Emma’s First Race

Emma ran her first official kid’s race on Saturday morning and it was a hit! I decided to sign her up a few weeks ago, in part because she seems to love running everywhere else (parking lots, long store aisles, the mall, etc) so an event specifically designed for her to run seemed like a no-brainer. But let’s be honest — I’ve also been waiting for her to get old enough for a Kid’s K basically since she was born.

Since she just turned 2 a couple months ago and is still pretty young for this type of thing, I figured we’d just take it super easy and casual. If she was into it — great! If not, no big deal, and we’d just move on to the 5K (which started right after the kid’s race, and during which she rode in the stroller, obviously).

Turns out she was pretty excited about it! The whole drive there, she kept saying “I run, I run” from the back seat, and I had prepped her for the crowd by talking about how she could run with other people and other kids. (And I had purposefully picked a small race, so “the crowd” was about 15 kids and no more than ~150 people total.)

During her “warm up” (aka random running around the parking lot before the race) she fell and scraped both knees just a bit. I was worried that might put a damper on the rest of the morning, but she dusted off her “boo boo” and was perfectly fine.

She ran some, and walked some, and ran some more. I thought a full kilometer would be too much for a 2-year old, so we just went out for a couple minutes, then turned around on our own and headed back to the finish line.

We probably covered about a quarter mile in all, on a gorgeous fall morning with cool temperatures and nice bright sunshine.

I didn’t get a great finish line photo since a bunch of other kids were coming through at the same time, but no matter — rest assured that she crossed the line in style!

Post-race victory photo! She got a medal and everything! I don’t know if Emma will remember this for very long, but I was one proud mama.