First, a commute run: 3 miles up to campus (longer way than normal, because I hate partial miles). Because I'm crazy and have a super thick/stiff new pair of raw jeans to soften up, I wore them while running. Also, wearing a backpack with wallet/phone/keys/running shorts/watch for my run later. No watch, wanted it to be easy, which is hard to do on a several mile uphill when you pay attention to pace. Next: 9 miles home via shoreline. My building up to JCC, up dry creek, to the 5 way, down to city creek meadow the non-shortcut way, down to city creek, through memory grove, back up 4th. Ran easy to JCC (.7), then tempoed moderately hard to the 5-way (a little under 4 miles with a lot of uphill) in 28:13. The fastest time I had ever heard of was Adrian Shipley's 28:40 last year and I ran this wearing a backpack full of a several pound pear of super heavyweight jeans, wallet, keys, phone, etc (at least 5 pounds). Adrian wasn't training for 10k stuff when he ran that 28:40, but it was right around the time he ran sub-4 hours for the very slow Bonneville Shoreline Marathon, putting him in very elite local Utah trail territory (the Speedgoat 50k record holder before Kilian showed up just barely broke 4 hours at Shoreline in a few tries, same with Karl Meltzer). In any case, I'm really happy about how fluid that 28:13 felt and I think I can run sub-27 if I'm not wearing a backpack and I'm pushing all out. After that, I picked up the effort and got down to city creek in 45:33 total (I think Adrian hit 48:xx last year). Along the way, I hit a fastest split of 5:33 (downhill, but on quite rocky trail), so I was going hard. Shortly before the end of the trail, it's too steep downhill to tempo, so I started into marathon effort. This netted me 6:02 pace through Memory Grove and honestly didnt' even quite feel as hard as it should have. It's not common that 6 flat feels easy for me, so I'm not sure what happened there. Anyway, I hit 4th and jogged in easy from there to my apartment. Afterwards, I went back to Memory Grove with Holly so she could play with other dogs and swim in the creek and jogged about a mile with her. Today was definitely super encouraging and I swear I will have no miles at even marathon effort tomorrow... all easy... | 