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Normally, I like my Sundays to consist of sleeping, eating, and watching movies and football. This past Sunday was nearly the opposite of that.

I got up at what we here on the internet like to call o’dark-thirty and went to Oakland to participate in the Great Race 5k. This was kind of a big deal for me, because it was my first “real” race. The Race for the Cure was fun and it was a good experience, but I couldn’t do much running. This time, people were actually there to race and while it was still a fun atmosphere, I could tell that there was more intensity in the air.

I got kind of nervous the night before and considered backing out, but by the time I got to the starting line and had time to stretch and warm up, I felt ready to go. I had whipped together a playlist on the shuttle to the start and it ended up being totally perfect.

When the starting gun went off, there was the initial stutter of everyone trying to go, but it cleared out pretty quickly and we were off.

I was surprised at how good I felt. The first jog I had done since injuring my toe had left my legs feeling kind of crampy, perhaps from favoring my left leg, and I was worried that I would have more of the same. But my legs felt fine. My only real discomfort came from the long-sleeved shirts that we were issued, which felt good at the beginning but oppressive about halfway through.

I walked for a bit near Duquesne, deciding not to wear myself out on the small hill, and a few more times for a few seconds while drinking some water.

I pulled into Point State Park at around 38:28 and I was pretty pleased with myself and my time. I was surprised to find myself feeling pretty emotional, even tearing up for a second. I started jogging kind of on a whim over a year and a half ago, because I needed to do something about my physical and mental health. Jogging led to a slow revamping of my diet, which led to a rekindling in my interests in yoga and Pilates. The cool thing is that I consider more challenges and don’t get discouraged because I won’t be the best at them, but excited because I can just go and DO them. All of this is to say that I might be doing some rather foolish things over the next six months or so.

That's my "I'm about 10 minutes away from a caffeine headache," look.

Crazily enough, the Great Race was the first of several big items on my to-do list for Sunday. I still needed to get coffee (see: aforementioned impending caffeine headache), get the baby’s soccer pictures taken, watch the baby’s soccer game, send the baby off with my dad to the Pirates game, do something with the 5 pounds of chicken in my fridge that were thisclose to going bad (ended up making the most massive batch of chicken noodle soup), wrap the husband’s birthday gifts, go to the mother-in-law’s house for the husband’s birthday party with the totally awesome birthday cake in tow, birthday it up, watch the Steelers game, watch Boardwalk Empire.

The baby’s soccer game went really well. He scored what ended up being the game-winning goal and did a really great victory run. There are a lot of things that are really cool about being that kid’s mom. One of the coolest is seeing things start to click into place for him. Score soccer goals? Totally doable. Play Beatles songs on the piano? Got it, though there will be some angst first. Learn Spanish? On it. Understand math? Please. Read books and start to realize that they’re more than just words on a page? That the stories are there to help you understand the world and your place in it? Obviously!

He’s going to be 10 soon. Last night, after some bickering escalated into shouting on my part, I took awhile to cool off. Later, I asked him to come sit with me for a bit and he let me hug him for a long time as I apologized for yelling the way I did and saying mean things (and then “reminded” him that he owed me an apology, too, for being a jerk in the first place). I looked out of the corner of my eye at his head resting on my shoulder, his cute little ear poking up. It used to look just that way when he was a baby, too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2011 at 11:44 am and is filed under baby, dumb shit that i do, life n'at. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.