A.M. Did a tempo run with Benjamin. Well, more precisely, he dropped me after the first 0.6 and I watched him move further and further away after that. He ran 2 miles down the Provo Canyon with the splits of 2:31, 2:35 (5:06), 2:37, 2:31 (5:08) - 10:14 total. His first quarter in 73 did me in. I hung on to about 1 K mark, then started losing it. Got 5:10 at the mile, then really lost it and ran the last mile in 5:35 finishing in 10:45. The start was fast, but it should not have killed me that bad - probably still low on fuel from Saturday and fasting on Sunday.
Benjamin's performance was quite encouraging. I am figuring right now on a good day he should be able to run somewhere in the range of 15:20 for the 3 mile tempo course. I think it is reasonable to expect that he will be running it under 15:00 by June, which I think will translate into 1:08 performance in the Utah Valley Half. Using direct ratios, he ran 15:54 in the 3 mile tempo, then 1:15:21 in the actual race, so improving the tempo run to 14:54 gives him 1:10:36 assuming the same endurance, but even now he has quite a bit more endurance than he did back then. In May in all of his workouts he was good up to 3 miles and then experienced an abrupt drop. Lately he has been powering along as far as 6 and feeling like he could do more. I am expecting the endurance to improve even more in the next 7 months, so I think he can find 2 minutes over the half in the endurance department.
Assuming he can go through with this and actually run 1:08, and assuming that UVM half is equivalent in quality to an OTQ eligible course at sea-level, that will give him 3 minutes to shave off over the course of about a little less than a year and a half with the age changing from 15 years and 4 months to 16 years and about 8 months or maybe a little more depending on when the window closes. At least on paper it all looks doable, but we will have to see if we can actually pull it off. But regardless, it is worth a try.
I did total of 12, Benjamin did 8, Jenny 4, Joseph 3, Julia 3, Jacob 2, William 1.
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