A.M. Benjamin and I attacked the 5:00 mile barrier at Orem High. Neither of us had the juice today to break it - we ended up with 5:03.7 for him and 5:04.2 for me. He can now drop me in the kick. He led the first lap in 75, then I took over at 500 and brought him to 800 in 2:29 (74). So far so good. But on the third lap I did not have the juice to deal with the headwind and botched it quite a bit - 3:47 (78). Benjamin took over at 1100 as planned and tried to kick. I tried to help him, but we were both rather sluggish and could only manage a 75 for the last lap. But still Benjamin improved his track mile PR by 5 seconds. Then we paced Jenny. It has been a while since she even tried to set a mile PR. She has suffered from a growth spurt that gave her a good amount of muscle and joint pain along with cardiovascular underperformance. So her old PR of 6:52 she set 3 years ago never got broken since. It was now time to kill the beast. The plan was to take her through the first two laps in 1:40 each, and then see what happens. We instructed her to not doubt our pacing and maintain contact even if she thought all she could do at that pace was take one more step. That seemed to work - she trusted our pacing and got a new PR of 6:42.8. The splits were 1:38, 1:42, 1:43 and 1:36 with the rest of the total time going towards the additional 9.34 meters. Then we ran another mile, which made it 7 total for Benjamin, and I went for 5 more with Julia and Joseph following me on their bikes. I was mad about that 5:04, and the kids were anxious to go faster, so I did a mini-tempo to release the fumes running the last 2 miles in 11:20 (5:33, 5:47 uphill). Total of 12 for me, Benjamin did 7, Jenny 3, Julia and Joseph 2, Jacob 1, William 0.5.
| 