Every Race is an Adventure!

I ran the Orem loop this morning. My left ankle still hurt a little as I got up, but I decided to test it with a run anyway. I figured I could cut the run short if it bothered me too much. It turns out it didn't hurt me at all while running. I ended up not only pushing the pace a little but also extending my run by a mile. It's a high ankle sprain and I guess the position of my ankle while running doesn't impact the injured area.

I ran 7.4 miles in 58:55, an average pace of 7:58/mi. My mile splits were 8:16, 7:55, 7:50, 8:28, 8:12, 8:07, 7:14, and 2:54 for the last 0.4 (7:18/mi). I think I maintained a pretty consistent effort throughout the run, pushing a little harder the last mile or so. I think you can tell which miles were uphill with a headwind.

We recently watched "Hello, Dolly!" with our kids and the music from the song "Dancing" kept going through my head this morning..."And one two three, one two three, one two three. Look I'm dancing!" This kept me moving along. Other lyrics include: "Well my heart is about to burst, My head is about to pop, And now that I'm dancing who cares if I ever stop!" and "Whatever you do for gosh shakes keep breathing!" and "One-two-three. One-two-three. One-two. And now that we're dancing, Who cares if we ever stop." It may be a little dated, but this is a high energy song that I may add to my old running song favorites "Theme from Rocky" and "Chariots of Fire".

I was expecting the big hills of the water tank road this morning, but Larry had decided he wanted to do some speed work at the track, which consisted of 4 - 1/2 mile intervals with 1/4 mile rest in between. My times for the 1/2 mile intervals were 3:05, 3:17, 3:16, and 3:04. After the first interval I realized I had gone too fast and wouldn't be able to hold that for all four. Larry also reminded me that the last interval would have to be my fastest (a goal we have). I ran the second and third intervals at a saner pace, hoping I would have enough left to beat 3:05 on the last interval. As you can see, I barely made it.

This wasn't the workout I had planned for this morning, and I'm not sure how much benefit I got from it, but it was fun. That should count for something. The old neighborhood group (of which Larry and I are currently the only active runners) had the tradition of doing these track intervals once a week during the summer/fall for many years, gradually moving from 4 to 8 repeats and trying to get faster each week, but the tradition has died over the past couple of years. I like doing them because the slower and faster runners can all get a good workout and still be with each other a lot of the time (warm up, rest periods, and cool down).

I should mention that Wayne doesn't live in our neighborhood, but has recently been coming on Tuesdays and Thursdays to run with Larry and me. This was his first experience with these intervals. He didn't know what to expect and I'm not sure he had as much fun as I did.

I ran Lake View with Tom at noon. It was hot, humid, and smoky. I don't get to run with Tom much or I might not have gone out at all. I didn't feel like going very fast and I felt like we were doing 9:00 miles, but we ended up averaging 7:57/mi overall, 8:08/mi out and 7:46/mi back.

I ran the Lindon loop with Larry and Wayne at an easy pace. It seemed pretty humid this morning. At mile 3 I decided to insert a little fartlek and ran 0.75 miles @ 6:29/mi. I also ran the last 0.4 @ 7:31/mi. Overall, I ran 6.15 miles in 54:00 (8:47/mi), but this included stopping a few times to make sure Larry's dog Ozzie was staying with us.

As we sometimes do, we took a detour to see some point of interest. This morning we ran past Wayne's daughter's new house where Larry's crew had recently installed the sprinkler system. I enjoy runs when there's more to the run than just running.

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.