Last weekend Lena ran her first half marathon. I will upload a video of our experience on our youtube channel here soon. It was a great time as a family to cheer on one of us even though the rest of us weren’t running. Afterward we had a great adventure checking out Yosemite National Park.
This adventure started a few months ago when Lena started running and decided she was a runner. She doesn’t do anything half way. She joined a running community and started running more and more. Then she decided she wanted to try a half marathon. So she signed up for one. And she trained with her community. A couple of months before the race she was able to complete 13 mile runs. We now knew she was going to finish the race, but that wasn’t enough for her. A half marathon is a pretty major accomplishment just to do for the first time, but she wasn’t happy with that. She wanted to improve her time before the race, which was already a pretty quick time. When race time came, she improved her time again! She did amazing. She was in the top ten percent of all runners (on her first try) and she was number 9 of women in her age group (out of 200 +/-).
The kids and I were there to cheer her on, and I quickly got caught up in the excitement and wanted to be a part of this community. I started thinking about what I would have to do to be able to run in a half marathon. I started thinking about all of the mental training I’ve had over the last couple of years and I knew that I could push my body to do things it didn’t want to do. Then I realized, I don’t want to do that.
Wait, what? Isn’t this the part of the story where you say you were inspired and started training right away and pushed through your mental barriers? I could have done that. My joints aren’t what they used to be and it’s really hard for me to run long distances, especially the high impact type running that would be involved. I could have pushed through that and gotten my body to do amazing things, but I realized something this weekend. I don’t LOVE running. If you don’t have any physical issues and your pain is minimal when you run, you can LIKE running and get it done. But if you have knee problems, you really have to LOVE it. And I don’t. So what does that mean for me being a part of this community? Well, we discovered something awesome. We knew that if you volunteered for one of the races this company puts on, you get a code that allows you to do the next race for free. What we found out is that it is just a code, so I could volunteer and Lena could run the next race for free. As much as we can, that’s what we decided to do. I will volunteer and get to be a part of the community, and she gets to run the races for free. It’s a win win. Cailyn is even talking about starting to run herself.
The best part is that we’ve found a new thing to do as a family, and not everybody has to do the same part of it. We can all be there and enjoy it but we don’t all have to run. The race was in bass lake and the twins are in 4th grade so we were able to go to Yosemite and get into the park for free. If you haven’t been there, Yosemite is AMAZING. It is absolutely beautiful and I could have walked and explored for hours more when the kids were ready to go. The waterfalls are incredible and being that close to actually see half dome was quite an experience. Even as I was taking pictures I was trying to capture it and what I saw with my eyes just didn’t match what was in the camera.
So what’s the moral of the story? This post isn’t as educational as most of our posts are. This is a glimpse into our lives as a family, and if I can teach you one thing it’s this: get out and do things as a family. Cheer each other on when one of you is doing something amazing. Have a new experience. There is a reason Family is one of the Foundations for your Dynamic Life. You never know what you’re going to discover when you try something new as a family.
Be Blessed
