Calvin Spring Classic
David and I started running together at the beginning of March. Due to life circumstances, we pretty much didn't go to the Y in Dec, Jan or Feb. But when March started, we got ourselves into gear! David had not really run at all since his knee surgery last June. His cardio was mostly biking. He started off biking and then running on the treadmill. After a few weeks of that, he joined me on the track! We trained hard and quickly were shortly running 3 miles together! It is different running with someone. In some ways, I don't like it. I like to be competetive with myself, push myself. But I know I'm not a fast runner, and whenever I run with someone I always feel like I'm slowing them down, so I try to run as fast as I possibly can. But then I tire myself out and I have to slow down, when I don't want to slow down, and so I'm more focused on pushing myself than enjoying myself. In some ways, I feel like I'm really holding David back, and I don't like that part of it! But it's also really fun to spend that time with him. Even if we don't talk during our runs, it's still fun to be doing something like that together. Sometimes after a few warm-up laps he'll take off and run until he catches up with me again (at the Y, you have to run 7 laps to get to 1 mile). That usually balances us out, because he pushes himself during that time, and then he's happy to run at my pace for the rest of it.
Anyway, we trained to run the Calvin 5k race. It was really fun to run on our old campus and see everything! It was a great course and was pretty well attended (about 1000 people). David pushed the kids in the jogger so we could run as a family! That was really fun. The kids were great and enjoyed people watching, eating their breakfasts and playing with some toys. It was a beautiful day for a run too! David pushing a jogger evened us out a little bit (although he still could have run much faster than I did, even with a 80lb handicap!). We ran together the whole time, and had a really good race! The beginning part was really hard to navigate through so many people. It was a run but also a walk, and they asked that walkers and stroller start near the back. We should have known better and put ourselves in the middle, because we ended up behind a lot of slow joggers and walkers and it's really hard to pass people with a huge stroller! But eventually we found clearings and our rhythmn. My goal was to run it in under 30 mins, and we ran it in 29 mins 44 sec!! I was pretty proud of that! David would like to note that we were the first stroller to cross the line! :) Our first mile was by far the slowest. I think we would have run it 30 sec to 1 min faster if we did not have to slow down to pass people for the first 1/2 mile. But, we beat my goal, so we were happy!
After our race they did a kids race. We hadn't planned on doing that and Kayla was wearing jeans and sandals! But she wanted to run, so we signed her up!! It was a neat experience for her so I'm glad we did it.
Afterwards, we peeked around the new gym they have. What an amazing facility!
We had a great race. Mom and Dad Taylor paid our entry fee as one of my birthday presents this year, and that was such a great gift - thanks mom and dad, we had a blast!!