Blake Bennions running

Ran up the mouth of the canyons while my dad biked. It was fun, didn't feel too fast. Did some core on the pull up bar at the park on the way home. Tomorrow is gonna hurt but I'm gonna keep up with Tayte!!

Great run with Tayte today. I actually felt really good for my first real long run, especially since we did 2k elevation gain going up little cottonwood. It was fun to catch up!

The last mile going up got pretty hard. And that same mile was pretty hard to keep with Tayte going back down cause man he's fast and incredible at the technical areas, they literally do not slow him down haha. But I did well and it was really fun! We did some core in the middle school field next to his house on the way back, I was already pretty beat so that was really good. Also really glad we got the run in at the perfect point in the day when it wasn't storming.

Now to drive down to cedar city and get my stuff from Wendas vacant apartment and move it to the apartment I was gonna live in. Wow its just started coming down really hard, looks like large hail too! So glad we went running earlier!

Yesterday was really long, after training with tayte I drove to cedar, moved in my new apartment, saw some friends and teammates and then decided to drive home and got back way too late. Today I might just rest.

No mileage today but a good day of bench, curls, rows, pull ups, back, and other stuff.

Averaged 6:32 for 6.3 miles in the high 80s/low 90s, it felt easy do it was a pretty good day. Oh and I threw in a couple quarter mile pick ups in the middle. I started with an easy uphill mile in 7:27 and accelerated to finish in a 5:39. I also stopped after 5 miles to do a good workout at the gym, I did military press, overhead press, curls, rows, a few other back workouts, and the rowing machine. Can't remember if I did anything else. But yeah it was a good workout and I felt fast today, gym felt good and I got to a lot of muscle groups. Tomorrow will be back at bench, kind of excited. I'm going to do a lot with bench. I'm excited to see where I will be at the end of July.

Ran to the rec center as a warm up and did a lot of sets of bench, free bench, squats, curls, rows farmer carry with 2 45 plates, abs, back machine, rowing machine, pull ups, more abs, who knows if missing something. Anyways then I ran down to the park and did 20 monkey bars forwards and 20 monkey bars backwards, then 10 monkey handles forward and 10 backward. Then I ran 3/4 more miles in the heat and was dead. Full workout was 2 hours, I went easier on the running and averaged 7:15 today. Still was really dead by the end there. I'm getting a healthy change up of doing the bulk of my running done before and after my lifting. It's definitely more tiring after you've already been working out for over an hour.

Evening- did push ups, abs, and tennis with my brother. Then carried a rock salt bag for over half a mile and did burpees and Wenda burpees. This weekend's sub 17:00 attempt is a little ambitious, especially because its supposed to have a decent amount of uphill and I haven't don't that much speed and haven't raced in 7 months. It will be good to ease back into things, sub 17 feels like a really good goal for this one. It feels really good having gotten all the stuff I wanted to do today finished, it was a large list! These days where I spend 3-4 hours working out give me confidence I can beat or at least with the pros at Spartan. My hands keep getting best up from all the pull ups and weights, I have gloves now but they're still being beat up. Tomorrow will be a fairly easy day where I will spend more time concentrating on gre prep and do a practice test.

3 easy prerace miles with Jake. Its been good to catch up my best friend! SUU certainly seems more empty heading into this year without him. But if I'm lucky it could be my best year yet!

One should never concentrate so much on hypothetical future events or unreachable past events that they lose sight of the present and enjoying what they have. That's some thing I need to work on, I'm always very concetrated on the future trying to achieve a specific outcome or situation I have in mind, but in reality I'm a very small piece in a giant universe and no matter what I do, things will take their course and I can't predict or even full prepare 100% for the future, and I certainly can't control it. When I look back at this last year, it was such an amazing experience with Jake and Wenda in the fall and Wenda in the spring, it was the perfect situation. Yet at the time, in the fall I was too concentrated on something I never should have let bother me, and in the spring I was too concentrated with the future of how things were going to go. I was happy but I should have spent less time worrying and thinking about things I couldn't do much about. Now it's summer, and I'm concentrating way too much on the fall and what's going to happen then. But I'm taking for granted that I get to live and spend time with my parents and my brother and his family, I can spend 4 hours a day working out and goof off a ton of the time. In 50 years I'll look back at this summer and regret not spending every possible second with my family making more memories and becoming closer to them. I need to concentrate on the people I'm with and on the present, some day I will wish I could be here again!

So the course we raced today was not conducive to a sub 17:00 attempt, apparently what used to be one of the fastest courses in Utah got turned into one of the slowest this year. They started us up a giant hill for the first mile which resulted in no one breaking 6 the first mile and being gassed for the 2nd. I took 3rd behind Jake and Ben Vanbeekum, i beat Christian Corver who is a fast guy from my graduating year who's on the byu practice squad so that was really good. And considering Jake and Ben ran 15:20 last year on what this course was supposed to be and ran 17:20 and 17:45 this year I'd say my low 18:10 wasn't too bad. I think in a flat 5k I probably could have made sub 17 considering those guys ran a full 2 mins slower on this course. And I mixed it up with some really fast guys so I'm feeling pretty good about the race despite the slow time. Not much you can do when you've got a course like that,but yeah i had a lot of fun, it took me until about half way through the race to get my legs back under me after that huge hill.