A.M. Celebrated my 39th birthday by pacing Chad through the Uneventful Provo River Half-Marathon, or in other words we drove up to the start and Chad did a time trial. The target was 6:00 whenever possible, and I was thinking it would be nice if we got a low 1:20, or maybe even a little under. In fact I was thinking that after we had finished the first half. But then I moved up front and for an experiment decided to see how Chad would handle 5:52 pace. He groaned, but was not falling back. So we did my 3 mile tempo stretch in 17:34 and caught up to the 6:00 guy who slipped away from us during the uphill/headwind detour earlier. Then we held on to 6:00 or around that in the last mile. The finishing time was 1:18:42. During the run I felt sluggish. The pace did not feel like a jog, I felt I had to concentrate. In fact, until we got to the headwind, we were running side by side and I made zero effort to push the pace letting Chad take the initiative. Even when I moved forward once we hit the headwind, I could tell I was going too slow at first as Chad kept running into me. However, around 3 miles, and around 8 I had to make a VPB stop, falling back by about 30 seconds each time and both times caught up in a little over half mile with what felt like my own half-marathon race pace effort. So I did have another gear, but for one reason or another was very reluctant to shift into it. Maybe it was psychological. I told myself - you are pacing a 1:18 half that will likely deteriorate into 1:20 later on, and my body refused to work any harder than it had to. Overall, I think this sluggishness on my part ended up being a plus because it happened to hit Chad's fitness level right on the dot and he ended up with a 4 minute + PR. We jogged to make the total 20. During the cooldown we met Benjamin and he joined us. He ran the total of 8 miles, having run 1 mile with Joseph, and 1 mile with Jacob earlier. Jenny and Julia ran 2 miles.
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