The Renegade

Little tempo workout to get the legs ready for region. Did on the road by my house that we used all the time in track. We did a mile and a half at 6:20 pace (the whole varisty besides Jack who was ahead stuck together). Then we did a mile in 5:45, and it felt controlled, but it also felt pretty hard. I'm pumped!

Suuuuuper easy run with some strides. A lot of the other varsity runners on the team went and goofed off at a store downtown, but I just did a short easy run so I could keep my mind focused on what lies ahead.

Amazing day. This was held at the same place as Pre-Region (Cottonwood Comoplex in SLC). I'm gonna get right to it. I got 100m into the race and I was not feeling it. I felt really slow and tired and my leg didn't feel nearly as strong as it should have. Settled into it and found myself in 12th or 13th place, and I guess I just assumed that I wasn't going to move up and all these negative thoughts passed through my mind like I wasn't even going to medal and I was going to let down the team and Bear River was going to steal all the glory for the day. I stayed in this position for the first mile and a half probably, and then I decided to latch onto this Bear River kid. I was currently in 5th place for the team behind a teammate who I had always beaten. I didn't worry about that too much. I just stayed on this BR runner. Well we got to 1.8, with a mile to go and went through this little series of hills and Hayden and I passed a few guys. I could see another BR runner right ahead of this one. I decided to chase both of them. Pretty soon I had passed Hayden, the two Bear River runners, and Nate from Ben Lomond, but everybody was still closely knit together. I was hurting pretty bad but I hear Paul cheering for me and telling me I gotta want it, and that motivated me. Hit the final 500 and I only sped up. It was an exponential uphill for 200m from this point and I could tell BR was right on my tail. I hear his coach yelling at him that he needs to go hard up the hill, so I obeyed him too. Heard somone breathing on my shoulder, I look over and it's just Hayden, what a relief. We hit the top of the hill and theres this steep downhill combined with a sharp left turn, and I passed Hayden down it. We are entering the finishing stretch and Hayden moves in front of me on my right, and a Morgan runner is coming up on my left (theres a picture of me looking over with a look of horror, it's pretty funny). Happy to say I took the fear and turned it into power. Bear River kid is falling further behind us but as far as I know I had Hayden and two other runners right behind me. 100 meters left and Hayden is still pulling ahead of me, but I let out a few ferocious Grizzly roars and move cmpletley to the front of the pack with 40m to go, and stay there. By this point, according to Strava, we are at 4:17 pace. That was arguably the most adrenaline filled finish I've ever had along with the 4x800 at region track, but this time I knew we had a team title on the line. These two events have me convinced that I perform very well under pressure. Well, turns out we won by 7 points, with all 5 scorers in the top 8. Jack took second and Elliot and Austin took 4th and 5th. I've already made a decision on my game plan for State, and it is..... I am going to stick with those two no matter what. No matter what kind of pain I have to go through, not matter how much I want to slow down. I didn't run this long to get beat by two rookie seniors, they are my teammates, adn I love them, but I know that if I can cross the line in front of them or at least within ten seconds of them, I have had an insanely succesful last race. I've just gotta make sure to get rid of some mental blocks. 

Easy run with Jack, Todd, and Dallin with 5x100m on the track with Jack afterwards. Ouch my shin.

12x400 w/ 350 jogs, continually. Ran all of these in my spikes, even though I wasn't planning to, because we met at 6:30 to run these and the grass was super wet and slippery. So I guess they might have made me a bit faster, but not too much. But really, my average was significantly faster today than last week. First three wer mid to low 80's, then I ran 16s and 17s exclusivley until the last two, where I ran a 73 followed by a 65. 65 is the fastest 400 I've run since track, so that was nice. Gets me pumped for track because if I ran a 65 at the end of a workout, on grass not track, and I've had a big base since the beginning of the summer, than I could probably pull off a ~2:07 800 right now, 3 seconds off my PR, and state track is a looooong ways off. Anyways, another thing that gets me excited is that last week my average (81) was about what I ran for my last quarter at Region, so if my average was like 76-77, I bet I can close that fast at state, expecially since it ends on a downhill this year. Ran these alone because I had to stop to tie my shoe and got left behind by the other guys, but it was nice because I didn't have to compare myself to my teammates. Turns out they were running them a lot slower anyways haha. Getting more ramped up for state ever day!

Easy run up Right Hand Fork with Jack, Austin, and Keith. WE went like 10:30 pace on the way up, granted it was something like 300ft elevation gain per mile, so it GAP was in the 7s, then on the way down we ran like 8:30s, which was actually slower GAP then on the way up. The only part that wasn't competley slow was when I picked it up to 5:45 pace for the last half mile just for the heck of it. After that we went to Herm's, line was too long, stopped at Angie's, line was too long, so we setteld for Village Inn and I had a pretty dang good Cali Skillet and pancakes yummm.