Big Workout today. Cody and I started from my house, ran up Center St. to Dry Canyon, then took the Bonneville Shoreline Trail to Millville Canyon, and back to my house along the Top of Utah Marathon course. The idea was to progress from 7:00 pace for 5 miles, to 6:30 for 5 miles, to 6:00 for 5 miles. The route is very hilly. It starts around 4500' and climbs to about 5100' at the mouth of Dry Canyon. From there to Millville Canyon, there are numerous rolling hills, with a peak at 5250', not to mention poor footing. From Millville Canyon, there is a nice downhill, and then small rolling hills to the end. We had to run by effort and feel to hit our "pace", rather than looking at actual pace, since the hills throw it off so much. Splits were slow, well over 7-minutes, but the effort was there. I had a lot of trouble today with footing on the trail, especially the downhills, but worked the uphills pretty hard. We finally hit pavement again at about the 8-mile mark, and I was actually quite happy about it, even though I usually prefer dirt. From there on in, it was easy to hit the proper pace. We did a couple 6:20 miles on the downhill to finish off the "6:30-effort" segment. Unfortunately, Cody's IT band seemed to be awry, so we separated ways on the last 5 miles. I hit 5:55, 5:50, 5:56, 5:53: 6:04 on this stretch to finish off the run, and everything felt pretty good. It was a beautiful sunny morning, in the upper 30s at the beginning of our run and 50s by the end. Gotta love Utah this time of year! 6:50/mile average pace for the run. (1120: 368 miles)
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