Junior Boys Workout

Since my buddies Craig and Paul execute the Big Boy Workout each Wednesday in the Herzogenaruach, area of Germany I couldn't steal that. So today I did the Junior Boys workout. It was a scheduled run for Marco and his Cross Country team. Today it was around Lake Miramar. 5 miles of twisting-turning-undulating paved path around the lake. The workout was to run to the 2.5 mile mark at an easy effort and throw in 2 X 5 minutes of Tempo with 5 minutes at that easy pace in between each effort. The group of 10 started together but within the first 200 meters two boys went off the front at a fairly good clip. I was comfortable with Marco running with his buddy Nelson. After all, running should be fun and if you can run with a best buddy even better. So I left Marco and headed for the boys up front. It took a good while to catch them. Their "Easy" was fairly steady. It was fairly hot for 7:30am and sweat was already rolling off my visor. The boys began counting down by the 1/4 mile. At 2.5 miles they were off. 1 minute into the 5 minutes the thought crossed my head that this is more than I care to do but then what the heck. I stuck it out and it wasn't that bad. We were back to "Easy". 5 minutes later we were on and the first 2 minutes was up a slight grade the entire way. The boys were hanging tough and even picked it up off the top of the hill. By this point I could see the finish area. We finished the 5 minutes and I made the suggestion that we would run out of space to finish this easy 5 minutes and that we should go past the finish area and add on to get the 5 minutes. The response I got was what I thought o.k. As we approached the finish area I was checking my watch to determine how much extra we would be adding and then bam "This is where we started" came from one of them and they stopped. 37:04. It took me 20 minutes to understand. They wanted that time so they could compare it to everyone else. Running 40 minutes wasn't the workout to them. Running one lap and timing it was they're workout. Now I know the Junior Boys Workout.

It's a good life...

Dave