Sunday Sep 20 — Lap Card

14 mi · 7 E + 5 @ HMP + 2 E · Aug 30 route, 3.02 mi flat loop · cups at the loop start · A tier already locked

Buy this week

Paper cold cups, 3 or 5 oz — Dixie-style, paper-goods aisle, ~$4 for 100+. Not rigid plastic: the whole skill is pinching the rim into a spout, and a Solo cup won't pinch. 5 oz is closest to what the race pours.
Stand-in for Gatorade Endurance (goes in the cups marked Endurance below) — either:
- Regular Gatorade Thirst Quencher, bottle or powder — ~5.8% carb, matches race-day concentration; ~460 mg·L⁻¹ sodium, about half of Endurance, irrelevant at 4–8 oz total.
- Your own mix + 60 g sugar per liter (~5 tbsp) — takes it from 1.8% to ~6% carb; sodium already matches Endurance.
Not plain water or your normal 1.8% mix — the 6% concentration at 7:40 is the point.

Four cups at the loop start, in order, left to right. Pour 4–6 oz each — race cups are not full. Use a small cooler with a lid rather than an open chair: they sit outdoors for two hours, and wind takes an open paper cup.
Order: 1 water · 2 Endurance · 3 water · 4 Endurance. You take the leftmost remaining cup on every pass. Do not think about it mid-run.
Both gels in the race shorts pocket. Race shoes, race shorts.
90–60 min out: half bagel + 12–16 oz + 150–200 mg caffeine, all together, 60 minutes before the first step. Nothing else in the 3 hours before the bagel.

Pass	Mile	Time	Do
1	3.02	0:27	CUP 1 — water + Gel 1, on the move
2	6.04	0:53	CUP 2 — Endurance, 2–4 oz, on the move
—	7	1:02	Block starts — 7:40
3	9.06	1:18	CUP 3 — water + Gel 2, at 7:40 — the one that matters
—	12	1:40	Block ends
4	12.08	1:41	CUP 4 — Endurance, still at 7:40 through the cup, ease to E at 12.25
—	14	~1:59	done — 2 E, jog it in

Gel 1 lands at ~27 min; on Oct 4 it lands at the mile 4 station, ~30 min.
Gel 2 lands at ~78 min, at 7:40; on Oct 4 it lands at the mile 10 station, ~78 min, at 7:40. Same clock, same pace, same pocket. This is the highest-fidelity thing on the card — if one pass goes wrong, make it not this one.
Never a gel and Endurance at the same station. A 6% solution on top of a gel is how a stitch starts. Water with gels, Endurance alone.

Pinch the top rim into a spout before it reaches your mouth. A flat cup at 7:40 goes down your front.
Exhale, then swallow. Do not tilt your head back — that is the reflex that makes you choke and then stop.
2–4 oz is the whole target. You are not finishing the cup. Two swallows and drop it.
You have done this in races before, at 8:18–10:07/mi. The only new variable is 7:40. If you wear one, you wear one — keep running.
Zero standstills. Not "short stops" — zero.
The sequencing is the actual unrehearsed thing, not the cup. Four stations, two of them water-with-gel and two drink-alone, in order, while your legs are busy. That is what goes wrong at mile 10.

Custom workout, pace-programmed: Warm-up 7 mi, no alert → Work 1 mi, pace alert 7:35–7:45, repeat ×5, no recovery step → Cool-down 2 mi, no alert. Auto-pause off.
Five separate one-mile work steps, not one 5-mile step. Sep 13 was built as a single 8-mile lap, which made "current-lap pace" a five-mile running average — a 7:25 quarter moved it by about a second, so the field could not show you the 7:28 mile you were running. Five laps means the number resets every mile and is readable.
Main screen shows current-lap pace.
HR is guardrail only. Sustained >175 → 7:47 for the rest of the block. 178 at any point → abort to easy. Sep 13 topped at 167, so this should not come near firing.
Touchscreen disabled before you start, forecast irrelevant.

At 0.20 mi past the cup, read current-lap pace. Faster than 7:35 → back off until it reads 7:40.
There is no standstill this time, so there is no HR-drop mechanism behind the surge — but you have sped up after every fluid touch in this build (6:36 → 7:15 → 7:28). Assume the habit transfers to the cup and check the number anyway.

Four cups at 2–4 oz is 8–16 oz across two hours. You normally take 21–30 oz on a long run. This is a deliberate ~40% cut, and it is the price of not stopping.
Run the race volume, not your habit volume. The point is to find out at mile 10 on Sep 20 rather than at mile 10 on Oct 4.
If it genuinely doesn't work — not "I'd have liked more," but a dry mouth affecting the pace — that is a real finding and it comes back to me. Dew point matters to how it reads, so record it.

Standstills: zero. Any stop, and the fluid plan is rewritten rather than the athlete blamed.
Sequence: four passes in the right order, no gel-plus-Endurance collision.
All 5 block miles inside 7:35–7:45. This is the execution test the Sep 13 gate wasn't. Four of eight miles landed outside the window that day, three of them fast. The display is fixed now; if the same shape shows up anyway, the race card's mile column gets written as a hard cap on miles 1–6 rather than a target.
Gut through the block on Endurance + gels at 7:40.

Temperature and dew point at the start and at mile 12. Not in the file — the watch records no temperature.
Standstill count (target zero), and what caused any of them.
How much of each cup actually went down versus on you.
Gut through the block, and anything off from 150–200 mg of caffeine versus the clean 100 mg on Sep 13.

Sep 27 is 9 mi with 3 @ HMP — a confirmation, not a rehearsal. Its card gets written after this one runs.