One of the greatest things of the sports camp is seeing the kids get better at everything and more self-confident. When we sit down in a circle on the first morning for some games to learn each others names half the kids are too shy to speak loud enough for the rest to hear. Just an hour later noone is shy anymore and the next day they've found good friends. What surprised me was how incredibly good the kids were at running. Every morning I always make my kids run one lap around the track, 400m. No time or anything, I tell them that the only goal is to keep running and not start walking. Usually they manage but many at a very slow pace. I hadn't really thought about that they were better or worse than any other group I've had but when Friday came and we had our Mini Olympic games, man... Usually half of the kids are slower than two minutes, this time the slowest one was at 1.55 and the fastest at 1.29, far better than I'd have guessed.
If I had realized how good they actually were earlier I probably would have been a bit more nervous on Thursday, when they got to compete against me. For them it was a relay race, each kid ran 100m, meaning a total of 1.9km, my colleague joined them to make it 2km. It felt the first three laps but during the fourth one I started to get tired, the fifth and final was really tough but I managed to win with 10m vs them. To my surprise they kept running however, I didn't know that my colleague had told them to run 100m each twice, meaning 10 laps, 4km. As I didn't know it I thought that I had one lap left when I was actually finished so I kept going, my body telling me to quit. I managed to keep up with them for 300m more but the last 100 was just impossible, despite the kid I raced against being one of the slower ones. After stumbling over the finish line I pretty much fell down in the grass, causing all the kids to call me a weakling. I didn't really care about it, my time on 2 km was 6.13, a new personal best with 8 seconds and I'm not even in particularly good shape. I guess I just really managed to give it all I had, for the next 10m I just lay in the grass for 10 minutes without moving more than to drink from my bottle of water.
Later that day we leaders had decided to spend some time together, playing a Swedish game called kubb, a game about throwing small sticks on targets that's very common in Sweden. After that we played football, which showed me that I hadn't completely recovered from my race vs the kids some hours earlier, after 5 minutes I couldn't really run anymore.
That's it about my sports camp but now that I'm writing about sports I'd just like to congratulate my friend who ran the midnight run, a 10 km race in Stockholm yesterday and finally managed to get below the magic line, 40 minutes. It was a close call however, his result was 39.48 according to the official time and 39.55 according to his own clock.
Now I'm gonna go to bed, see ya.