A.M. Ran a warm-up with Benjamin and Jenny (0.36), then paced Jenny in the Payson Onion Days 5 K. She ran 25:04, a PR by 1:23, winning her age division (1-9), and finishing 11th woman overall out of 157 women. She beat the second place in her age division by 4:50. I checked the results, it looked like she would have made top 3 in any age division except 14-16 and 25-29. She ran pretty much exactly what I thought she would.
Benjamin ran without a pacer, and I think he was having an off day on top of it. He did PR by a bit, 22:26, but that does not reflect his potential that I saw in his training. I've seen this with him before, though. When he reaches a new level, at first he is not consistent at it, then he gets used to running at faster speeds. Nevertheless, nothing to complain about - he won the 1-9 age division by 5:08, 29th among men, and his chick score was 2, one of them being Breanna who ran a great race and destroyed the field with 19:54, the other only 11 seconds ahead, not bad for an 8 year old boy. Added some more miles while waiting for the awards/raffle. Benjamin and Jenny got medals for their effort, and Benjamin got a nice cooler in the raffle. While I think in the end it is fair that he got the cooler, I do think that wrong values are being taught when the value of the raffle prize greatly exceeds the value of the prize for performance. I understand very well the business reasoning of the race director - most people do not win anything, and a raffle with good prizes increases the number of participants. However, if we are going to ask ourselves what it would take for Americans to start beating the Kenyans (short of facilitating the immigration process), part of the answer is to convince the race directors to move the best prizes from the raffle into overall and age division awards. Luck should never be rewarded greater than performance - we need to teach the right values at every level. Then we went on the drive of the Nebo Loop. I was still not done with the miles, and added a few more at Maple Dell. Total of 10 additional miles in 1:13:37. Then ran 0.5 with Julia in 5:08. P.M. We were out of honey and bread. So for my evening run I had to run to the store. To be able to carry stuff I had to bring a stroller. If I am bring a stroller, I may just as well put a kid in it. So I ran 6.1 in 45:42 with Jacob in the stroller, and some honey and bread I got at Macey's after 1.75 into the run.
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