Easy run with Ted at 4:50 AM. Two items of notice - it took me as usual 4 miles to warm up to pace, but I could handle 7:20 pace after the first mile. After that 7:00 pace felt easy. HR was normal - very low as usual, lower than it should be for the pace in the first 4 miles, then normal after that. Also, only one bathroom stop - the average for this early in the morning is 2.5. Ted picked it up to 6:40 trying to catch the 7:15 guy. With a quarter to go I watched to catch the 35:00 guy for the last 5.02. So we ran the last quarter in 1:23. My legs felt good, like they had some jet energy in case Ted decided to test my kick. We ended up with 1:12:22 for 10.04. The highlight of the afternoon run with the kids was Julia's first timed mile ever. Her goal was to break 10:00. After seeing Benjamin and Jenny get all the prizes for running fast times, she said to me: "Daddy, can I get whatever toys I want if I break the mile?" I told her she could if she went under 10:00. The main challenge was not the fitness. It is hard for a 4 year old to comprehend how long a mile is and to keep running at a hard pace with no end in sight. Especially for Julia - Jenny was a very mature 4 year old, she was already reading scriptures at 4.5, and comprehending the things of life in general much better. Julia is barely able to read her power words, and still does not quite realize what is going on around her, more like your average 4 year old kid. Jenny volunteered to help pace Julia. This made a big difference. We did the time trial on the Provo River Trail. First half a slight up, then turn around and come back to the start. The first quarter was perfect - 2:30. The next 300 meters went great, we were right on pace for 10:00. Then Julia started to panic. I told her she could slow down. We got to the half in 5:07. After the turnaround, Julia realized we were going back, so the finish was close. She started pushing the pace and ran the next quarter in 2:18. Then she saw the four dots and stopped thinking it was the finish. We told her no. She lost a bit of time on that, but fairly quickly got going again. Jenny and I kept giving her encouragement telling her she was still on pace and could get her prize if she did not quit. Jenny kept telling her to believe in herself. With 100 to go we saw our friend Amy with her kids, and that cheered Julia up enough to run the last 100 in 33 seconds "breaking the mile" - 9:57, now 5 people in our family of 7 are sub-10:00 milers! Julia probably has the ability to run sub-9:30 with her current fitness if only she could understand the distance and how to run it better. That will come with age.
I checked Jenny's blog, and did some math - Jenny broke 10:00 for the first time at the age of 4 years and 295 days. Julia was 4 years and 242 days old today. Jenny had been running 0.5 miles a day consistently for about 3 months prior to breaking 10:00, and this was not the first time she had run the whole mile. Julia started much earlier, but her consistent daily runs have maxed out at 0.35. She had never previously run the whole mile without stopping for a considerable period of time.
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