Run down

As I was sitting here, drowsily snuggled up under a blanket and basking in the warmth of my laptop, I realized vaguely I was losing the battle between taking a nap and writing a blog post. "Wow, I am abnormally tired for a Tuesday afternoon," I thought to myself. Mid-doze a little while later, I found my mind wandering off to count the meanings of the phrase "run down." Slowly my brain caught hold of the expression and I began to feel slightly more alert. There's nothing like a good list to wake me up!

When Amber's video tape reaches the end of its reel, it has run down.

If a summary is needed, I will give you a brief rundown.

When I am at the top of a hill, I can run down the other side.

When I am feeling exceptionally worn out after three intense weeks of balancing regular parenting with a rigorous cross country coaching schedule (including all of the literal running involved), I feel rundown.

Now this is starting to look like third grade vocabulary homework: define each word on the list and use each word in a sentence. Today my most personally applicable form of this expression is the last option on my list. While I am not completely destroyed, I am feeling a little bit rundown. A cross country coach feeling rundown? The various potential puns are almost too obvious to be amusing. And yet the fact remains: I am tired.

The POINT: here's the rundown of why I am rundown. Noun, adjective, BOOM.

Last week we had two cross country meets nearly back to back and right in the middle, I caught the first-wave back to school head cold. Since the illness wasn't bad enough to force me to stop, I didn't stop. I kept running. I kept mom-ing. I kept coaching. Sudafed and ibuprofen were my buddies.

We had a pleasant Thursday afternoon league meet in Yakima. The travel time to Franklin Park was less than an hour. Angel-of-mercy Grama Leslie watched our kids and it was extremely liberating to be 100% coach at a meet rather than 30% coach, 30% mom, 40% crazy like I have been at all of the other meets so far. We arrived home on Thursday night around 8:30pm and it was all very manageable.

On Friday night, Jeff and I set our alarms for 3:30am and went to bed a little after 10pm. My brain was concerned about getting up and at 'em on time, though, so I woke up at 1am and laid awake for close to two hours, finally beginning to doze off around 3am. Our alarms rang at 3:30am right on schedule and I groggily clawed my way awake and rolled out of bed. We got our kids up at 4am and drove over to the school, boarding the school bus and rolling out of the parking lot by 4:30am.

Amber was wired the minute we climbed onto the bus, so we got out our ammunition: Jeff's phone, a Ziploc baggie, and some masking tape to implement an innovation that occurred to me after our first bus ride with Amber. We put the phone into the baggie and taped the baggie to the back of the seat in front of the kids so the phone hung down at eye level. They watched movies the whole bus ride. Without a five point harness, movies were the only way to keep Amber from pummeling the entire population on the school bus!

Three and a half hours later, we arrived at Fort Steliacoom Park, the venue of possibly the largest cross country meet I have ever attended. 93 teams came, and during the coaches meeting before the meet began, we learned that there were 1400 more runners at the meet this year than ever before. It was an awesome meet. Of course there was an open race on the 5k course before the high school races, and of course I couldn't resist entering and running. It was my third race in three weeks. I have not raced that frequently since college! This was my favorite race out of the last three weeks though. The course was firm and fast, and I felt fabulous as I flew along the trail, cruising to the finish line in 22:24--my best 5k since Amber was born!

My parents came to the meet to say hi, cheer, and whisk the kids away for a few hours of quality grama-grampa time while Jeff and I continued coaching (we had runners in six of the races). It was so much fun to run a cross country race with my Dad cheering me on. It was just like the old days of my youth, and the deja-vu/time warp feeling was a bit disorienting for a few seconds. Then Amber got lost and my parents, Jay, Rose, and I spent an anxious 5-to-7 minutes combing the crowds looking for her before we saw her, propped up on Jeff's shoulders, heading towards us through the milling throngs. She had wandered off of the playground and thankfully run into a few members of our team. They rescued her and brought her, quivering lip and all, back to Jeff. He put her in plain sight up high on his shoulders until we saw her and breathed collective deep sighs of relief.

My parents took the kids for the large middle chunk of the meet, and Jeff and I were free to exhaust ourselves running back and forth across the course, cheering and encouraging our athletes to greater speeds and personal records. After a day with their grandparents, Jay, Rose, and Amber were back in time for the final race of the day, and we gave my dear parents two dozen garden fresh tomatoes as a parting gift of gratitude. The only downside to the arrangement was that I didn't get to spend the day with my parents too! Back on the bus, we paused for a nasty McDonald's dinner (which had me reflecting why the only restaurants that seem to give coaches free meals are the unhealthiest ones). We arrived back at Sunnyside High School on Saturday night around 9:30pm, 17.5 hours after we left.

Almost simultaneously at 9:00pm, (just before we got home), all three of our kids passed out in a deep exhausted slumber. They had lasted 17 hours awake (even Amber!!), and they could not handle another second. It took great effort to wake them enough to stumble over to our van, where they slumped tiredly once again. Rose actually woke up enough to try to convince me that she had never been asleep. That girl. At last the high schoolers were all gone and we drove home, arriving around 10:30pm. I still needed a shower. Saturday was a lengthy day.

These two tiring meets plus daily cross country practices and two consecutive Sundays of sitting at the piano for two hour primary program practices are my valid reasons for feeling a bit rundown. Now, to catch up on sleep before the next early XC wake-up call!

I'm learning just how much coaching is a labor of love. Who would go through all of this if they didn't love the sport and care about the kids? The more time I spend with these big-scary-spirited-stubborn teenagers, the more I care about them, their running, and their progress. They matter to me.

As Anne Shirley said, "It's so hard to keep from loving things, isn't it?"

Captions, then photos:

• Franklin Park: this cute cheerful girl's finish had me all sobby in my throat for a minute. She worked SO HARD and succeeded! The back-of-the-pack success stories are often my favorites.
• After the Thursday meet, we stopped at a local legend, Miner's Burgers, which feeds all coaches and bus drivers for free in the kitchen at the chef's table. It was my first experience eating there as a coach, and it was fun, even though the massive burger was a bit of a tummy ache.
• Miner's
• Friday morning practice: stroller caboose. There was no school on Friday. It was lovely. We did a short easy run with the team, then went home and relaxed around the house all day. It was the calm between two storms/xc meets.
• For funky Friday cross country practice, we dressed up as each other, right down to the socks. Jeff is trying to get the team more excited about funky Friday, but so far we've mostly been the only ones who do anything goofy. Amber's photography skills are still developing...
• Saturday morning, 4:30am, snuggled into the school bus.
• I didn't get a better picture of our rigged school bus movie theater, but it worked wonders.
• The tent jumble at Fort Steliacoom: everyone sat much closer together than usual because it rained off and on the whole day, and we only have the one tent.
• One of the enormous race start lines. The starts were such ground-shaking stampedes towards the bottle neck of the first turn.
• Back on the bus with my Amby.
• 9pm…
• Across the isle from Rose, same position, same time. (that beer bottle looking thing is Jeff's water bottle--he won it at a road race that was sponsored by a local pub)
• Amber slipped over sideways in her bench while watching a movie, and Jeff rescued her. Our wild Amber child never falls asleep during movies and never sleeps in our arms. I guess a 17 hour day was enough to change that. Our kids are such troopers!