It's Spring BREAK!!!

"The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start."
-John Bingham

So, we are on Spring break now. Last week was out last week of practice for almost two weeks due to holiday schedules. I mentioned how the week before we were having team troubles and one of the girls suggested that we shorten the talking/lessons and spend more time warming up and actually running. That she really missed running more. Funny thing, I agreed with her. The lessons are great but this season they felt a bit more time consuming and I felt like the girls weren't getting their full allotted time to run. So that being said-I ended up giving the girls almost 45 minutes to run. I told them the goal Monday was to run 40 miles as a team. That's a huge task for 15 little girls to do because many of them are still struggling in that first mile!

But you know what, I had no doubts that given an objective that the girls could achieve it. It meant they needed to do 240 laps around my makeshift track. And the sad thing-they got 239 laps! I mean, seriously, these are the girls who I thought would never get focused or on board. I was "hard core" that day. I couldn't run with them myself because I had injured my arm the day prior. As a matter of fact I didn't even get to go to work that morning and I had to have a friend come to practice with me because I always think of the girls' safety first and I knew that if someone got injured I wouldn't have been able to pick her up if I needed to. I am so thankful I have friends that are willing to take a little time out of their busy schedule to bring me an extra set of hands.

While sitting there handing out beads, I got so proud of these kids and realized that in just a few weeks they have already grown so much. They have really taken it upon themselves to work better as a team and to really focus on their running and the lessons. We have switched up the format a little bit because we are learning the girls are in crazy mode when they are coming out of class and its better if we do a quick warm up/stretch and let them Run and then take them inside to let them drink water and go over their lesson for the day. They seem to like the newer format too. I switch it depending on the lesson but we are finding for my little team that they are more focused after they have run.

So I plan something special for Thursday's lesson. The girls have worked hard for weeks, really tried to get better at running...Just overall I have been impressed.

So Thursday I get out of work a little early, pick up my daughter from school and we head to the sporting store and pick up a kick ball, soccer ball, and then head to the store to get cupcakes, juice, snacks, and head to practice. Today I am determined to have a fun filled day of exercise. Funny that our lesson was about Centering yourself. Because I pretty much went in the opposite direction. It has nothing to do with me not liking the lesson, we did go over it but the girls each showed me how they like to get centered/calm and then instead of doing the meditation sequence we went outside and worked on team building exercises. We did two teams of the human knot and let the girls work together. Now, the objective is to untangle themselves as a team and get into a circle. This has gone very wrong in prior seasons where kids cry, get hurt, or start yelling. One team achieved un-knotting themselves very quickly and they helped set up the cupcake picnic. The other team was unable to achieve the un-knot process-HOWEVER, they worked together with little to no problems. Seriously, that is impressive if you know what these girls have been like. So they all happily ate their cupcakes as they were given their options for activities. We ended up doing a round of kickball AND then we did a round of freeze tag.

So in the end I got all the girls running and exercising, just that they have a really fun time at it. Its one of the things I tell people all the time, running can be fun, its just about your approach.

And we bid our farewells as we headed into the spring holiday break and I smiled the whole way home with my daughter thinking about what a great idea it was to give those kids a bit of a mental break.