Winter Grand Prix

A couple weeks ago, Gareth was invited to go along with our friends to the first race of the Winter Grand Prix. He's never done anything like this before, but decided to check it out. His PE teacher offers a running club at school, where the kids run laps around the playground once a week during recess and get charms for a bracelet for every 7 laps (1 mile) they run . Gareth tries to run at least 10 laps each week. The races for the Grand Prix are about 2 miles, so a little longer than what he runs during recess.

Apparently he enjoyed his first week, despite it raining and being a bit chilly, so we signed him up for the entire series. The first race was a road race, so mostly flat road surfaces. The second race was today and was a cross country race - a little muddy after a some rain yesterday. Gareth's time was a little slower this time around, I'm guessing due to having to run up a hill plus the different surface. Regardless, he still had a lot of fun. He even told me afterward, when I was talking about my feet being cold, that the solution to that was to run rather than just watching.

Mal captured A LOT of pictures on my phone - probably got every runner on there at some point. I went through and deleted those that didn't contain Gareth.

Everyone at the starting line. Gareth is in there somewhere.

Gareth, just after starting

And a close up, about half-way through his first lap.

Mal got pretty into cheering on the runners, especially Gareth. Gareth was losing steam during the second lap, but when our friends and Mal cheered him on at the half-way point, he picked up speed again.

He's already stated that he's interested in trying out cross-country this next fall. It looks like his middle school doesn't have a team, so I'm going to see if we can figure out something for a local team. If you want to follow along with how he's doing, the results get posted on the website linked above a few days after each race.