8th Grade (2001-2002)

Wow... adding the dates to the title make this seem like forever ago. And looking back, it truly was.

Well, going into 8th grade, someone (probably my dad…) had worked out a deal that I could run with THSouth’s girl’s cross-country team that summer. My mom drove me pretty much every morning to meet up with the girls and I fit right in with their abilities. Well, at some point I had to leave two weeks in a row. One week for dance camp (first ever in 10 years of taking dance classes…) and another for cheer camp with my 8th grade squad. Yes, that’s right, I was a cheerleader. I wish I had some of those pictures scanned onto the computer, because wow that was definitely part of my awkward years! Well anyway, I came back from those 2 weeks of basically no running and had lost any fitness I’d built up. I remember my first run back with South’s team was at Deming, and it was just pitiful. I think at this point I stopped coming to their conditioning, haha. If my memory serves me well, I believe each summer, two weeks before school started, we would have "conditioning" each weekday morning. Thinking back on it, my first experience with this before 6th grade, we just ran to Deming and back via Ohio Blvd (~2 miles) and I ended up sitting in the grass talking to a girl for a long while. A mile and a half can really kill an 11-year old! Man had I made improvements in those few short years. So anyway... getting along with things. I hadn't ran much faster my 7th grade year in cross, so I remember setting my goal time for something under 13 minutes (3k...). I don't really remember the races throughout the year, other than Amy Hamilton came on the scene as a 6th grader and they changed the system from 7th/8th grade & 6th grade races to Varsity/JV. At county I ended up 5th once again (as I had in 6th grade), behind Amy, Kayla, and my future HS teammates Ariel Hall and Kate Goeller. I didn't end up breaking that 13min. mark though. (I'm thinking 13:02).

Winter came which meant cheerleading season. I didn't really fit in with those girls, but I really enjoyed doing it. I was also on year #10 of dance lessons with Marge the Sarge. By this point, however, I had stopped playing soccer. It really was NOT my niche. At some point leading up to winter, I got this "walkman" with a band on it that I could run with. Man this was so cool! I recorded songs from the radio onto some cassettes (that's probably illegal come to think of it...) and was good to go. I remember having some sort of route set up in the neighborhood next door that I ran every once in awhile. I would come back and tell my dad how I had improved my time by X amount as compared to the last time. Wow was I cool. I bawled my eyes out at the end of cheer season because I’d made up my mind that I wasn’t going to do that in high school (goodness what a loser!), but then it was onto the fun part – track season!

Really, all of track season is a blur. I do remember making a rival out of Nicole Athey when we went to Honey Creek for our dual meet though. She beat me in the 400m going, I believe, 65. I remember having to look at her legs the final 100m. So this sparked a little somethin’ somethin’ in me. I have no recollection if I ran the 800 that year or not. I’m guessing I had to have at least once. But mainly, I did the 400m and the mile. Oh, and high jump (huge PR of 4’6” whoop whoop!). Well, for the county meet (this year at South), Chiado had a little trick up his sleeve. He had entered me in the 400m at a faster time than I had actually ever been, so as to get me that first seed & lane 1. Not sure if he told me this before or after the race. Well, Nicole started out in blocks, which was a little intimidating for me (even though at that level… man it does not matter). But as the race unfolded, we got to about 150 to go and I had already made up the stagger. I knew as long as I held on, I would win. Sure enough, I won in 64.xx. Now I’m not sure if this was before or after the mile, but as I write this, I’m pretty sure I had already HJ’ed as well as run the mile. For that race, I had been pretty close to breaking 6 all season, so my goal was to get under 6. Future South teammate (then, Honey Creek Bee), Brittany Fuhrmeister, was my only real competition. I remember constantly looking behind me to where she was. Had I not done that, I probably would have broken 6. Instead… 6:00.07. Dang. But I got the win, so oh well.

So that was all of middle school & running. I’m pretty sure at this point I still hadn’t run the July 4th mile or any sort of 5k road race. I was excited about running in high school though, because I’d watched the Engle’s progress in the paper and their dad had told my dad that they were excited to have me be on the team next year. We’ll see how much I can remember about high school next…

Until then: If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Romans 10:9