Life with the Ball's: Runners Take Your Mark!

Marcus ran his first 5K with me. He did a great job, finishing in 25 minutes. He has been training for a few weeks and watching him run past the house checking his pace on the Garmin was one of the cutest things to see. I think he was motivated by the independence of running through the neighborhoods by himself.
Running with him brought back memories of running my first 5K with my mom when I was ten years old. We had been training for a long time because my mom was not a runner. She'd get my older sister and I out of bed each morning at 6:30 to run a couple miles. We didn't have a fancy GPS watch to tell us how far or how fast we were going, we ran in ugly old sweats, and when it got cold we wore our bulky winter coats. It's a good thing it was dark so no one could see us! But my mom didn't care about all that. She just wanted us to exercise, especially since my older sister was a little on the pudgy side. {I can say that because now she is not only the opposite of pudgy, she's a running machine and has probably run about ten marathons and is super fit.} Back to my story. . . we registered for the Salt Lake City Classic Memorial Day 5K. The farthest we'd ever run was 2.5 miles but we figured the extra adrenaline rush on race day would see us through to the finish. I'd say it nearly killed us! I finished in exactly 30 minutes and my mom finished in 33 minutes. We were slow! My older sister finished way ahead of both of us. That's the last race my mom ever did. She stuck to her regular routine of walking after that, but for Laura and me there was no going back. We were hooked on running.
It was thrilling to run along with my sons, first Marcus in the 5K, and then Ethan in the 1-Mile fun run. Next year I'm going to make sure Ethan trains so he can do the 5K because he's a force to be reckoned with as he fearlessly zipped around runners twice his size, passing people all along the way. Plus, running is a great sport for short people which fits the bill for our short family!