Anyway, Mack was registered for the 5k race at this school. Mack has run several 5k’s before, but he hadn’t done one in about six months. So we were both a little nervous before the race. He actually told me he had butterflies in his stomach, to which I replied, “Good.”

The race started and off they went down the street. I puttered around, preparing my camera and finding my “cheering spot” on the side of the road. I kept checking my watch, waiting for the first runners to appear back up the course. It’s so annoying, when you are at a race, how bored you get while you stand there waiting for the runners to come along. Must remember to bring doughnuts next time.

I had a time in my head when I expected to see Mack at the two-mile point, so I was surprised to see him chugging up the hill towards me about four minutes ahead of schedule. At first I couldn’t believe it was him, even with the system we have in place – Mack always wears red when he races, so I can pick him out of the crowd from a distance. I just got tired of cheering, “There he is! Go, Mack! Oh, that’s not him. Hold on, there he is. Yay, Mack! Wait, nope.” So now he has Race Red and it cuts down quite a bit on my cheering for the competition.

Mack looked to be in pretty good shape when he came by, but I figured he wouldn’t be able to keep that pace up for the final mile. So imagine my surprise when he came back towards the finish line, still more than three minutes ahead of his personal best. He was chasing down a kid in front of him who had the approximate size and dimensions of someone in his age group (eight and under). I was running along the path to the side, cheering madly, as he passed the kid and then passed a teenager right before the line, finishing in a new best time of 24:07.

I came running up as the race staff member was putting Mack’s participation medal over his head, just in time to hear the man say, with tension in his voice, “Here, move over here.”

I realized that my little thoroughbred was vomiting chocolate Pop-Tart all over the finish line. He kept going until his stomach was empty, as I tried to coerce him to move away from the finish. A school nurse and another volunteer converged on him, checking his eyes, lowering him to the ground and procuring water. Other parents were looking on with concern and asking, “Is he okay?”

Mack was fine within minutes, and very proud of his great new personal record. I was proud of him, too, but I felt badly. Because when I saw him throwing up, my very first thought was how awesome it was that he had pushed himself so hard that he made himself sick with effort. My second thought was, “Gross.” My third thought was that I needed to tell him, for the future, that if he is going to throw up after a race he needs to move away from the finish and find a bush or a trash can.

Fourth was, “Oh, I guess I should be concerned.”

Which probably makes me a bad Mommy. But my kid is a heck of a runner.

Whoever assigned the bib numbers for this race obviously knows Mack.

He struggled during the race and ran about 25 seconds slower than last week in the state championships (where he came in third). Both times I saw him on the course he just didn’t look like himself. He just seemed tired and as if he couldn’t pick his feet up like normal. Usually I love to watch him run. But today I actually felt like hopping the rope and pulling him off the course. He did have a pretty good finish where he was seesawing with another boy on the way in and he beat him to the line.

Later I was looking at the race photos with Mack and showing him how he just didn’t look like he was having fun except when he was battling that kid at the end. Turns out that, as that kid passed him earlier in the race, the kid said, “See ya!” as he went by.

Big mistake.

Mack came after the kid, passed eight other runners while looking for him, found him and beat him by a quarter of a second. That’s. My. Boy.

Mack placed third overall and had a very good run. But Aidan got the laugh of the day.

They had flags, like little landscaping flags, laid out to mark the course in places where it was indistinct. I watched Mack finish, then ran back over and cheered Kiley up through this muddy, slippery hill. Aidan was about 30 seconds behind her. He was coming towards me and running kind of weird and I was thinking, “Is he struggling? Is he okay?” Then I realized he was running around each flag, in a little slalom, like you do with cones at soccer practice. He did it all the way up the hill and down past me, as everyone around me chuckled and I yelled, “Honey, run straight! You can run straight!”

Amazing how much energy he can get from a diet consisting pretty much of peanut butter and jelly and chicken nuggets.

Here’s where our inexperience hurt him. Before the race, I told Mack that the race would loop around and end “at the same place as it started.” In actuality, the finish line was about ten yards past the start line. Mack came in, got to the start line, and stopped dead…as another kid went right around him and into the chute. Mack figured it out, and finished, but he ended up coming in second place in his age division, just three seconds behind that kid whose mom wasn’t dumb enough to tell him the wrong ending line.

It kills me that I hurt his chances at coming in first, but he doesn’t care. A trophy is a trophy! And I know he (and I) will never make that mistake again.

He came in 19th in the race, of 163 people 18 and under. So, apparently my boy is a runner.

It would have been nice if he won, because the girl he luuuuurves won their age division for girls. That could have been the spark that brought them together. Now she will feel superior to him (although he did beat her by more than a minute.) Actually, I’m sure she already feels superior to him. After all, he is a boy and she is a girl.