Awesome 3000!

I sincerely apologize if you've already heard my outrageously proud description of Avery's race this past weekend. I had to post these pics and brag at least once more! This past Saturday, Avery ran in the Awesome 3000 in Salem. It's sponsored by the Salem-Keizer Educational Foundation and any kid in the Salem district can participate. This was Avery's first year. She's been looking forward to it for a while and kept asking me over the past month or so if she could go running with me to train for her race. When I saw her out on the soccer field completely winded after a few plays, I figured I needed to help her get in shape a bit. Don't get me wrong, she's VERY active, but it's been raining and cold for the past 6 months and she just didn't have a lot of endurance. I was a bit worried, though, since it was a 1.5k, which ends up being just under a mile. And there was a HUGE crowd of people there! I really second-guessed myself just letting her go into a big crowd and do a race all by herself. It was very well-organized, though, and several measures were taken to make sure kids were kept safe.

This is Avery and her good buddy, Blake. Blake is in kindergarten, also, but they were split up by gender, so they didn't get to run together.

Avery is somewhere in that giant crowd of kindergarten girls with the volunteers all in blue. They were getting ready to start and I was nervous!

Ok, so the pictures of the start of the race are just a mess of girls running. After about 8 1/2 minutes, a few girls come back into the field. That's right, they didn't just run on a track. The course took them through the park and ended up back in front of the crowd. I was SHOCKED when I saw Avery enter in the very front of the crowd! She's in the middle area of the picture with the volunteer pointing her toward the finish line. She's all alone! I found out later that a big reason she was alone was that the girls all got stopped right after she entered the track because the boys had started their race a bit late and needed to get through. That was really disappointing for them, I'm sure. I don't know if anyone would have passed Avery before she finished, but her time was accurate.

Here she comes rounding the corner to the finish line!! Needless to say, I was screaming and jumping wildly!!

And she finished! She was 8th place out of 163 kindergarten girls! I am still so amazed at her! She said she wanted to stop and was tired, but I don't think it even occurred to her to actually stop when she was so close to the finish. Her time was 9min, 18 sec.

Did I make my point that I'm SO PROUD of my girl???????????