Talent begets talent- singing to cross country.

So this is a crazy concept.  Part of Olivia's training for The Voice- kids (8:00 am audition time) was to get up earlier in the mornings and go for a run. Her voice teacher said it would help her lungs, wake her up and get her ready for an early audition. So we ran...every day....for several months.  

Here we are running on a track at 9:00 am during school holidays- yes, I would time them around the track- I only had Mary and Thomas come along during the school holiday/ two week break.

Once The Voice- kids was over, we stopped running.  A few weeks later, Olivia's school had cross country qualifiers for districts. Olivia placed! We couldn't believe it- we didn't know Olivia could run. The truth is, she is tiny compared to her peers, but she had trained (albeit, she was training for voice and so this was icing on the cake, but she was in shape and used to running when it came time to qualify). Here are some picture-

First- qualifying at school- she came in the top 5 for her grade of about 100 kids.

Here she is about to take off- 

 She ran with a stitch (cramps) the whole time, but she still managed to lap a few of her peers. Her goal was to not walk.

Here she is holding her side-

 The course was a 3K

 

I love this picture she is so proud of herself!! About 6 weeks later was divisionals (so the top 5 kids from each school against each other going for districts) To get to Districts you needed to place in the top 8. 

Again, we didn't train :-) I told Olivia just to have fun since we were doing a sport we didn't know much about. Other schools had been training daily with their cross country kids and they were taking this pretty serious. 

Here is Olivia about half way- she is starting to pass people up.

She was 4th place the whole race and right at the end a group of 6 girls started to sprint to pass her. I was screaming for her to run faster but she kept a consistent pace the whole race.  

She ended up having this girl in the white shirt get in front of her, but she still got 7th overall and qualified for Districts! Wooohoooo! 

 Again, she was pretty proud of herself. This time she had no cramps and took almost 2 minutes off her original qualifying time- 2 minutes is a TON in cross country!  She told me the girls behind her kept yelling "slow down, or you will burn out!" she told me "mom I wasn't going to burn out- I felt good!"

My little runner!

The next section was Districts!  By now, Olivia was in the full swing of Les Miserables and I was having to email the show to see if she could continue with these comps. We were playing it by ear, but in the end they didn't need Olivia on the day of the race so we got to go. During districts they again take the top 8 (but the bottom two are alternates) for State!

To sum it up, it was a cold rainy day- Olivia was grumpy tired, and she got a cramp. She didn't qualify for state, but in the end we laughed about how far she got- who would have thought?? Go Olivia!