Tempo

Ladies,

Runner	Mile 1	Mile 2	Pace	Proj. 5k
Joslyn	6:16:00	13:18:00	6:39:00	20:36:54
Madison		13:58:00	6:59:00	21:38:54
Carrie		14:14:00	7:07:00	22:03:42
Zoe		14:23:00	7:11:30	22:17:39
Chelsey		15:17:00	7:38:30	23:41:21
Katlyn		14:56:00	7:28:00	23:08:48
Kate		15:04:00	7:32:00	23:21:12
Diana		15:56:00	7:58:00	24:41:48
Sarah		18:09:00	9:04:30	28:07:57
Cynthany		18:09:00	9:04:30	28:07:57

Look at those numbers. Just look. Shhhh! Be quiet a second and just let those numbers pour over you. 

<crickets>

Okay. What does it all mean, really? You might say, "Coach, that was a flat course" or "Coach, it was downhill", or "Coach, why are you so fat?". I of course would say, "SHUT UP! I'm not FAT!" Okay, the first two points are valid, and in relation to the BNL course, it's fair to say we wouldn't have been that fast. Or shouldn't have been. Things aren't always that simple though. 

Though we didn't get the one mile splits, at least for all of you, I don't need them to know what happened. You all, to a person, took off too hard. You blew up a bit and had to slow down the second mile. I know, because I did the same thing (though nowhere near the same extent). When I saw my Garmin instantaneous time of 6:00 at around 1/2 mile and I could still hear female voices right behind me, I knew you were out too hard. See, by my logic, throwing that huge first mile split in there was like having a big hill on the course. That negates both the flatter and slightly downhill argument to a great extent.

Of course if you ran an even effort all that wouldn't apply. Trouble is, none of you did. I stand by my belief that, though you might not quite be ready to run as fast as what you did tonight in a race, you're close, and it won't be long. North Harrison is the week after our race. Brown County is shortly after that. Both of those races are quite a bit flatter than ours. And faster. 

Here's my takeaway from tonight; potentially we have 7 girls right now that could break 24 minutes at this point in the season. I would be thrilled if 5 did it first meet, and happy if at least 3 do. Do any of you remember the first meet last year? Let me show you some times...

Athlete	5k	Pace
Carrie	22:51:00	7:22:15
Danielle	22:56:00	7:23:52
Alli	23:00:00	7:25:10
Bret	23:56:00	7:43:14
Morgan	24:18:00	7:50:19
Madison	24:38:00	7:56:46
Keeley	24:42:00	7:58:04
Katlyn	25:33:00	8:14:31

That's opening meet for the top-7 runners last year. Come to grips with it girls... you're a much better team than we had last year, by a wide margin. Of course we won't know for sure until the meet, but on paper there is no question, way beyond the margin of error. Now here comes the exciting part... those numbers today, if they didn't improve at all (and they will) would likely be enough to get us to Semi-State. THAT is exciting!

We'll be talking about pacing and mindset a lot this week. Know this... today was pretty uncomfortably hot and you ran that well. What might have happened if it had been 20 degrees cooler with low humidity? You know that weather is coming soon, right?

I am really, really stoked!