dedication, perseverance, self-discipline

for those of you that know my brother Andrew (probably from the Wasatch Back Relay) he ran at his district meet yesterday to try and qualify for the state championships next Saturday. It is a huge meet, and it can be quite difficult to qualify. Andrew has been running times all year that have indicated that he had a very good shot at qualifying this year. However, he got sick a couple of days ago, and despite having run a 16:44 5k last week on a course that is not the fastest around and being on a much faster course yesterday, he ran his worst race of the year, finishing in 17:50 for 5k, good for 93rd place. His teammate whom he beat by 3 seconds last week, qualified for state fairly comfortably finishing in 17th (30 qualify for state). Races like that really suck. You train for so long to try and reach certain goals, and you feel like you should be able to reach those goals, yet then at the last minute a wrench gets thrown in your face and it feels like all of your preparation is for naught. I know I have had races that turned out that way, and I am sure that Andrew feels that way now. I feel bad for him.

I ran 10 miles this afternoon after school.  I went a little faster than normal in part because I was talking to one of the guys on the Cross Country team, and I didn't realize how fast we were going.  After running 6 miles with Mark, I finished up the run on my own, finishing 10 miles in 1:08:35.  I also biked home today, getting in an equivalent of 3 running miles (10 miles total biking).

Today was a weird day.  The plan was to run 6 miles and then come back and run with Kimia while she biked for 4 miles.  I accidentally overshot my mark and ended up getting in 6.25 miles by the time I made it home.  I was not surprised to see that Kimia was not ready to leave yet when I got there, but I was surprised when she immediately pulled me inside to talk.  Her employers did not want her to leave (we were going to move) and they offered an incentive for her to stay.  So, we talked about that for a while, and by the time we finished she did not want me to run any more and she begged me to stay at home.  So, no more miles for me, but I did ride my bike home, and I rode it pretty hard, so it is not all bad (3 mile equivalent from biking).

I ran with Sasha this morning.  I needed to get back to the house sooner, so I was only able to run 6 miles this morning.  We did it pretty slow, finishing in 52:04.  I was planning on getting another run in the afternoon, but by the time I finished biking home, I needed to get ready to go somewhere else and I did not get back until it was too late to get a second run in.  Darn, two days in a row without that many miles.

I ran with the cross country team today. We did a workout, where we did a little loop on the high school grounds before going hard up a hill. We would take the downhill easy, and then pick it up once we started the loop again. It was a total of 2 miles, but I probably did no more than 1.5 miles of it at marathon pace. I then ran more on my own at the end to finish up with 10 miles on the day.  Total time was a little over 1:13:00.

I ran on my own today, as I got to practice too late to run with the team.  They only ran about 3 miles so it really wasn't a big deal.  I ran a big loop up into mapleton and then out to hobble creek canyon before heading back to the high school to finish up 10 miles in 1:15:00.

I ran with a bunch of people this morning. After about a 2.5 mile warm-up Sasha and I started a 10 mile tempo. Michelle came with us for the first mile, and then did a few more mile repeats (sometimes 2000 repeats) with us at certain points of the tempo. We ran the 5 mile tempo twice again and we finished in 56:30, (56:38 for Sasha) which is much faster than last Saturday. Here are our mile splits (miles with the same coloring were run along the same portion of the 5 mile tempo).

5:47 - Just getting warmed into the tempo (1:32 first quarter)

5:43 -

5:40 - First turn around halfway through

5:46 - Slowed a bit so Michelle could stay with us

5:43 - Halfway split 28:39. Second turn around at the end of this mile

5:37 - Michelle ran the second half with us, but we actually sped up a bit (2:49, 2:48)

5:40 - Slowed a bit the first .5 for Michelle and then sped up (2:52, 2:48)

5:31 - Last turn around halfway through

5:37 - Slowed down just a little the first half mile and then sped up the second (2:51, 2:46)

5:26 - Was on pace for about 5:33-5:34 but ran a 1:16 last quarter to finish off the workout. Finished the second half in 27:51.

Overall I think that it was a really good workout.  I did not feel like I was really pushing it that hard, and I was able to progressively speed up without really increasing the effort much (not counting the last quarter).