A.M. Long run with Chad Robinson. He went 15, I did 20. He waited for me after we got to 7.5. We did a test pickup. He made it to the mile in 5:53. After that the markers were gone as the new ones have not been painted after the road reconstruction, but we kept going. I tried to maintain the same effort, not sure if I got it quite right, but Chad survived for about another 0.5 miles.This is quite an improvement for Chad in the last two weeks.
After that we jogged some, I dropped Chad off to wait, then ran up, and then did a 3 mile tempo back down. The legs were stale from the combination of quarters on Thursday and drills on Friday, or perhaps stale just because, so I was not quite sure what to expect hoping it would not be as bad as 16:30 or worse. Went through the first mile in 5:15, was happy about that, then Ian interesting event happened. A guy that I passed earlier all of a sudden caught up to me and passed me back. His form looked decent, so I had hopes he was some stray collegiate runner in good shape and could pull me for the rest of the tempo. So I mentally relaxed thinking I would have company. He did OK for the next quarter which I ended up doing in 77. Then he lasted another quarter, but started losing steam. After a 77 I had enough steam to draft at 80, but not enough to sense that we were running slow and to want to take the initiative. He actually did not quite make it to the 1.5 mark, so I was left alone at that point. I felt like somebody had just held a juicy watermelon in front of me, and then took it away. What was I thinking? I should not have held up my hopes. What are the chances that a random runner on the trail would be able to hold 5:20s for a couple of miles mid-run when out of 2000 or so people that came to race the Provo River Half last year only 4 could have done it under such circumstances? After this disappointment, it took me some time to recover. I hit several goose egg quarters in a row with the worst being 85 and the second mile in 5:27. With about a half mile to go I was finally able to speed up to an 80 quarter when I zeroed in on Chad, followed by a 78 at the end which gave me 16:06.3 for the run and the last mile in 5:24. It was not so much the fatigue, but rather the anticipation of the rest of the run being easy and fast. The lesson to learn from that is you should always expect the target pace to be hard. Be thankful when it is easy, but always be prepared for it to require more effort than what you are currently exerting. Chad and I jogged some, then sped up some. I challenged him to run the last 3 miles at 6:30 pace, and he accepted - we ended up with 19:32 and the splits of 6:21, 6:39, 6:32. Benjamin ran 4, Joseph 1, Jenny and Julia 1.5, Jacob 0.25.
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