It was back to TC Williams HS in Alexandria today for the second day of the Potomac Valley Games. On tap today, the mile, and this was for me THE MILE that I trained for all summer long. I got there about 45 minutes before the scheduled race time and then headed out from the stadium for a warmup jog on the trail in nearby Chinquapin Park. 1.5 miles was about right, I figured, but when I got back they still hadn't even done first call for the mile yet. No big deal, I did some drills, laced up my spikes, chatted with a few of the other runners and just generally relaxed. Finally a race official showed up and started calling our names and giving us our hip numbers. The field ended up being divided into two heats and I was in the "fast" heat seeded second, which I found surprising. After the first heat concluded, I stepped out onto the track. It turned out the #1 seed didn't show up so I was in the pole position, still not sure of what kind of time I had in me. I had started the summer with a goal of training down to a 5:20 mile but had gotten nowhere close to that, my best result being a 5:49. Somewhere in the back of my mind though, I thought sub-5:40 was attainable. When the gun went off, three guys quickly surged ahead as I searched for the right pace. As I came around for 400 I felt like I was going really fast, faster than I could handle at what turned out to be 82 seconds. But I told myself it's a mile, you marathoner, just keep going hard! I hit the 800 in 2:47 and by now my legs and lungs were burning but I knew I couldn't afford to stop. Somehow I survived lap 3 and got around to the 1200 in 4:12. One lap to go, and I was reeling in the third place guy. I drew even with him with about 250 to go, and at that point I went for it. Hard. Full sprint to the finish, everything on fire inside. I crossed in 5:34, exhausted but thrilled by the performance. After some ups and downs through training, it was very satisfying to bring it at the target event. Today's mile was my fastest in at least 5 years. And yesterday's 5000 was my best 5k of this year. A good way to end and hopefully some momentum for both the fall and ultimately the big long term goal, which is a PR at Boston next spring. And so ends my summer of short speedy racing. Now it's time to go back to being a distance runner. The Prince William Half Marathon is only 3 weeks away, guess I better do some long runs!