Friday Night With The Kids -- 3 Run/1 Walk

Tonight was fun!! (I'm actually writing this a night late, but who cares.) I came home from work and decided to go running a little early. My wife asked me if I'd take some of the kids with me. Why not. I figured it could be fun. I was originally thinking I was taking 5, but when it was all said and done, 7 of them ended up at the track with me.

When we first got to the 4 that had ridden in the car with me all headed right to the track and started running a lap. It took me a couple minutes to get my HRM set up for the interval change and get stretched out. Just as I was about to start, one of my sons, who I was expecting, arrived on his bike. I headed off. As I was coming out of the final turn of my first lap, I looked at my GPS to see how much running time I had left on my first interval. ARGH!!! I hadn't started it correctly!! So I wasn't even getting credit for it on the HRM. I went ahead and started my walking there, and reset the intervals on the HRM. Got it up and running, and took off again. About that time, 2 more of my sons arrived on their bikes. (We only live about a half mile from the track.) By this time, most of the little kids had bored of running laps, (I think they ran one at the most, some less than that) and they had ventured off to various things -- running around the grass on the football field, playing on a dirtpile they found or frisbee on an adjacent field.

On about the 4th interval tonight(I had 8 to do), as I came up one of the straightaways, there was my 4 year old son, the B-Lakester as he likes to be called. As I came along side him, he told he he was going to run with me. Lucky for him, that interval was about to turn from walking to running. I think I was the most relieved that it was time to walk for a minute, but he picked up quickly on what the beeping "watch" that I was wearing meant. When it came time to run again, I started to pull away from him a little bit. He told me to slow down and wait for him. My first thought was about how it would affect my distance travelled tonight. But I immediately followe that thought up with the thought if, does that really matter? And it didn't. So I slowed down to his pace again. He eventually bored of running on that interval, but did join me one more time before the night was up.

Who knows, maybe he'll be running the marathon with me next year!! That could be pretty entertaining.