Jr High cross country

And the season is off - with a bang. He's already been to 3 meets and one invitational. The invitational was on Saturday - and amazingly enough, there was some slight cloud cover and it wasn't quite as hot as it could have been. As a 7th grader, he's been doing pretty well in his races - coming in 22nd, 17th, and 19th in his meets (out of about 70 boys each time). At this invitational though, they divided the kids up into A team and B teams depending on their abilties. Well, Philip's team does exceptionally well at these meets - in fact they've won them all so far, so he wasn't in the top 5 kids made the A race. But, he got to run in the B race and it was very exciting. He was ahead the whole time. At the last corner, someone passed him, but he still managed to come in second. He was pretty excited about his 2nd place finish. In fact we all were and went out to lunch to celebrate! At church today, the manager of his team was there and had Philip's medal for him - it said he came in 1st place! The kid ahead of him wasn't in the race - he was missing the number and must have just fallen in somewhere along the course. Philip was quite excited to find this out!

And, as side note, the coach was kind of kicking himself for not letting Philip run in the A race. He was about 20 sec faster than the slowest kid on our team and that would have made our team come in 1st instead of 2nd. But, who knew how it would turn out?

Labor Day Run... again!

Well, my friend that I did the Labor Day run with last year and I talked about doing it again this year. But, then she ended up injured and decided that she had better not do it since she can only run about 3 miles before she is in some serious pain. This was the beginning of August. I then decided on my own that I probably wasn't ready for it. With our trip to WY and all I just hadn't gotten in the miles I wanted to. Even though we work at the same school, with how busy it is anymore, I seriously hadn't talked to her about anything since summer. Like how I wasn't going to do this race. So, a couple of days before, I went to my mailbox at school and there was this lovely lotion in it that advertised that it relieved tired legs. And a note from her that wished me luck. Oops. I probably should have mentioned my decision to her. So, instead of doing that, I went home and asked Rik if he wanted to run with me for Labor Day. He was game so I signed us up.

The morning of Labor Day I felt good, but I really had no idea how long 8 miles was going to take me. I was scared to even think about it. We started out and the last time I looked at my watch it said we had been out 34 minutes. That was at about 4 miles - in the middle of this terrible hill. Shortly after that, I kind of got my second wind and started having fun. I passed Rik and felt like I was kind of bounding to the tops of hills. Too bad right before the end he passed me again. He claims he just couldn't let me beat him. As I rounded the corner at the finish line, I was shocked to see the clock just pass the 1:10 marker. I wasn't expecting anything *that* good. Last year I finished in 1:13 and the year before it was 1:12. What would have happened if I had actually trained for this thing????

What would you think if...

You got this note in your science class? I'm sure Philip was wondering the same thing. So, he went to the principal's office and found out he had been nominated as student of the month - but the class was a secret. He brought home a bumper sticker, coffee mug, decal, and pencil. Friday morning I got to go with him to the Student of the Month breakfast. Way cool. Nine students were honored. Philip was nominated by his PE teacher and he had so many nice things to say about him. And, besides breakfast, they gave him this nice plaque, a t shirt, and a nice letter in this cool gift bag.