I ran up Provo Canyon with Larry and Wayne. We left home at 5:30am and started up the canyon about 5:45am. I'm sure glad we did. The weather was great for most of the run but was getting into the upper 70's by the time we finished.
We didn't see many runners on the way up, but shortly after we passed Bridal Veil Falls an old guy (probably about our age) passed us. Wayne and I looked at each other and it didn't take us long to decide to leave Larry (his toes and hip have been bothering him, he's going to the doctor on Tuesday) and go get this guy. There was a pretty strong head wind this morning, and our mile splits up to that point had been pretty slow: 9:48, 9:18, 9:36, 9:54. We ended up catching and passing him pretty easily. The next mile was 8:30 followed by 5:32 for the last 0.77 (7:13/mi) into Vivian Park.
Larry turned back at this point and Wayne and I continued on up South Fork until we got to 8 miles, about a mile past South Fork Park. Our mile splits were 9:23, 8:42, and 1:48 for 0.25 (7:19/mi). Given the steepness of the hills, I feel okay about those times. We were working pretty hard.
Back down to Vivian our splits were 7:48, 5:10, and 2:55 for 0.22 (13:28/mi). Does anyone else suspect a GPS glitch here? If you add the times and divide by the distance I think the resulting average pace of 7:09/mi is closer to what we actually ran.
We stopped for water twice on the way back down from Vivian. It was starting to get warm, and we were getting tired. The mile splits were 7:45, 7:20, 7:21, 1:08 for 0.16 (6:57/mi), 7:13, 5:10 for 0.72 (7:12/mi), and 6:13 for 0.88 (7:02/mi).
After the first 4.5 easy miles (when we couldn't let the "old guy" pass us) we pushed the rest of the run pretty hard. After averaging 9:39/mi for the first 4 miles, we averaged 7:40/mi for the last 12 miles, nearly two minutes per mile faster.The total run was 16.0 miles in 2:10:38 (8:10/mi).
Maybe the best part of this run was actually seeing Wayne get tired. I saw him tired at the end of the Hobble Creek Half last year, but I've never seen him this tired during a training run before. I guess he really is mortal.
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