Confessions of a Serial Swooper

Well, I did it.

I ran my first 5K today (the Coastal 5K Run for the Beach) and, although I was cursing myself midway for signing up in the first place, I managed to finish with a time that was two minutes shorter than my fastest time to date.

If I’m being honest, though, I spent most of the race worrying that I was going to come in last.  I was one of a group of five women in a little pack near (what I thought was) the back.  We all surrendered and walked a little here and there and we all, likely motivated by not being last, kept each other moving — trading places from 1st among us to last among us.  I’ve mentioned before that I’m a way, way overly competitive person so (sadly) somewhere along the way in my training my goal stopped being about beating my best time or even about simply finishing and became more about not reading my name at the bottom of the race results in our local newspaper.

Thankfully, I won’t have to see that.

And, as it turns out, there were a number of other small packs of people finishing well after I’d gotten myself a banana, a drink and headed to the car with my very supportive little family.  So…it’s possible that maybe no one would even have suspected that I was freaking out for the last few days about the possibility of being last.

Well, unless they were within 100 yards or so of the finish line when Big Brother welcomed me with a big hug, a smile and a loud and joyful exclamation of:

“Yay, Mommy!  You’re not last!”

Thanks, buddy.