Bubble Run

So this story really starts back in January when my sister, Sarah, emailed me that she was thinking about running a half-marathon in June and would I be interested in running it with her. At that point, I really hadn't gotten back into running yet but I said I would go on some runs and let her know. Well, we kept in touch about it and both went on some longer runs to see how we felt and long-story-short, she got injured so we shelved the idea for now. (Aaaaaaaaaand I just realized I never responded to your last email about that, Sarah - I'm so sorry!!! Hope you're feeling better and sorry I'm a dork and maybe next year? I'll call you sometime soon.)

But that got me back into running. Second part of the story starts in February when we were trying to come up with ideas to motivate Speed with karate. They have a star system at his karate academy and one of the stars the students can earn is a purple star, which is for physical fitness. They have to do 3 1-minute sets of exercises to check off a box in one column and 3 minutes of endurance work to check off a box in the other column. There are 30 boxes in each column so it's meant to be a pretty beefy endeavor. So I started going on 3 minute runs with Speed and he started getting faster and faster and enjoying it more.

So sometime in late February, an ad showed up in my Facebook feed for something called the Bubble Run. I was intrigued so I checked out the website and it looked pretty fun: 5K through areas of bubbles, all for fun. So I talked to Speed about it and tried to give him an idea how much he'd have to train to be able to run a 5K and he agreed to do it. We trained for another two weeks before I actually purchased our passes just to be sure he was really going to be okay with the increased training. We would run for the 3 minutes and then walk until Speed had his breath back and then we'd run some more. Then we would work on exercises when we got home - sit-ups, push-ups, etc.

But the time we made it to early April, Speed had finished the whole purple star form! The karate instructor told us that they encourage the kids to go for multiple of the stars, especially the hard ones like the purple star, so we grabbed another paper and just kept going.

I have to tell you, this kid is a ROCK STAR. We had some hard moments, especially on our long runs leading right up to race day. We'd get about 2 miles in and he just wanted to be done. I sure didn't blame him - I wanted to be done too! But he pushed through and even started repeating my own words back to me: "I'm a Wall and Walls don't give up!"

Race day started off a bit nerve-wracking for me. To start, the race was down in Goodyear, which is a suburb of Phoenix that is about a 40 minute drive from where we live. So I was worried that we'd be late. I was also worried that we'd have trouble with the parking and that I would forget to pack diapers for the little kids who were staying with Jacob at the finish line and that I'd forget my paperwork I needed to pick up our packets....and so on and so on and so on. Basically, this was just a brand new experience for me and I'd dragged my four-year-old son into participating with me and dragged my husband and 3 other children into spectating for us!

Thankfully, everything went great. We made good time on the drive, packet pick-up was easy and we were in the second wave of people to start the run. I was surprised how many people just walked the whole thing. I think it made it harder to convince Speed to run more of the time - he would actually say to me (in a really loud voice), "Why do I have to run? No one else is running!" We made good compromises and made decent time. Not as good as our best practice time but still pretty good: 48:48. A 15:30-ish mile at not yet 5 years old? Like I said: ROCK STAR.

Speed got lots of compliments about how cute he was and how well he was doing. The bubble parts were really fun to run through, especially when the bubbles were higher than Speed's head. Speed said it was awesome and he's excited to do it again next year. From talking to Hazel and other family members, I think we have the beginnings of a team for next year's run!

It was a lot of fun to train and then run this race with Speed. I really enjoyed all our one-on-one time and the talks we got to have on our training runs. We're still finishing up the exercise column of his second purple star form but he has days where he wants to do 4 boxes at once (!) and he rocks it. He's a strong kid and just keeps getting stronger and I love that I get to watch it happen.

Also, we just HAD to hit up McDonald's for our post-race meal because.... the ROCK STAR wanted to. :-)

One funny thing is that Jacob and I were talking a few days before the race and one of us (I think it was me) mentioned that it would be fun to have the GoPro for the entire race. So Jacob (being Jacob) did some checking, figured out the right tool to use and how to hold it, and behold, we have a video of the entire race. And thanks to Jacob's awesome editing skills, it's only 6 and a half minutes instead of the 50-ish it took us to run the actual race - enjoy!