OK.. before I get into the sprinting stuff just an FYI: Thursday morning I woke up and my inner 13 year old was screaming, pissed off and irrational, all be it for a good reason. I promise a blog on that bit of fun later. 

Now my “Sprint Mechanics Session” with the lovely Valentina Romanov. (Great name eh?) I was pretty nervous going in, plus I had a secret that even my conditioning coach (Michele Helmeczi) didn’t know.

The secret… as I kid I LOVED sprinting. I didn’t do it much because most of the gym time was spent doing longer distance running and I ALWAYS came in last.. huffing and puffing, red in the face, clumsy, embarrassed and generally discouraged. So I never mentioned to anyone that if all I had to do was 30 meters I would happily harness every bit of power my stocky legs had and give ‘er sh!t! I wasn’t very fast even at the short distances but something inside me always said I could be.

So here I stand at The Athlete Factory with more or less a bunch of kids.. who’s parents (that I am older than) sitting on the sidelines watching.

It was awesome.

While I did feel awkward, as in REALLY REALLY awkward, even worse then when my husband tried to teach me to swing dance awkward, I didn’t feel that deep embarrassment. You know the kind, that feeling that settles into your core and you can’t shake it for the rest of the day.

Yes, everyone in the group was faster, more experienced and seemed more coordinated. Yes, a bunch of coaches were shadowing the class and yes a group of parents were watching.

BUT

It is fun.

I can see how this was going to help with my goals and on top of that I was learning something that I wanted to learn in grade 7 but didn’t have the courage to persue because I had the belief that you didn’t try something unless you had an obvious talent for it.

Will I ever be known as Susan “Flash” Knight? Probably not.. at least not for sprinting skills, but I am going to get faster and it’s going to be fun learning the how and why!

WAIT! One other AWESOME thing. Track spikes. If I keep this up there will be a very cool new pair of shoes to add to my collection of cute sport stuff! Check out this video and Michele will tell you all about them:

One quick note.. if someone says to you… “Hey! Let’s try…..” Please do. Even if it is just once. It doesn’t matter if you are 7, 18, 26, 44 or more.. you seriously have nothing to lose!