Friday, May 18, 2012

Weekly wrap-up: CLU's graduation, Mother's Day, and track season winding down

Another week in the books.  Nothing earth-shattering to write about, but trying to make posting a weekly habit.  Here's a recap in chronological order:

I attended CLU's graduation ceremony last Saturday.  It was a really nice event.  Perfect weather (imagine that?!?), really good speakers, and it was great to see how much emotion students have during the event.  I found it very motivational to go to and realize that what I'm doing may not seem like much sometimes, but what I'm doing means a lot to some students and I need to always do my best.  (Side note: I'm not going to cover any aspects of a little faculty poker night the night before graduation, but suffice it to say that it was fantastic!)

While I was at CLU's graduation, Brady was running the 400m at the Junior Varsity Conference Finals meet.  He had a really good race.  He placed 3rd out of 32 kids in the event.  He ran out of gas with about 50 meters left, but he was stuck in no-man's-land: he wasn't going to catch the 2 kids in front of him and the kids behind him weren't going to catch him.  It's hard to stay mentally motivated when you feel isolated in a race.  Despite running out of gas, still turned in his fastest 400m time yet at 1:28.11.

On Sunday, Melanie wanted to do a 5K run with Brady for Mother's Day along the beach in
Ventura.  Brady had never ran a timed 5K before, so we weren't sure how fast he'd run.  We figured he'd tootle around for about 30 minutes or so.  Well, much to our surprise, he was quite a bit faster.  He was pacing Melanie to her fastest time ever (she finished with a 25:59) and toward the end he asked her "can I just run my own race now?"  She was going max speed, so she said go ahead and he finished in front of her, then turned around and ran back to her and ran in with her.  Like I said, Melanie ran her fastest time ever and we estimate that Brady's finishing time was around 25:30.  I say estimate because Alex and I missed his finish because we never would have thought he'd be done in just 25 minutes!!  It was a good day for Melanie with a new fastest time and for Brady who had a lot of fun running his first official 5K.

After the Mother's Day run, we went to breakfast together and the boys and I spent the day cleaning the house for mom.  That night we had a wonderful dinner to cap off the weekend.  I am SO THANKFUL for the great Thai restaraunts in Thousand Oaks!  Delicious!

Well, track season for Brady (and for me coaching) is winding down.  Tomorrow will likely be the last meet for most of the kids.  Some of them may qualify for a dual-conference meet in Santa Barbara, but if not, then the season's over.  I've had so much fun coaching the kids this year.  I've mostly worked with the distance kids, but still have been able to interact with the sprinters quite a bit, too.  Tomorrow at the Varsity Conference Finals, we've got quite a few kids running (you have to qualify by time to run at this event, so not all kids were able to make it).  We have a 4x100m relay team, 3 kids in the 100m, 2 kids in the 200m, 1 kid (Brady) in the 800m, and 5 kids running the 1600m (mile), and 3 kids in the long jump.  Considering there are only 9 kids for each of the sprints (100, 200), 12 kids in the 800, and 17 kids in the mile, I'd say Newbury Park is well-represented! Brady competes in the 800 and 1600.  He's pretty stoked!  If he finishes in the top 8 for either event, then he'll qualify for the dual-conference championship.  He's already FAR exceeded what I thought he could do for the year, so I'm not banking on him making it, but I do hope he goes out and has the best and most fun race of the year tomorrow.  I'm so excited for him.

Unfortunately, Alex is going to have to miss his soccer game due to the track meet.  Melanie and I are really bummed about that because he likes soccer so much, but if he goes then Melanie is going to miss Brady's events.  It's hard to do, but since this is a 'big' meet, we wanted to make sure and have the whole family there for the race.  It's tough to pull him away from soccer though because he loves it so much.

And lastly, last night Brady lost his third tooth.  He actually requests us to try and yank out his loose teeth, so I tied a string around it and pulled it out for him.  He was pretty excited about that.

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