Alice's first (and last, according to her) 5k!

 

Alice has recently been on a kick to run with me when I jog around the neighborhood.  I kind of put her off until I heard about one of her little friends running a 5k and thought, hmm... I wonder if Alice really would be interested in running.  So, I asked her if she'd like to train for a 5k.  Well, the idea of running a race and winning something was VERY appealing to Alice, so we started training.  This entailed getting ready, starting our run, and then about 1/4 a mile in (I'm being generous here), Alice starting to complain about something--her feet, her tummy, how much she's sweating, how thirsty she is, etc.  I'd make her finish up a mile and then I'd drop her off at home and finish my run.  After a few times of this, I wasn't really too thrilled about doing a 5k with her, but the idea of winning something was just so appealing to Alice that, in her mind, she just had to do this race.  And I thought, you know what, doing something that is really hard will be good for her.

I signed us up for our little town's 5k and I told Alice's friend Holly and her mom about it and they decided to run as well.  Alice and I set the goal that we would run the first mile and then walk for 1/2 a mile and then run for 1/2 a mile, alternating for the rest of the race.  But once we got going, I noticed Alice was doing really well and the first half of the course was mainly downhill, so I didn't even mention when we reached a mile.  We finished half the race with Alice barely complaining!  This was great!  But once we turned back around and started going more uphill, Alice wanted to stop and walk.  I convinced her that we really needed to keep on running because we didn't want a dog to beat us (see above picture), but we were going so slow, we couldn't even see the dog after awhile.  Alice started really really wanting to stop and walk, but I really really wanted to run the whole thing so I looked behind me and the walkers were right on our tail (we were the last of the runners pretty much the whole race) and one of the walkers was Holly's father who was pushing a jogging stroller.  I told Alice that we couldn't let Brad beat us, that we had to keep on running!  Alice really latched onto this and kept on looking back and got so worried about Brad beating us that we pretty much ran the whole way.  There were moments where we'd walk a minute or two, maybe 4-5 minutes of walking total, but we mostly ran.

  

This is the home stretch, about the point where Alice said to me, in no uncertain terms, that she was never ever going to run a race again.

And this is the point where she told me she wanted to run 10 more races so she could get 10 more gold medals, so she could be rich!  Our final time was 43 minutes--not bad for a 5 year old!