How to run a perfect mile

Not so long ago I was out at lunch with a group of sporty types. They were the sort of people whose wrists jangled with an assortment of smart bands that did everything from monitoring how well they ran and slept to calculating how big their bonuses were that year.

The women had all run half-marathons at some point, while half of the male contingent were bracing themselves for an Ironman Triathlon (a 2.4-mile swim chased by a 112-mile bike ride, washed down with a 26.2-mile run). They groaned about their times as well as the litany of injuries an eight-month training schedule had given them. This was, in fact, a rare lunch outing. They should really have been pounding the pavements, then having an Epsom-salts bath.

You see, in the past few years, marathons and triathlons have been the choice of exercise for alpha types hellbent on pushing themselves to their absolute limit. Places on the most popular races are about as tricky to get hold of as an 8pm table at Chiltern Firehouse — and in some cases just as expensive. There are the punishing training schedules, and pricey kit (special Triathlon laces for your trainers? Who knew?) as well as the small issue of sidelining your social life for half of the year.

These people could have saved themselves the bother. Because for anyone in the know, the true mark of a hard-ass athlete right now is the person who braves the mile-long run. Just as HIIT training (short, intense bouts of exercise believed to force the body into a fat-burning state) has taken over from hour-long aerobic classes as one of the most efficient ways to get into shape, experts are now reviewing the significance of short, intense runs. And the mile, long associated with Roger Bannister, who became the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile, in 1954, is where the smart runners are heading.

‘The mile is a brilliant distance for everyone — mainly because anyone can do it,’ says performance coach Martin Yelling. ‘Yet it comes with its own unique set of challenges. For years, running has been about shuffling along for longer distances, but with mile-running it’s about maintaining a faster speed at a shorter distance. It takes a real physical and mental push that few of us are used to.’

Throughout the 20th century, the mile was one of the most popular runs in the world. And Britain dominated it, with Roger Bannister and Diane Leather becoming the first man and woman to run sub-four-minute and sub-five-minute miles respectively. Forty years later and Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram spent much of the 1980s passing the world record back and forth, with Cram’s time of 3.46.32 in 1985 eventually holding for eight years.

But then something happened. Running settled at either end of the spectrum, with short sprints or arduous marathons and ultra runs attracting the masses. The mile run settled into relative obscurity — until this summer, when exciting new research published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology showed that running a mile has the same mortality-lengthening benefits as a marathon. The study, which lasted 15 years and included 55,137 adults, discovered that those who ran for less than an hour a week gained the same health benefits as those who ran for over three hours a week. (Both sets of runners, incidentally, lived on average three years longer than non-runners.)

This is good news for a number of reasons. Firstly, timing. When you consider that the average Briton works 43 hours a week, who has time to run and train for a four-hour marathon (and that’s if you’re relatively quick)? A mile, on the other hand, with a ten-minute warm-up and warm-down, can be slotted into a lunch break or fitted around a weekend’s socialising with ease.

Then there’s injury. I’ll never forget a friend telling me that running a marathon was a bit like giving birth: hugely satisfying, devastatingly painful and almost guaranteed to wreck your body in about three different ways (sagging boobs being one of them, FYI).

Hollie Grant is one of London’s premier personal trainers and founder of the Model Method, a combination of HIIT, Pilates and weight training. She was a hardcore runner for years and once ran seven marathons in seven days. But then the injuries started. ‘My knees were absolutely ruined,’ she says. ‘And even now, after lots of rest and Pilates, I still can’t run for long distances.’