner (the 4-minute mile) I can see that you need “special” shorts.”—My dad, in an email response to my post about needing new shorts (I find his use of quotation marks funny because the shorts literally say Brandeis Lacrosse, as well as his use of the term “professional”).
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Since I don’t have any sort of actual plan yet, and I ran yesterday, I didn’t run today. I also hadn’t heard back from my potential coach/trainer since his email response on Friday afternoon, so I figured I’d reach out to him again. Because he has not agreed to anything yet, I have edited out any possible identifying information. I sent him the following email this afternoon:
“Hey XXXXX,
Hopefully we can speak this week. I’m not sure if you read the links or not, and I realize this is, and sounds, totally crazy, but I want to see how close I can get to a 4 minute mile. When I looked at the (Unidentified School) and (Other Unidentified School) track team coach bios, yours stood out because you were a mile champion in college. I am looking for some help in the form of a training plan (ie, how should I be training and running with speed as my goal).
We could discuss this over a beer and maybe it’ll all sound a little less insane. Thanks in advance and I look forward to speaking soon.
–Paul”
I sent that email at 4:15 pm. He responded four minutes later:
“Yeah, sounds good Paul. Let’s set up something next week. We have conference this weekend so I’ll be pretty busy. But next week could work.”
I’m pretty excited because, not only does this mean I might be getting some direction and guidance on how to do this, but the guy who might be giving the guidance ran pretty close to a 4 minute mile in college. In other exciting running related news, my legs didn’t hurt today after running with the treadmill at an incline. It’s kind of big because I think this is the first post-running day on which my legs didn’t hurt. Of course, if I start seriously training with a real plan, I’m sure post-running pain will be my default setting. And crazy as this is to me, I’m starting to look forward to running tomorrow.
Maybe I can do this…
Stay tuned.
Great article!