A.M. Earn Your Turkey 4 miler in Orem. 21:22.6, 10th place. Today was a special day. Everybody in our family except Sarah and William ran. I ran first. We had a fast field. The start was very fast. I worked through the pack until I found Stephen Clark pacing Shaine Kirtright, and tucked in behind them. The mile markers were off. For the record, my time at the first mile marker was 5:06, but it was short. 5:30 at the official 3 mile mark which we would hit on the next lap again, and the it was really supposed to be 3 miles, but I knew already it was in the wrong place. I caught a split at the four triangles for 1.25, and it was 6:40. Now that made sense. 2 mile split officially in 10:41, I think that one was right.
Then around 2 miles Shaine started struggling, Stephen started yelling at him, and I passed them and surged to catch Gamechu, a high school runner that immigrated from Ethiopia. Caught him, he surged and dropped me, but I was able to pull back up. Tucked in behind him as tight as I could. 15:55 at the official mile 1 the second time around, 16:06 at the triangles, I think this was the actual 3 mile split, and 16:19 at the official mile 3. My natural tendency to association cannot help but remind me of the standard Soviet propaganda line when they spoke about America: "According to the official, obviously distorted, data ..."
With about 1 K to knowing that Gamechu had a close to 11.0 PR in 100 meters I tried to break him, but could not. He ended up gapping me instead, but I closed with a quarter to go. But then it was too late. He turned on his kick and pulled ahead. He eased off, I closed some, but could not catch him. I timed the last quarter in 76. Ahead of me: Sean Sundwall 19:55.3, Nick McCombs 19:59.8, Jeff McClellan (our Jeff) 20:02.1, Reagan Fry 20:13.8, Aaron Robison 20:30.1, Shin Nozaki 20:33.0, Danny Moody 20:45.1, Thatcher Olson 21:11.9, and Gamechu Goesse 21:21.9. 1-2-3-7-8 for the blog. Not bad in that field. Bloggers beat BYU, not bad at all. Of course, not sure how to count Thatcher - he is both.
Overall the race went better than I expected. 5:20 pace felt good when tucked behind somebody. Felt like I could run a 10 K like this. But not any faster. Did not handle surges well, they hurt bad. On the positive side of things ran strong all the way, did not fade in the last mile. So while the neural power is lacking the neural endurance is not doing too bad. Now the fun begins. Kids races. Men 0-2 - 100 meters. Jacob won with 35 seconds. This is our family record for the diaper division. 9:20 pace while wearing a diaper, how about that? We've tried to win that division ever since we've had kids. It took 5 tries (as in kids, not the number of runs). Men 3-4, 400 meters. Joseph ran 2:34 for 7th place. A new PR, and not bad for a 3 year old. His stride is still developing though, he shuffles. No big deal, he'll outgrow it. Jenny used to shuffle at his age as well. Women 5-6. 800 meters. Julia crushed the field with a 3:51 winning by more than 40 seconds. New PR. Splits of 1:51 - 2:00, quarter PR en route as well. She pushed hard, which for her is remarkable. She is not developed mentally to the level of Benjamin and Jenny at her age yet. Women 7-8. 800 meters. Jenny won coming from behind. Her time was 3:21, splits by quarter 1:41 - 1:40. There comes Jenny the Fire Breathing Dragon, better watch out. Men 9-10. 1 mile. Benjamin finished second with 6:14, 4 seconds behind his arch-rival Jacob Blackburn who is a year older. New mile PR. Last quarter in 1:30. He gave it all he had. Interesting enough, in all of the races our kids ran the Pachev-Blackburn combination did a 1-2 punch. The main Blackburn family has 10 children, and they have cousins as well. It is fun to race them. All of the children performed according to my expectations. After having worked with my kids for probably 7 or so years I can appreciate the significance of this. This is a true miracle. I do not set my expectations low. I do not tell a kid he did a good job to make him feel good when he performed poorly. When he runs below expectations I am honest with him, we analyze what went wrong, and make plans on how we are going to improve. You can train, you can prepare, you can make plans, and things still go wrong. They go wrong even with adults. With all the experience I have I still have bad races. With kids it is much worse - kids can run into issues adults never will (hopefully), like a temper tantrum at the start, or half way through the race. To have all five run with no glitches was something special.
Ran a cool-down with Jeff, total of 11 miles for the day.
| 