Three Things Thursday: Track, Healthy Ever After and…

Getting back into my blogging groove with a Three Things Thursday about what’s keeping me busy these days:

1. Dude’s Track Team:

The elementary schools in our district have an annual track meet for grades 3-5. As a 5th grader, this is Dude’s 3rd year on the team. The last two years he ran the 4 x 100 relay and his team earned a spot on the podium in 3rd place both times. He’s also run a few other shorter events. This year, he’s running the 4 x 400 relay and the 800m race. Stepping up the distance!

Several parents and myself have volunteered to help the teachers with track training. I go to the school on Fridays during their lunch to lead them in a sprint workout and then on Saturday mornings we meet at the high school track for an easy, longer run. The teachers lead a workout after school on Thursdays for the whole team and another parent comes on Tuesdays after school to work with the field event kids.

These kids are pretty amazing. They’re all working really hard. We’ve had 4 weeks of practice, with 2 more to go before the meet. I get a little bit of griping during the lunch hour workout because they all want to get back to playing, but it’s not everyone, so it’s not that big of a deal.

I think at this week’s long run, I’m going to have the kids to 1/2 a lap at their goal pace – most of them can do a mile in about 7:30, so according to my research, it’s not unreasonable for them to do a 1/2 a lap in :30. I’ve been having them run about a mile at a 9:30 pace. My kid wears my Garmin to help them keep pace and I encourage them to chat with their friends and to have fun. We also do a dynamic warm up and cool down stretches. It’s pretty amazing to get 25 kids and their parents to the high school track on a Saturday morning for this.

The first day, I introduced myself and explained who I was and what my plan was going to be. I made sure to tell them all that I’m not trained in anything, but I run myself and while I can’t possibly keep up with the kids, I do know that the additional workouts will only help them. We go for less than 30 minutes in the weekend workout and the Friday lunch workout is less than 15.

Oh – the funniest part – during the sprint workouts, I’m trying to get the kids to understand their own effort levels. I typically ask them to do 3 different speeds so they can understand their own abilities. When I asked them what was 100% effort in a sprint, one of the kids said “give it your best”. It was sort of that “everyone gets a trophy”, “give it the good old college try” kind of a comment and I had to chuckle and explain that 100% effort in a sprint will leave them just short of wanting to throw up. They were amused of course, but I do think they’re getting the idea of their own different speeds.

Now to help the kids doing the 800m understand the strategy of that race. Actually, to go learn about that myself.

2. Healthy Ever After

I’ve blogged about this amazing program many times before, but now that my kid is leaving the elementary school, I’ve been on a frantic search for someone to take over the program. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find someone willing to spearhead it. I have, however, found 2 parents that are willing to help me to run it next year. So, I’m now the crazy parent that will still volunteer at the school that my kid no longer attends. I just think that this program is so worthwhile, it’s completely worth my time to make sure it continues. With the help of 2 other people doing the job I did by myself for the last 2 years, I think it won’t be too awfully time consuming. I likely won’t teach any classes, but will just help coordinate. One of the parents that stepped up said she’d do all the volunteer coordination which makes me so happy because that’s my least favorite part about running this type of program.

The RD that developed the program is actually not going to be involved next year, but there are 2 other RDs at the hospital that will be running it.

The last lesson that we taught this year was all about eating locally and farmers markets and seasonal produce. I’ve even been able to work in a home component so that parents are getting the information in the school newsletter. I’m so excited to expand that part of it all next year and encourage the kids to talk about the program with their parents. There are 5 lessons a year and it’s a 3 year cycle of lessons, so this will now be our 3rd year and then the lessons will rotate back to the beginning. I hope to blog about it more next year too.

3. Dance

So, this doesn’t involve me all that much – mostly my taxiing service (which includes Starbucks runs)… but since I talked about what’s keeping my younger kid busy, I’ll mention a little about the older. This weekend upcoming is the last of her regular season dance competitions (they just have a national competition in the summer). It’s been an amazing season. With her first solo, it’s been a joy to watch her challenge herself and to learn from the entirely different beast that is getting up on stage and opening herself up to the critique and the competition. Her studio (this is a new studio this year) takes many dances to each competition, and it’s been wild trying to keep up with it all. They’ve had some good success and I’ve become more of a Dance Mom than I thought I’d be. But, now we are gearing up for the auditions for the high school dance team which is a rather highly regarded team and a challenge for anyone to make as a freshman. My kid has set her sights on it and I think I’m more nervous than she is. There’s an intermediate and an advanced team and they do usually take a few freshmen onto the advanced team, but you never know. Fingers crossed…

And because busy parent nerves aren’t already on edge – the track meet and the high school dance team auditions are on the same day. Talk about parent nerves!!! At least I’ll be occupied at the track meet.

(And I totally jinxed myself – I really have pictures for this post and I can’t get anything to upload. I’ve tried from my laptop, my phone and my tablet and my pictures keep disappearing – grr).

The post Three Things Thursday: Track, Healthy Ever After and… appeared first on Family Fitness Food.