As I write this blog post with a big smile on my face, my kids are outside playing.  It’s 7:00 p.m. and it’s still light out.  I’m happy that they are still outside playing and not wiped out on the couch from their tremendous accomplishments over the past week.  Today was the last 5K race of the Hartford Marathon Foundation Trinity Race Series.  This means we all participated in a 5K last Sunday in Putnam, a 5K yesterday in Niantic (IN THE SNOW!) and a 5K today in Hartford!  I will post about each race separately but wanted to summarize what took place in the past week.  I am so proud of my children and my husband and dad and especially my mom!

We signed up for these races because she wants to do a Disney 5K.  She had her knee replace last March and it was a grueling recovery time.  I kept telling her that her recovery efforts were her marathon to get better.  She wanted to do a 5K with me one day.  Well that day finally came last weekend.  My kids, husband, mom and dad had never done a 5K race before and they all just completed a three race Challenge!

I hadn’t written about this yet, but my word of the year for my one word resolution is Challenge.  I am going to challenge myself this year in all aspects of my life.   I recently received a challenge when my co-worker, who is also becoming a good friend, resigned from her job last week.  Thankfully she is going to be around for three more weeks; but now I have the challenge of learning as much as I can from her in that short time.  She has been a mentor to me since I started working there in October.  I thought I knew stuff, but man does she know so so much more!!!!  But we will remain friends after she leave and will remain in touch with each other so I am not worried.  I am just going to face the challenge like I do with everything else and do my best.

My kids faced their challenges with these races the past two weekends because they both had suffered colds.  First my son had one last weekend and my daughter, of course, caught his cold and had it for this weekend’s races.  But we all showed up for the races, despite the cold, the drizzle, snow and fierce wind!  Each race had its own unique issues; but they were all great (the jury is still out on the O’Niantic race).  I laugh because the entire mile 1.5 to the end my daughter whimpered “I can’t do it, I can’t do it.”  But then as we crossed the line and she got her medal she had the biggest smile!  My husband had meniscus surgery on his knee last September and a stress fracture of that leg so he wasn’t so sure how he would hold up running a race, but he told me he wanted to run the 5K with me.  It was fun pulling him along and showing him the Jeff Galloway method.  He always commented on how he thought it was different not “running” the entire race.  I think if we didn’t use it he’d be in a lot of pain tonight.  I may have convinced him that the method works!

What a great way to kick of the Spring racing season!  Stay tuned for recaps of the past three races, the O’Putnam 5K, the O’Niantic 5K and the O’Hartford 5K.