Benjamin and Jenny ran in the Harrington Memorial 5 K today in American Fork on the American Fork 5K course. Ted and his son James came over early in the morning. Ted tried to replace the battery connectors on Zhu (our Ford Escort Wagon), but turned out I got the wrong kind. So the job was postponed until after the race. We did some easy running before the race. Then Ted paced Benjamin, while James and I paced Jenny. Benjamin ran a new PR of 22:49, an improvement of 29 seconds. His mile splits were 6:59 (down), 8:11 (up), and 7:00 (down). He was second in the 10 and under division losing to his arch-rival Alexander Barry by 26 seconds, who also ran a great race after just running Magna 5 K in 21:57.
Jenny also ran a PR of 26:27. Her first mile was 8:38, followed by 9:24 uphill. That is when she started passing people. On the last mile she unleashed her furious Jenny kick and ran 7:41 passing a good number of people. She almost got Alexander Barry's father but did not quite have the juice on the last 100 meters after essentially having sprinted the entire mile. Steve joined us for some more miles. We began discussing how much slower this course was than Magna. To provide some data for the debate I decided to run the course at a steady marathon pace effort. Steve joined me. We ran the splits of 5:27 - 6:07 - 5:38 and the final time of 17:51. Steve thought we had eased off much on the last mile, and he may have been right as I was probably getting slightly dehydrated with the temperatures getting into the 80s. But at the same time Ted was jogging up ahead of us, and this may have been triggering his greyhound instinct. One thing for sure is that we have put in at least 5:47 flat effort into the first two miles - we reached the two mile mark in 11:35 which is located above the start. At the end Steve and I agreed the course was comparable to Heart of Holladay. Stopped by at Checkers on the way back, got the right kind of connector, and Ted finished the job on Zhu. Zhu is now very happy, and so are Sarah and I. We do not have to lift up the hood and wiggle the connection every time we want to start it any more. Ran with Julia plus a tiny bit more to make it 13 for the day. In the evening had a barbeque at Ted's.
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