Blake Bennions running

Ran with Bryan and Brady, 2 Nevada 800m state champion freshmen, they were in the 2 biggest divisions. Brady is my roommate and runs 1:53 and Bryan will soon hopefully be my roommate too and he runs 1:55. So we ran 3 miles up the canyon and then turned around and raced back and I got back to the track first! That was a lot of fun, my classes were good, I want to get straight As this semester! I think my online class could be challenging because its not only higher level, I've never taken an online class but I am working ahead and will read yhr text book very carefully!

Ran with Bryan and Brady again and kind of same story we went out 3 and turned back and the last 1.5ish miles we started picking it up and by the last mile or so we were racing again and I got back first again! Brady came in last and he ran 5:30 for the last mile so I went pretty darn fast :). We averaged about 6:30 for the run which is great, and the first mile of the 6 is easy so I started 7:20 and ended like 5:20 or something, maybe faster. Just a great run, I want to get do I can run under 5:00 for that last mile without trouble!

Seriously got 2 hours of sleep last night, I got in bed right when I should have but it took me 6 hours to fall asleep :(. But I woke up and went to practice and I did a super fast run, o dropped everyone in my group by mile 3 and kept going hard. We went to this giant grass loop and I didn't have a gsrmin so I was relying on other people, when I had done 2 I saw coach who was riding on his bike and I asked him how many would be 6 miles and he said to do 4 laps so I did 4 but when I got back I found out that Brian and Brady had done 2 laps and gotten 5.5 and the loop is over a mile. So I did a little more them I needed, it felt great though so its awesome! I guess all that grass running this summer payed off haha, its not as hard for me anymore. Road race is Friday so tomorrow I will take the pace a little easier. Today the last guy keeping with me said we were going sub 6:00 pace so I slowed to it like 6:20. But yeah, fast and fun run today!

Pre-race today, lots of grass running. I tried to take it easier but still did 6:20 or faster for most of it. The last mile I did easier. Afterwards we did 5x100m hard. We are being split into teams for the road race tomorrow, some people arent racing but out of the 24 guys who are, like 4 of us slowest/getting into shape runners are on the same team of the 3 haha. I don't think the guy who drafted our team is very good at of lol, we have some really good guys though and it will be a lot of fun. But the great thing is that 5 guys of 8 on each team score and my teams number 5 is wide open for someone to take. The top 4 are pretty solid, but I'm going to race hard to get the number 5 spot on our team and minimize the gap!

Another interesting thing, originally there were about 13 freshman runners and now there are 8. Of those 8 I took 5th on the progression run and one of the guys ahead of me is only doing 15 minutes per day right now, the top 3 are all pretty good so I want to catch up to them this season!

We had the road race today, pretty intense, flotrack is going to regret not ranking our team in the top 30 when they see we are even stronger than last year. Again I only got 2 hours of sleep last night, I need to stop taking naps. I forgot about one of the freshman who beat me on the progression run, so I actually took 6th out of 9th on the progression run I think, maybe i took 5th i cant remember. And today I took 6th out of 8 freshman. One of the freshman isnt much faster than me and he's straight out of high school so I know I can catch him soon, another one has lots of natural talent but is at like 2 miles a day, he trained inconsistently this year but he's been training inconsistently longer than I've been training consistently, but I know I can catch him the next time we will race at the SUU home meet. Then there are the top 3 freshman right out of high school who all put in good summer training and are really good runners. By the end of the year I want to have caught up to that group. My goal for this race was to run under 27:00 and I got really close! Especially considering I was sore and not well rested. The race is pretty much an 8k, shortened a bit to make up for altitude. Its the first time I've really run a race of this intensity over the distance of 5k so it was a good experience.

Good long run with Mark, Mark is a transfer from community college level running, he took 4th in the 10000m national championship for community college track which is awesome! We did 11 miles at an easy pace, the last 4 were on the track but it didn't seem like we were on there for that long. Running with company is always so much easier than on your own. Then after the run we talked for another hour, it was really cool to get to know him! To give you an idea of how good our team is, Mark took 10th at the road race yesterday with a 24:50. Yeah for an 8k. Hes redshirting this year too. There was a big dance thing going on across from the track, I promised myself I would never have to go to another one of those things after high school but unfortunately people still do them in college. I'd much rather be running! Pretty good day today :)! When I don't eat in the dining hall with runners I eat with the international students and that's always a really cool experience, today I found out that one of my friends from austalia ran a 1:52 800m and he's trying to get a SAT done so he can compete for our track team this spring!