A.M. 13.5 total. 8 with Benjamin. Jenny, Julia, and Joseph did 3. Jacob 1. William 0.5. I did some pickups with Benjamin, and ran the last mile hard as well. It is actually a bit more than a mile, hilly, snow covered in most parts (I could only remove so much with my snow plow), and has a 180 turn in the middle. With a pretty hard effort that I would expect to give me something around 5:20-5:30 on a good road without the hills I got 6:09. P.M. 0.5 with Sarah. She ran 4:57 on the first part of the mile that I earlier ran fast. My split for that part was 3:01. She is starting to slowly work her way into shape after delivering Matthew. The idea is this - we run for as long as we can at the pace 10:00 or faster. Even if it is only half a mile. No more plodding at 12:00 pace. My theory from observing various runners throughout the years is that if you can run 10:00 or faster you should work on increasing the distance up until you can run 8-12 miles at once comfortably on a daily basis, and only then introduce speed work. But if you cannot, you should increase the pace rather than the distance. It is better to run 10:00 pace with frequent walking breaks than to run 12:00 continuously. The basic idea that very slow running is almost walking, and there are a lot of overweight and otherwise competitively unfit people that walk long distances every day but would not be able to run sub-10:00 pace even for half a mile to save their life. You could, of course, argue that we might be confusing cause and effect here - some people just cannot run sub-10:00 pace no matter what they do, and that is why they walk or run at near walking pace, while others are more naturally fit and choose sub-10:00 pace from the very beginning. This argument does have some merit, but I would like to forget about it and approach the matter like this - get yourself out of the dead slower than 10:00 per mile zone immediately and to the greatest amount that your body will let you and see if that lifts you out of the mire. The longer your head is above the water, the more oxygen you can get, the higher your chances of not drowning.
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