Ethan Cannon

My achilles tendon made it through a 4 mile tempo at 5:11 pace overall. 

9 miles. Achilles didn't feel great. 

Pre meet

Mt. SAC. My race was at 9:40 pm which equates to 11:40 in Minnesota. So I was yawning a bit beforehand, and I think it may have been due to tiredness (as well as nerves). But I wasn't worried about it affecting me. I decided to do what I considered the smart thing given my achilles situtation and wear my Vaporflys instead of spikes. I'm glad I have that option. Spikes would be pretty unforgiving. The new stadium is absolutely amazing. There wasn't a ton of people there so on the backstretch I could totally hear my coach yelling at me, which was helpful. I did a lot of thinking prior to this race, because a 10K is a mental battle. You can spend the first 10 minutes or so not really struggling but thinking about how its going to hurt later. With 40 people in my race, I didn't end up having anyone in specific to hang onto like my brother did so he could break 9 in the 3K the other night, but we decided to have me just try to be near the top. Weather and set up were awesome. This was a great final race in California under the lights. 

Race: With so many people, my first lap was like 73. That was a little unnerving to be behind already with so far to go. But someone started pulling us from up front, so I was pleased to see my splits put me closer to being on pace over the next several laps. I remember hitting around 4:44 at the mile and maybe 8:49 at 3K. I passed a few people on those laps, and as the race progressed, it became tempting to "rest" behind someone once I caught up to them. But their coaches would yell "72" at them, and I knew following them was not going to get me the paces I wanted. Hit 5K in about 14:43 feeling ok, and now focused on my plan to get to 20 minutes intact. Basically from there on out I tried to let the time pass while maintaining pace. My fear going into this race was I wouldn't break 30, and I had good reason to be concerned about that. I remember having 10 minutes to run the last 8 laps and feeling like I could really PR. The last few minutes I was motivated by knowing I would PR. For example, with 1600 to go, I was in a lot of pain and was not resting on my laurels but knew I only needed a 5:07 at that point to go sub 30. So I'm proud of myself that I never let the pace balloon like I did last year after a similar start. I have enough data to estimate splits for the six miles (knowing there's an extra 200 somewhere in there on a similar pace), assumimg I correctly got my 3K, 5K and 8.4k splits- 4:44, 4:40, 4:43, 4:41, 4:53, 4:45.

AM: 8 miles around a resevoir type thing. 

Long run. Felt pretty tired. Achilles hung in there.