The first-ever Pirate Dash 5K and Fun Run were held this past Saturday in Mayberry. It was a fundraiser for the PTC for the two schools that cover grades kindergarten through sixth grade, so it was heavily promoted to the students. Sarah Kate’s school running club, in particular, had trained specifically for this event.
Unfortunately, Sarah Kate doesn’t have the stamina to cover 3.1 miles, which meant she couldn’t run the 5K with the rest of the running club. However, the club sponsor wanted her to be involved, so they talked about different ways she could be included. We talked over several possibilities, but ultimately settled on having her be the race starter (in large part because play rehearsal interfered with most of the other choices).
In case you’re wondering about the white T-shirt and the sparkly blue skirt worn over the purple top and pants… it was cold and she didn’t have a lot of cold weather options, but she wanted to dress in the school colors (many of the running club girls wore blue and yellow tutus) and the shirt is the official race shirt.
The gig was pretty simple: hang with the emcee, Coach Sowden from the elementary school, and sound the horn when the time came. No problem.
The trick, of course, was not getting trampled by the enthusiastic horde of kids. 🙂 She pulled that off, too.
So are you wondering where Nathan was during all the excitement? He was with Mr. Andi, which worked out just fine except for one heart-stopping moment after the race started when he thought he needed to do a little sprint, too, and made it into an intersection a block down from the start with a car sorta-kinda heading toward the same intersection.
He did, however, get to meet our Mayberry mascot, the pirate (yes, we have the same school colors as Bluebell on Hart of Dixie, and yes, our biggest rival is Daphne, and yes, occasionally they do show an actual shot of Mayberry which is supposed to be Bluebell, but no, we don’t celebrate Planksgiving). You can see how excited he was.
So, yeah, the race wasn’t high on his list of Fun Things to Do on a Saturday, but the playground a few blocks away? That was a different story.
We had a little time to kill between the 5K start and play rehearsal, so we took advantage of the fact that it was early on Saturday morning and also cold and windy outside (read: no one but us was foolish enough to be at the park at that time and in those conditions).
And I know all of you folks north and east of us are looking at Nathan’s lack of gloves, mittens, a hat, or even a heavy coat and reading “cold and windy” and laughing at us, but hey – that’s how we roll down here. Anything south of 45 degrees is COLD. 🙂
Happy Tuesday.
