1.5 mile Run for Army in 11 Minutes

Hi, nice newsletter by the way, I was wondering if you could help me. I have never been a runner but have decided on joining the British Army.

I need to be able to run 1.5 miles in under 11 minutes for assessment. I am currently doing it in 13.30.

Are there any tips that would help me gain on that time? I am running around 2 miles four times a week, but just can't seem to get any faster.

A reply would be much appreciated.

Tony

Answer by Dominique:
Hi Tony,
Thanks for your running question.

Well done on running four times a week. That's a fantastic commitment. Shaving off two minutes is quite a bit, but we have room to improve and nothing is impossible.

A few ideas to improve are:

1. Increase your mileage
2. Add some quality work

Increase Your Mileage

Running two miles four times per week is a good start. I am not sure how long you have been doing this. But if you have been doing it for a longer time, then your body has probably gotten quite used to this routine, meaning that your performance will not improve much anymore.

An optimal 1.5 mile running program would get you to run more. A 1.5 mile run test is a test of endurance and speed. You want to build up that endurance through a lot of easy, slow, but longer runs.

So, what I recommend you do is to increase your mileage. Why? Well, just imagine you'd be able to run five miles. Or more. How easy would a 1.5 mile run be then? Even when you try to run it faster, you will feel stronger, it will take longer for the run to get really hard, you might have some capacity left for a sprint to the finish... You really want to build that endurance as an absolute priority. Learn more about this on my base building page.

When increasing your mileage you increase the risk of injury, so make sure you do it safely. Don't just go from 2 miles per run to 10 miles per run in a couple of weeks. Add 0.5-1 mile to some of your runs steadily. Also see my page about increasing mileage safely.

Add Some Quality Work

Given your limited running experience to date I think that you'd benefit a lot already from only increasing your mileage, not increasing your pace (in your training runs).

So, I'd first focus on building up that mileage, keeping almost all your runs at an easy pace.

As mentioned before, the 1.5 mile run is a test in endurance AND speed, so after building up the mileage, let's start adding in some quality work, i.e. faster workouts.

Just like with adding miles, when you are adding intensity, you are increasing your injury risk. So, be sensible in how you approach it. Here's an idea for a few progressively harder workouts you could do that add some speed to your running:

1. Strides - add some strides to the end of some of your easy runs. The great things about strides is that you are adding speed, without making it feel like an intense workout.

2. Fartleks - fartlek is Swedish for speed-play. An easy way to implement a fartlek is to use landmarks on your run, e.g. pick up the pace until the end of the street, then run slowly for a bit, then run faster to the next lamp post, slow down a bit, run faster until you have passed five pedestrians, etc. Check out my fartlek workouts page for more info.

3. Other interval type workouts - after having built up your confidence with faster running through strides and fartleks, it is time to "graduate" to intervals, tempo runs and goal pace type workouts. A good combo page that brings all of this together is my running workouts page.

Just to summarise, running is a fairly simply endeavour. Run easy most of the time. Build your mileage. Add some speed. Good things will come.

Hope this helps you get to your goals.
Best of luck with the running training.
Kind regards,
Dominique

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