#72 Run/Walk Turkey Trot 2008 – CHECK – 11/2008

I have accomplished a few goals on my 101 goals in 1001 days list that I have yet to blog about. So here goes one of them...

Early Thanksgiving morning, we got our whole family, our jogging stroller, and our out-of-town guests loaded up in our van to head for downtown Dallas. It was a cool morning so we were all wearing many layers as we parked and walked the streets of downtown toward the starting line. I had never done any sort of organized run before so I was excited to see what lay ahead. There was a big group of us going - my whole immediate family, Matt's Dad, his brother Daniel and his fiancee Stephanie, and 4 of the 5 Schroders (Matt's sister's family). Most were doing the "fun run" or 3 mile, and a couple crazies were doing the 8 mile. It was fun to be doing the Turkey Trot as a family.

The first big run experience I got to have, was waiting 15 minutes to use a lovely port-o-potty. Nice. While in line, I got to hear them officially start the race without me. No worries though, by the time I was finished and back with my group, we still had to wait another 15 minutes before we actually crossed the starting line. There were that many people running that morning. So we started moving around 9:30 and enjoyed our walking time. The kids were snug in their stroller with their snacks and drinks and we hoped they would just kick back and enjoy the ride. Conditions quickly deteriorated however, as Gabriella's naptime approached. For some reason that I still cannot explain to this day, I casually tossed her beloved bunny and paci back into the car as we headed for the starting line saying "we won't need these." She started screaming, ready to sleep but not able to without her sleep aids. So she screamed for about 30 minutes at the top of her lungs with everyone staring at us as we tried everything in our attempts to comfort her. What eventually worked was one of us holding her while she slept in our arms. Now that's something we didn't sign up for - walking 3 miles holding an 18 pound infant. That worked for a while, but by mile 2.5, we were all spent. We made the decision to bow out of the race and head for the car. We like to think it was about another half mile back to the car from where we bailed so we call it a finished race... we just happened to make our own course at the end. It felt so wonderful to be back in the car and headed home to a filling Thanksgiving dinner!