A.M. Total of 12. Took Logan to the track to do a 3200 meter time trial. I wanted to see the exact measurement of his improvement since he started training with us a little less than two months ago. He raced 3200 on the track in 12:01 in May. It was clear from his performance on Friday that he improved, but now was very curious by how much. So Benjamin and I paced him through a time trial. I was in charge of the pace and calling out splits, Benjamin was in charge of cheering. The target was 86 seconds per lap. Logan ran 11:27.8 with the following splits: 86, 86, 85, 88 (5:45), 86, 88, 87, 81 (5:42) On the fourth lap I sensed that Logan needed a break after my mispaced 85. The sixth lap was slow because Logan was struggling. But he had a kick, so we ended up dipping by 0.2 under 86 seconds per lap average. Logan is 14 years old. His training over the last year prior to the start of the summer consisted of average of about 3 miles a day with a lot of high intensity running. Prior to starting to train with us he reduced his training for a couple of weeks drastically and hardly ran at all for two weeks due to the stress of studying for the final exams, and it showed. Immediately after he raced 2 miles in our ward 2 miler in 12:55 which was probably worth around 12:30 on the track for 3200 meters. His training consisted of 4 miles a day of easy running for the first week, then he upped to to 5 miles a day and held it steady. Just a few days ago he moved ti to 6 miles a day. Most of the volume was easy, but on average once a week we did one-time test efforts for distances between 800 and 1200 meters to measure his fitness. We ran some more. Andrew ended up doing 6.5 miles, Logan 7, Benjamin 8, Joseph 3, Jenny 4, Julia 3, Jacob 2, William 1. I did a pickup for 0.51 uphill in 3:00. This experience with Logan was rather revealing to me. I had never tried to work with a typical high school/junior high runner during a summer break. I have always sensed that removing a typical school runner from the traditional high intensity program and working primarily on his aerobic base would cause a 3200 meter breakthrough with less magnificent but still solid improvements in 1600, but I never previously had anything to quantify the intuition. | 