A.M. Ran with Jeff. I did the quarters. He did two fat miles just to be safe. I did his last fat mile, although it was not so fat for me as the quarters put me in the carb burning mode. Total mileage for the run was 10.1. I did 5 quarters with 200 recovery, then ran out of road, and did not want to go backwards as not to delay Jeff as he needed to get to work on time. So I decided to take a longer break, about 2.5 miles or so until we got back to the trail marks. The longer break did not matter since I could not do the quarters fast enough to benefit from more than 200 recovery. The quarters went like this: pressed the stop button too early on the first, with the adjustment the time was around 73, on the second one the watch did not start because I am still getting used to the idea of starting the timer with one button and stopping it with another. After than I finally got the hang of those buttons: 71.4, 72.0 (lost concentration looking for the marker as it was covered with fluff), 71.2, 71.5. The feeling was interesting. In some ways I felt smooth. But in other ways I felt weak and awkward. In restrospect I said no wonder many people run this pace for a 10 K, it is not that fast, does not take a whole lot of power to sustain it if you can run smooth. But it does take a whole lot of Quality X to be sufficiently smooth to run this pace off low power. And for fairness, we need to say that a sub-28:00 sea-level track Kenyan would not break 29:00 on the Provo River trail. I raced a few of them in 2005 in Wasatch Run The Front, the winner was around 29:20, he had a sub-28:00 track 10 K to his credit, and he was racing 4 other guys his caliber. I ran 34:10, and, interestingly enough, my 10 K PR on the Provo River Trail was 34:09, so we can say the courses were comparable. So perhaps 71 quarters there are not that slow after all. And since I remembered Wasatch Run the Front. It was a great race, but unfortunately not well appreciated by the community. We had some of the best runners the world, a good number, and I mean really the best, sub-28:00 10 K runners in men, Constantina Dita, the Beijing Olympics Marathon Champion in the women's race, and she did not win easy, there was a Kenyan lady that gave her a run for her money. The good news is that I got to watch it. The bad news is that I got to watch it from far behind. I ran a decent race and got triple (!) chicked. We did not have to go anywhere to race them, they came to us. They were all right there, no special coral or anything. You could warm-up, cool down, and chat with a bunch of world-class runners. And guess how many people showed up? Only 300. Well, that was the end of Wasatch Run The Front.
2 with Benjamin afterwards in 17:41. P.M. 2 with Jenny in 18:11. Julia ran the first 1.5 in 13:51. 0.5 with Joseph in 5:55.
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