My First Half-Marathon

Woohoo! So stoked. I ran my first half-marathon today and am so stoked to have finished. I achieved my goals for both the first half and the second half. First half was to 'just keep going' and my second half goal was to 'just keep on keeping going'. Hehe! My knee was hurting the whole way around but it only really hindered me in the final quarter. Just getting too old eh??

It's funny the things that go through your head when you're running... like for instance Dori came to mind "Just keep running. Just keep running. Running, running, running..." Oh and that stupid song "Sunday morning, up with the lark, I think I'll take a walk in the park..." NUTS! And I can't believe I just shared that with you. No worse than sharing it with all those people running the halfie tho! But it was a beautiful Sunday morning, the weather really treated us well. :-)

People often assume I am far fitter than I actually am but it has taken a lot of preparation to get to this point I can tell you and my time wasn't overly fast, unofficially it was just over 2hours. I just know that I couldn't have done the preparation as a single parent and working fulltime. Finding two hours in a day after a full day's work to go for a run wouldn't be easy. Thank god for study leave!

Now that I have achieved this I intend to continue, I am so keen to do more so that should help motivate me. I hope that by the time I get back to work I will have developed myself enough that I am only having to run an hour and a half instead of two when I'm training. Time is just so precious and there is only so much of it.

Now to deal to this knee... ice :-( Urgh!

NCEA Level 1

I am so proud of my daughter. Over the past week she has turned 15 and has managed to achieve an Excellence in her Level 1 English assessment for public speaking. It's so hard having her at boarding school sometimes to help her out but we spent about half an hour on the phone going over her speech the night before she did it. As I am an English teacher you can imagine it's pretty important to me that my daughter do her best to achieve to her potential so I am really pleased with her efforts.

We had to have a little discussion about having to go back and add to her speech. She was very reluctant about it because she had already put it on cue cards. So many of my students make the same mistake. They don't seem to realise that the kids who get Excellence instead of Merit or merely Achieved are the ones who DO go back and start again. That's exactly what makes the difference, they find out how to do it well and go back and follow the advice even though it takes so much more effort. It was an important lesson.

It is for this reason that I am bringing her home from boarding school for her study leave so that she can do some serious study under my supervision. There won't be any of her friends around to disturb her either. Poor child :-) but I plan on checking the NCEA exam timetable and sitting down with her to sort out a study program. I have already spoken to most of my teacher friends who teach the subjects she is studying to find out about tutorials they might be running which she can attend. One of them, a teacher of NCEA French, has been nice enough to offer to work with her individually, I offered her services as a babysitter in return. She's so going to hate it. But I'm sure she'll appreciate it in the long run.

Her aim is to get an Excellence endorsement on her Level 1 NCEA certificate, I'm not so sure she's capable - I know that sounds awful - but I'm going to do my darnedest to help her because I'm so proud of her for aiming high. If she aims for the star she might hit the moon and their isn't anything wrong with that!