5m15s - 0.6 miles

Having poured over the handy route planner on realbuzz.com - I worked out a shorter route so I can run for 5 minutes a day. It's a little over half a mile, and I made it in a little over 5 minutes. If only I could keep that pace up (8m20s per mile) - that would be a marathon in 3h50m!!!

How does anyone manage to run a mile in 4 minutes?!

Realistically - running a fast mile is not a real indication of running over distance.
But this website has an algorithm which predicts the kind of time you can do in a long race given a fast mile time. This would suggest that if I can do an 8 minute mile in fast training that I would be on target to run a ~10½-minute-per-mile marathon, with a finishing time of a little over 4½ hours. That's a very encouraging target to aim for. I'll have a better idea of how achievable that is when I start training in earnest! For the time being I'm still in the "getting fit" stage, so none of the timings I'm making at the moment matter much, it's just a way of seeing if I'm improving from when I started out at the beginning of the month.