A.M. Total of 12. Started with 5 with Benjamin. We paced Sarah through 0.75 in 5:32. Then we went further on the trail and shortly before the turnaround saw a girl going about 8:00 that made a good chasing target that ended up about 2:00 ahead of us once we turned around. So I gave Benjamin a challenge to catch her. He did quarters of 86 followed by 83, and there was still no sign of her. Then we had to stop to cross the road as the tunnel was flooded. My watch did not stop. We lost about 20 seconds. We started going and Benjamin was anxious to catch somebody still. Then we saw another girl going about 9:30, and she was quite far away. However, Benjamin hit the gas pedal again, and we ran 600 in 2:04 and actually caught her before it was time to get off the trail. So we ended up with a 5:58 mile that included about a 20 second stop. This would be Benjamin's PR if you took out those 20 seconds, and it also shows about what his race on Tuesday was worth.Definitely quite a bit more than 5:37 1500 for sure. Jenny ran the first 0.75 with us, then turned around and ended up with 1.5.
I ran 1.5 with Joseph, and 0.5 with Julia and Jacob. Then I decided to do an experiment. I wanted to know how much weight is lost at sub-6:00 over 5 miles in 50 F if you are wearing shorts and a T-shirt. So I weighed myself before the start and it was 146.2. Then I ran 5 miles on my nasty course. I really do not like that course, but I do not have anything better that starts and finishes at the house. Total of 14 90 degree turns, one 180 turn, 2 road crossings (flooded tunnel) complemented by dodging a gate each time, 4 tunnels, and 2 wooden bridge crossings. I did the tempo run with the following splits - 5:56, 5:55, 5:50 (14:50 at the turnaround), 5:38, 5:36 - total 28:55.7. Felt good. When I finished I weighed myself again and it was 145.0. So 1.2 lb went away somewhere. There were no bathroom visits in between the weight measurements. So where did it all go? I was probably using up about 4.3 liters of oxygen per minute, and thus emitting about the same volume of carbon dioxide. So that is about 124 liters of CO2 that came out. Enough to fill up a small tank. Now we have to consider that O2 came in to produce CO2 that came out. CO2 density at 32 F and normal atmospheric pressure is 1.977 grams per liter. That should be good enough for this estimate. O2 density under the same conditions is 1.429 grams per liter. So 124 * (1.977 - 1.429) gives us about 68 grams of carbon lost via breathing. That is about 12% of the total weight loss! Through an intricate chemical process you could in theory collect all of this CO2 and make diamonds out of it. The process, of course, would cost more than the value of the diamonds produced. The rest was sweat I suppose.
P.M. 2 miles.
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