I think I know what it feels like to be a zombie. I'm feeling like one tonight. I'm sitting here in my chair not wanting to do much else. We've got a fire going tonight. The second one this....I guess you'd call pre-fall. Actually by now it must be fall as of the last day or two right? Whatever! It feels so nice. I love a toasty wood fire.
I never slept last night. We had to be on a bus by 5 am for a big x-country meet in New Hampshire. It was still dark when I boarded that bus. I'm not a morning person. I believe in getting up when the sun gets up and not before but hey, we've all got to make concessions, and today was one for me I guess. It didn't seem right getting up at 4 am. But then I was awake pretty much the whole night anyhow. At one point I jumped out of bed at 1:22 and turned on the light. I think I dropped off for a few minutes and then woke again scared. When I did this, my husband was startled and started to get up, "What are you doing? It's only 1:22" he said. "Oh" I said, and went back to bed only to get up again at 3:15 to check my watch using the bathroom light this time.
I was just so fearful I would not hear the alarm or that it wouldn't go off and I couldn't seem to shut my brain off from that thought process. When 4 am rolled around, I knew I was going to pay the price for the night of no sleep. I was facing 12 hours with a busload of very energetic teenagers. I was in big trouble.
One teen, Breezy did not make the bus so at 5 in the morning we're calling her house. She overslept. That could have been me I thought. So arrangements were made for her to meet our bus on the way and away we went.
There's thousands of teenagers at this meet with all kinds of divisions and races going off every half hour. Buses lined up for a mile dropping kids and tents off before parking. Just when we got there the sky opened up. Great, I thought, this is not going to be pleasant. It poured pretty much all day. We set up our tent in the rain. As a coach I'm running all over the 3.1 mile course probably running more than any of the runners individually by the end of the day. My feet are soaked, my hair is a frizz ball and the layers of clothing I put on this morning are all soaked. At least it wasn't bitter cold out. Wet and miserable but not cold. To top that all off there's not nearly enough porta potties to go around and the lines are a mile long. Why don't they ever get enough potties for these things? Every time we went to check , the lines were longer than before.
Regardless of the rain, we had some really bright spots today. No the sun did not shine (until we were on the way home) but our top boy got 6th place in the Varsity race and had a time of 16:49 beating his last year's place and time of 17:09. He was very pleased. He received a medal since the top 50 received medals in this race, but he didn't have the extra dollar to have it engraved. I wanted him to have that engraved so I handed him a dollar and his face lit up well worth the dollar in my estimation.
Our freshman girl got 14th place also receiving a medal. Her race gave out 25 medals to the first runners out of at least 200 by looking at the group at the start. We also had a Varsity girl placing 30th good enough for a medal being in the top 50.
Midway thru the day as we headed back to the tent in between a race we realized we put our tent in a bad spot. It must have been a low spot because the ground in and around our chosen area had the rain water settling and draining right there. Great. Need to move the tent and all the gear that's underneath it. With 25 kids this is alot of gear. Backpacks, jackets, portable chairs, blankets, sweats, etc. all got moved. Of course much of it by now was fairly wet, mostly wet, or soaking wet. Nothing was dry except what was still inside our duffle bags. Thank goodness I thought to take an extra pair of dry shoes and socks. They would not come out until I was back on the bus. After the last race was done, we packed up all our gear in record time and headed for the bus. Of course some had to use the potties, some had to have their medals engraved, some wanted to buy a snack....meet me on the bus I kept saying. That's where I'll be.
Ahhh the bus. Back to my blanket and pillow I remembered to bring along. First thing first. Strip off the socks and shoes and put on a dry pair. This felt like heaven. Little things can bring great pleasure sometimes. This was one of those times.
A stop at McDonalds and off we went for home. A pillow and a blanket feels really nice even on a bumpy school bus especially when you're as tired as I was. But even that doesn't beat this fire I'm sitting by right now.
And of course, the sun was brightly shining as we began our trek back home. Figures.