Journal excerpts from this week of school and cross country:
Tuesday, September 5th: Whew, I have been thirsty all day. Coaching cross country practice in the heat is extremely dehydrating. I have been drinking so much and I am still thirsty!
Today I felt so organized: I started the Roomba as Amber was leaving for school (she caught the school bus at 8am). Then I did some yoga and ran 5 miles in the gorgeous cool morning weather. I got half of my ministering interviews done today and even made dinner before cross country practice. I used the saute mode on the instant pot to cook the sausage and white beans and then turned it on slow cook mode to keep it hot until dinnertime after practice. It was a hearty filling meal. Jay had two bowls of it plus two pieces of cornbread. The bottomless pit teenage boy stomach begins.
Wednesday, September 7th: Another busy busy day! After Amber got on the school bus at 8am, I ran on my own because I knew I wouldn't get to run at cross country practice today. After my run, I showered and hydrated, then played the piano for a little while. I worked on the three tricky lines in the song I have been working on for the past 5+ months, and made enough progress to play the entire 7 page song without the music once through! It was an amazing feeling! It takes a special kind of grueling practice to memorize music. This is the first time I've exerted myself this hard on a piano song since I was the primary pianist at church 4 years ago, but even then I didn't try memorizing songs and never played anything this long or complicated. (It's called The Song for My Brother, from the show Crash Landing on You.)
After lunch, I baked the cornbread for our dinner tonight since I knew time would be short after xc practice. Then I let myself settle down to watch an episode of my current K drama (Her Private Life...my third time watching it this year...don't judge, haha, I love that show!) It was good to carve out an hour to sit and rest in the middle of the busy-ness.
Then it was on to xc practice. I went to two practices today: first the middle school practice, then the high school practice. I was in charge of ferrying water to and from the park, setting up cones, and helping time the high school workout. I left home at 2:15pm and didn't get back again until 6pm! It was a very draining sweaty afternoon, even though I didn't run. I am so thirsty! At 6pm I gobbled down a bowl of sausage and white beans (and cornbread), then went to a relief society presidency meeting at the church from 6:30-8:15pm. Whew.
Amber came home from school with a stuffy nose yesterday and it was still tissue city for her today. It seems early for the first sniffles of the school year!
Thursday, September 8th: This morning after the kids left for school, I did some yoga and listened to some of the Follow Him podcast to help me with the beginning of the book of Isaiah. Instead of following a yoga video, I did my own yoga based on what felt good, while listening to the podcast. It was pleasant and restorative. Then I finally did the blog post about Ultimook. It took a while to write everything down. After that I played the piano and worked on my memory of The Song for My Brother-- I managed it from memory again with only a few flubs! It's happening, and it's so satisfying.
I had to force myself to go to Walmart after lunch and it was just as crowded, messy, and understocked as always. I stopped by the t-shirt printing shop in downtown Sunnyside on the way home, for a second attempt at picking up my cross country coaches' shirt order, only to discover that the guy had forgotten to add the words "cross country" underneath the school logo! On the way home from cross country practice, I stopped by the shirt shop again and finally picked up our shirts.
Leftovers for dinner. The kids are all pretty tired from starting school. Amber especially is so worn out, I feel bad for her! She has a stuffy nose and is clearly tired from getting back into the school routine. We have a cross country meet tomorrow afternoon. Yes I can do this!
[end journal entries]
Man, I wish I had written in my journal after the cross country meet on Friday! It would have made this blog post much easier, haha. The meet we were originally going to was on Saturday, but it got cancelled last minute so we quickly signed up for the only other nearby meet (aka less than 3.5 hour drive), which was in the fair town of Umatilla, which is just across the border in Oregon. I picked up Rose and Amber early from school and we were headed south on the hot noisy school bus by 2:15pm. (The bus was supposed to leave at 2pm, but instead it arrived at the school for loading at 2pm. That may not seem like a big deal, but when the team gets out of school early for a meet, every minute counts, and it's no fun to rush a pre-race warmup due to a later-than-planned arrival.)
The meet was at a golf course, so the grass was like velvet and the footing was smooth. On paper, it was a fast course. It was 85 degrees, which is much cooler than it was last week, but still very hot to be racing around an open field. Our teams valiantly took on the challenge and I felt all of my usual maternal emotional pride watching my own kids run as well as the high school kids on our team.
Of course Jay is on the middle school cross country team, and we entered Rose unattached since as a 6th grader she's still one year shy of being old enough to join the middle school team officially. They both ran so well and looked the strongest I've ever seen them look in a race. Jay blew his last-season 1.5 mile personal record out of the water by a whole minute, finishing in 11:11. He got 8th place out of the 27 boys in the middle school race. Rose shaved a whopping 2 minutes off of her last-season time, finishing in 12:15, which put her at 6th place out of 29 girls. They were both very pleased with their performances. All of that running they did over the summer made a huge difference in this early season race! As a parent (and coach) it is always extra gratifying when the kids can tell that their hard work is paying off.
Our high school boys team finished 3rd out of 9 teams (woot!) and our girls team finished 9th. Both boys and girls battled it out on their respective levels and dug deep to cross that finish line. That's what I love about running: both the runners up front and the runners way out in the back have a similar experience, pushing themselves through the discomforts and difficulty of running a 3 mile race. It takes grit and heart and I love being a part of these kids' journey!
While all of the races were being run and the coaches were coaching, Amber played at the team tent. She is getting old enough that I'm not nearly as stressed about leaving her at the team tent while I dash around doing coach-y things. Thankfully she found a few kids to play with--younger siblings of high school runners--so she wasn't bored out of her mind too much.
At the very end of the meet, after we coaches had run several miles around the course and sweated in the sun on our feet during four races, there was a community race. Jeff and I looked at each other with the same uncertain look of dread in our eyes--we were going to run this, yes, but it was going to be a special kind of anguish. Racing a 5k is hard enough, but racing a 5k after coaching multiple other races and being on our feet for several hours in the heat (not to mention that cursed hour long bus ride) is excruciating.
To the starting line we went, racing spikes snugly tied and outer layers of clothing peeled off. The course was three one mile laps around the golf course, with a tail added on toward the finish line to make it into a full 5k, or 3.1 miles. It was hard. A tiny eleven year old boy running in pants and a baggy t-shirt cruised past and beat me by over 100 meters. It was a real sufferfest, although the sun was much lower than it had been during the earlier races. Jeff and I blew kisses to each other across the loop. He finished in an impressive 19:15 and I held it together enough for a 22:47. We Adam and Eve'd the race, our term for when a married couple are the first man and woman finishers in a race. It was a tiny race (less than 25 runners), but still. Adam and Eve after a grueling hot afternoon of coaching was a satisfying, shaky-exhausting way to finish up the meet.
We stopped for burgers on the bus ride home and arrived back at our house close to 10pm.
Saturday morning, we had an easy cross country practice with a cool fresh easy barefoot-in-the-grass jog followed by frisbee.
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