FitOne Family 5K

A week after Marc ran his marathon, we were signed up to run the FitOne 5K together as a family. Lexi really wanted to try to run a 5k, the boys were excited to do another race, and we were able to get the whole family registered for $30! Unheard of in the racing world by the way! Training for it over the summer was so difficult. Not to mention, the boys were at a totally different pace/endurance level than Lexi. It was easiest to train on a track. I could push Isabel in the stroller, run with Lexi, and the boys could run however many laps they wanted as fast as they wanted. This worked out really well for us in June, but then they locked up the tracks and we were back to the streets/neighborhood roads. If we didn't get out first thing in the morning before Isabel went back down for her morning nap, we didn't run. We had an instance where I was running with Lexi, and I had told the boys to go up one road, then turn and meet us on the other in the neighborhood and they misunderstood me and ran home instead. We didn't know they had run home instead, so we spent about 30 minutes looking, yelling for them then headed home so I could grab my bike where we finally found them. Anything past 2 miles was slow going and extremely difficult for Lexi. I found that the best method was to run for 2 minutes, walk for 30 seconds. It was hard to know how much to push her, and when to just shut my mouth and let her walk. I tried to go a lot easier on her than I did with the boys and just be as encouraging as possible. 

When the week of the race came, I really had no desire to run it. I seriously considered just not doing it several times. Especially, because the boys were missing their second football game of the season, Marc was still recovering from his race, and we were exhausted and under trained. We decided to do it anyway. We went down to Boise on Friday night to the race expo. It was a lot more impressive than anticipated! We had to wait in line for quite awhile to get our packets, and then our t-shirts, but we enjoyed looking around at all the stuff that was set up. I especially enjoyed the little photo booths, they had a couple of them set up with silly costumes/props and best of all, they were free! 

There was a few food samples, games for the kids to play, all sorts of vendors, spin the wheel prizes, etc. It was late by the time we got home, had everyone lay out their race clothes, and things packed up for the morning. 

On the race day morning, I woke up Lexi and she popped out of bed "It's my race day!" We ate breakfast in the car. We loaded shuttles at the Boise Mall, and those took us downtown to the race start. There was lots of people there! The starting line was at the Boise Capitol. 

 The plan was for Marc to stay with Lexi and push Isabel. He was still feeling tight from his marathon and we knew Lexi would be pretty slow. That meant that the boys were running with me, and Marc told them they needed to stay with me. 

That was fine and dandy, but I couldn't keep up with them, and kept pulling them back. Tyler was frustrated. So frustrated that he was nearly angry with me. He just wanted to run as fast as he could! 

 They left me at the finish line shoot, which was probably the longest finishing shoot I have ever run through! Good grief! 

Right after we finished, we went back out to the road to go wait for Marc and Lexi and cheer them on. I got a phone call from Marc asking "where are you?" I said we're right before the finish line, where are you? he says "we already finished, we're at the letter G flag". I seriously thought they had taken the short cut (it was almost half the distance of the actual 5k) because there was no way Lexi could have finished that quickly. I was totally wrong. They had come in just about 2 minutes behind us. Our little girl had run the entire race. She had knocked the socks off every adult that she passed.  

Overall, it was fun to do together. I think we'll try to do it again next year, especially if we can get the promotional rate again. But next year, I will let the boys run it as fast as they want and I won't stand in their way!