I ran with Sasha this morning and we did a tempo of sorts. We started by going out at 6:00 pace for a quarter, followed by a faster quarter. We then slowed down to 6:00 pace again for another quarter, with another fast quarter following. We did this for the whole 5 mile tempo. The only "slow" quarter that we got off of 6:00 pace by more than 1 second was at the turn-around halfway through and we did that quarter in 1:34. Our splits for the fast quarters are:
1:15, 1:15, 1:14, 1:16, 1:14, 1:17, 1:16, 1:17, 1:18, 1:15.
Sasha asked me to back off the pace a little during the second half, as he could no longer hold 5:00 pace, which explains the slowdown during the second half. During the last quarter I told him to slap my hand, and he made a big effort to catch me in order to do it. He then faded slightly over the last 150m as he used everything trying to catch up. I finished in 27:40 (5:32 per mile), with Sasha at 27:41. The early quarters actually felt easy to me, however the finishing quarters did not. I probably could have held 5:00 pace on the fast quarters over the second half of the tempo if I was not pacing Sasha, but I would have had to work a lot harder for it than at the beginning. Finished 10.5 miles with a total time of 1:10:40
PM: I ran with the Springville Cross Country team again. I ran part of a hill workout with them as well as their warm-up and cool-down. I ended up getting in about 4 more miles. The guys all started out really fast on their first repeat, and all but one of them faded pretty badly by the time the fifth and last repeat had been completed. Not by coincidence, the one guy who did not fade is the fastest runner on the team.
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