A.M. Jeff and I were planning on a 10 mile tempo run. However, Jeff ate something bad and was having serious stomach issues. But we decided to give it a try anyway. Jeff threw up before the start of the tempo, first time in 14 years. Jeff is quite a scientist. Most people would just get away from the vomit as fast as they could, but he studied it in detail and then reported one item at a time what came out.
Then we started with a tentative goal to run 6:00 pace until we had to call 911 for Jeff. We started out sluggishly. 6:06 for the first mile. During the second mile Jeff stopped to throw up again. Then we could not get back to pace, and then we stopped for Jeff's VPB, so we ended up with 6:09. Not much faster in the third - 6:02. An old lady, about 70 years old or so, was riding a bike in front of us. She was a nimble old lady. Her bike looked pretty heavy, yet she was maintaining sub-6:00 pace. She must have been Ben Crozier's grandma. Back when we trained together whenever I told Ben I ran a good time, he always said his grandma ran that same race on that same course 5 seconds faster. With the grandma ahead of us to chase the pace quickened. We ran the next mile in 5:53. But the grandma was not coming to us. I thought for sure we'd catch her on the uphill. But we did not. Then finally Jeff decided he wanted to catch the grandma even if it meant more vomit. So we sped up to an 84 quarter, followed by an 81. The grandma did not have that gear, we caught up, and she admitted that she tried hard to stay ahead of us. I was surprised that Jeff was able to go that fast without losing anything on either end of the pipe. Once we passed the grandma, the competitive urge was over and we coasted the last quarter in 85 to finish 5 miles in 29:50, last mile in 5:40. Jeff felt that was good enough, and I did not want to run 5 more alone bad enough to actually do it. So I stopped with him and we jogged in to get 10 miles total. Then I picked up Benjamin and ran 2 miles with him in 15:45. We did 6:00 pace to failure after the warm-up mile in 9:00. He made it to about 0.6 this time, the longest so far. I think he could have gone 0.75, but was not mentally ready. To help him prepare I challenged him to run a hard quarter from 1.75 to the finish, which he did in 1:37. His last mile was 6:45 which included a jog from 0.6 to 0.75. P.M. 0.5 with Joseph in 5:48. 2 with Jenny in 19:34. Julia ran 1.5 with us in 14:52.
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