Track

Honey and I were so very proud of John for taking a break from baseball to give another sport a try.  I’ll be honest and say that in these neck of the woods it’s a hard thing to do.  A lot of kids play year round and do travel teams in the summer.  John likes baseball enough and is good enough, but he didn’t show a real passion for it so we’ve been encouraging him for about 18 months to try something else.  He’s a pretty talented runner, but even in this sport many of the kids his age had a few years under the belts.  That being said, he had a great first season!!

He trained for a couple of months and then competed in four meets – trying all sorts of races and field events.

We knew going in that his strength would be in the distance races, but we let him figure that out for himself :-)  After a couple of 25th place out of 28 runners in the 100m dash, he settled in on the 400m and 800m towards the end of the season.  He achieved a new personal best meet over meet at every single meet, usually ending up in 7th/8th place in the longer distance races.

 

He really shined in the shot put – consistently getting 2nd/3rd place and having the best distance on our team.  He’s a scrawny thing, built like his mama, so it was pretty shocking :-)

I shared this little nugget in Instagram a while back…  Honey told me 5 years ago to never talk aloud about sports when I called home plate 4th base at John’s first baseball game.  Things have really not improved.  And besides, shock put really sounds much more exciting.

Speaking of giggles and grins, that’s really what John was in it for.  Hanging with his little buddies from school, running back and forth to the “bullet pen”, downing bags of pistachio nuts and cooling off with QuikTrip slushies on the way home.  Much like the swim meets, he said multiple times… “Mommy I LOVE track!!!!!!!  Well, everything but the running.”  LOL.  We consistently spent seven hours at these meets to watch him run a total of four minutes.  And he adored it!!

He will miss the area meet, which is required to move on to any others, so his season is now complete.  I’m not sure what the fall holds sports wise for this kid.  Honey and I would love to see him try cross country, and he is considering going back to baseball.  As for the summer, we are planning to bask in the glory of long, candy filled swim meets and will be dusting off the tennis racquets!
xoxo