Luke - 10

The Facebook group I'm in with a bunch of really good local runners has a few Olympians. One of them is Gabe Jennings, and every week he posts that he's going to do a 10k tempo in 32:00, so Josh and I decided to join him once to see how long we could keep up. We were hoping to stay for 3, maybe even 4 miles. So we met up and Gabe said he might start a bit slower, like 5:45 pace, and speed up the whole way, which sounded perfect to Josh and me. This was on the bike path (out on one side of the river, back on the other side) so every quarter-mile was marked, and also I took my GPS watch so that I could see exactly how far I was able to hold on. For both Josh and me this was a race effort.

We started and Gabe and Josh took off with me right behind, but they went really fast. 72 for the first quarter, maybe even 71 for them. I tried to keep up but I just don't have that kind of speed. I went through the first mile in 5:18 and they were 5-10 seconds in front of me already. They kept pulling away and I was never really able to close the gap, and fell off more in the second mile, which I think I hit in 5:40. At about 2.5 miles I turned around and did another half-mile or so in 6:00 pace, then jogged out to where they would be coming back on the other side of the river. I didn't really know where the finish line was so I jogged around a bit, hoping to maybe do a quarter or two with Gabe when he came up on me. I saw him behind me a while later and right when I turned around he stopped, apparently at the finish line. He had finished in about 32:20, and Josh had held on for three miles and then finished pretty well in the mid-33s somewhere I think.

The three of us jogged back towards our houses for a bit and it was nice talking with them. I'm hoping I can do this again sometime and actually be fast enough to hang on for a while.