sad day: cross country is officially over

The cross country coach called me yesterday to invite us to the year-end ice cream social.

Nothing says, "You're done training!" than loading up on fat and sugar, eh?

We turned in Runner Girl's racing jersey and socialized for a little while, and ate some yummy ice cream, but we had to leave early because it was past the baby's bedtime. It wasn't pleasant, leaving. Those kids love Little Mister and he loves playing with them -- one was playing catch with a football with Little Mister. Little Mister was *not* pleased I took him away from the kids and the ball and smacked me across the eyes. Awesome. Even better? He hit the sty in my left eyelid dead on. *sigh* Two is such a hard age.

I talked with the coach about next year, and the other charter schools are pushing for rule changes, as in only letting 7th, 8th, and 9th graders run, and taking the first 5 runners from each team for scoring. That messes up our school two ways: First, our school doesn't have a 9th grade. In our school district, 9th grade is in high school, and our 9th graders go to the charter high school down the street. Second, if our younger runners aren't allowed to run, we won't have 5 runners, boys or girls, to count for our scores.

Honestly, it seems like sour grapes since our young runners are beating their 9th graders. We have 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in the top 5 in every race. Bitter much?

Anyway. Runner Girl will be having her foot surgery to correct her flat feet and remove the extra bones in December. It is a same day surgery and she will be in casts for 4 weeks, then surgical shoes for a couple more weeks. She will be unable to run, jump, or stomp until February/March. We are planning on training starting in March and hopefully we'll do a 5K in June. We decided to train whether the other schools prevail in their desire to exclude our school from the races or not.

In the meantime, I will be getting back to the gym 4 days a week and will call the trainer manager tomorrow to get set up for that. I am hoping to get up to running a 5k every day on the treadmill and/or doing 7.5k on the elliptical so I can keep up with Runner Girl ... and hopefully the team.

p.s. It's The Rock's birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY HONEY!!!