4:59

Jay reached his big goal to break 5 minutes in the mile!! It was so exciting! He was so happy to achieve the goal that he worked so hard for!

The faster Jay runs, the harder it is to take pictures of him.

The Traditional Track Takeover

 It has come, like it does every spring: the time when track season takes over basic life functions. I managed to squeeze in a few non-track things amidst the planning, prepping, coaching, and clerking this week, but mostly track is life right now. Journal excerpts are keeping this blog afloat right now:

MS Track Begins

Middle school track season started this week! While I made the spreadsheet with all 65 kids who signed up for MS track, I officially crunched the middle school track numbers. 86% of last year's 7th graders on the track team joined the team this year. 66% of my 8th graders last year joined the high school track team. Retention is looking pretty snazzy, but that's not all: middle school kids kept registering throughout the week, so by the end of the first week of the season, 77 kids were on my roster! I believe registration closed on Friday, so that should be it. 

50 of those kids attended practice at least once this week, with a daily average of about 40. That's a 44% increase in attendance since last year! 8 more kids have COME to track practice this year than the total number of kids who REGISTERED last year! I don't know why numbers are up so much this year, but I am here for it! Every afternoon during and after practice, my neurons were exploding with the effort of learning and remembering so many new names. 

Windy

If I had to use one word to sum up the week, it would be WIND. My body and mind are eroded from the near constant sound of wind, the feel of the wind on me while doing battle against the wind. On a windy day if I'm inside my house, the sound of the wind whipping, whistling, and whooshing around our unprotected treeless house grates on my psyche. When I'm outside running in the wind, it pushes and pulls on me, messing with my pace and hair and patience equally. When I'm at track practice coaching in the wind, it yanks my voice from my throat and throws it in the wrong direction. It batters my body and chills my bones. It shoves me into survival mode and exhausts my muscles from tensing against it. WIND IS MY NEMESIS!

HS Track Begins

High school track season started this week! The first day of practice was Monday, March 2nd. The weather was eerily perfect: sunny, mid 50s, with a light breeze. I kept waiting for the wind, rain, and cold blustery weather to come, but that waited till Tuesday. Monday was lovely! Being a track coach is a master class in savoring the golden moment and accepting that it probably won't last, haha.

Sunday night's sunset was fiery.

Spring in February

After a gloomy wet Monday and Tuesday, we had the best February weather ever this week! It felt like such a treat to enjoy sunshine without wind at the end of February. It was a nice little gift during the one and only week between swim season and track season. Here are some journal excerpts:

Driving and adapting

Over the past 2 weeks, Jeff and I have had a lot of quality time in the car with Rose practicing driving. Rose's total hours spent driving since she got her permit on February 9th (13 days ago) is close to 13 hours! That's a lot of time for a full-time high school student who also attends early morning seminary and a 2 hour driver's ed class 5 evenings a week, while also preparing for the science fair and trying to sneak some running in to get ready for track season. Rose is cranking! She also performed four songs in the piano ribbon festival on Saturday. It's a lot, and she has been tired. I did all of her dishes and laundry this week because Rose wasn't home long enough to do them. One week done, two more weeks of driver's ed to go!

Swim Season Recap

Jeff has been too exhausted to write about the swim team, and our local paper has not stepped up to report on the team's progress all winter, I took matters into my own hands and wrote a swim season recap last weekend. It was weird tempering my snark in order to focus on the theme of overcoming barriers, so I felt like my writing was a little off, but this is what I came up with. 

Jury Duty

I had jury duty last week. I have jury duty this coming week. I will not have jury duty next week. This sounds like an English language learner's lesson. Maybe I'll revert to journal entry excerpts to tell the tale:

Sunday, February 8th: I made my first call-in for jury duty tonight. My group has to report to the courthouse in Yakima at 8:30 tomorrow morning! So Jeff has to take Amber to his classroom 1 hour and 15 minutes before her school opens, she will walk to school from there, and Jeff will somehow take her home after school during swim practice. He also has to take Rose to the DMV to get her permit. I will probably miss my doctor appointment. It's also piano lessons for the girls tomorrow night. It feels like I'm the only one who ever remembers about piano lessons. Will I be home by then? The court didn't say. I'm worried that Jeff might forget some of these necessary activities. I don't know why it's fair to ask any busy parent to be on a jury. What do other people do in this situation? It's so frustrating! I feel no sense of civic duty. All I feel is annoyed at being pulled away from my #1 duty. Ugh. I have to leave home at 7:30am tomorrow and drive all the way to Yakima in a dense fog advisory to stay at the courthouse for an undisclosed amount of time. 

Happy Birthday, Rose!

Rose turned 15!!! Her birthday was on Saturday, February 7th. We planned her family birthday dinner for the day after because Rose was originally going to be at the district swim meet all day on her birthday, serving in her role as team manager. When that meet was moved, however, Rose suddenly had a full Saturday birthday at home! She opened her birthday presents in the morning, and later I took her out to get Thai food for a mother-daughter birthday lunch. On Sunday evening, our local extended family came over for  Rose's birthday dinner of choice: pulled pork, mac and cheese, (also veggies, coleslaw, and salad), and cheesecake. 

All or Nothing

The saga of the swim season sans swimming pool continued this week. The district prelims were scheduled for Thursday, February 5th in Moses Lake (1 hour 45 minutes away) at 5pm. I chose not to attend the prelims, and instead just attend the finals on Saturday at the same location. Soon after the team school bus arrived at Moses Lake High School on Thursday, they were told that the pool facility HVAC system had blown out and the meet was cancelled. So the bus turned around and drove that long winding hour and 45 minutes back to Sunnyside. 

Sunrise from Monday morning (Feb 2nd) because this post needs something pretty. Even the sky was all or nothing this week: all colorful glory or nothing thick smudgy fog.

Coach Conference & Music

I coughed my way through the week, grinding my gears back into regular life routines as my body slowly worked on recovering from the flu. Journal excerpts from the week: 

Monday, January 26th: So. Tired. I went back to normal life post-flu today, and it was exhausting. I cleaned bathrooms, cooked dinner, played piano for an hour, did a pull-up prep workout, ran 30 minutes, and drove the girls to piano lessons, the library (Amber, for fresh books), and the hardware store (Rose, for science fair supplies). I am so sleepy. My slow run felt hard thanks to my cough and my feeble legs. Hopefully I can get all the way healthy again soon! I don't have anything else to say. I need sleep most.