Today, Aaron ran his first cross country meet, with the inaugural team at DHMC. The team is run by one of the teachers, coach John. They’ve been training for a couple of weeks, and this was their first competition, the Falcon Invitational. We had a rough start to the day, having trouble finding the park, then having trouble finding the entrance to the park, then having trouble finding the coach and team. But we found them, I let my blood pressure drop, and relaxed a bit before the meet.

I remembered to bring the camera, not just for me, but I thought perhaps coach John would be preoccupied with coaching, as opposed to picture taking. I took many photos, and tried to get as many kids and group shots as possible. But these are for you loyal readers. The first one, I got lucky and managed to align the stupid camera’s own sense of timing with the starter’s gun, and I got the kids right as they began to move. All the kids in black on the left are runners from Aaron’s team. It’s interesting that the boys have clearly begun to lunge across the starting line:

Here is the back of Aaron’s coach and teacher, John, cheering Aaron on. BTW, coach John asked Aaron after the meet to design the team’s logo!

Here is Aaron, crossing the finish line, flying hair and all. Even though we got it cut last week, it seems like he has a horse’s mane here in this shot. Ok, I admit I think this looks kind of cool. He cut a 14:51.6 for the two miles in the cold rain, which gives him a 7:26 per mile pace. John was really impressed by this, and told Aaron so. Because I’m such a competitive person, I had to see how long it was until his next team mate crossed the line, about 2:30 later. I’m pretty sure both Aaron and Adam would smoke me if we went running together, but I can’t wait to try, once my knee heals. I think it would be fun to run with them. They would try really hard to drop their Dad, and their Dad would try really hard not to get dropped. We be perfect training partners.

PS: when I last wrote about Adam’s running last year, I mentioned that he was using my running shoes. Guess who’s running in them now? Reuse, recycle…