The King Family Running Tradition

King Family Team!

Andy "Claus"

We have a family tradition of doing road races which began in August about three years ago.  My daughter, Laura, was home for a quick visit right before the county fair.  She managed to convince her brother, Andy, to join her for a fun run the fair had published online.  I pretty much decided they were crazy and I'd rather sleep than get up at 6 AM to go run.

Fast forward to 5:30 AM race day. I heard them getting ready in the kitchen and couldn't stand to miss out.  We were about fifteen minutes late due to my last minute decision, but managed to get to the starting point with plenty of time to spare.  Or so we thought!

This year's team without Laura, our captain.

Team Captain:  Laura King

The race was
scheduled to start on Main Street in Ventura right across from the mission.  There wasn't anyone there.  We rushed  a mile or two down the road to another possible starting point.  Maybe we misunderstood the actual address.  Hmmm, no race.  Well, we decided to do what anyone else would and double checked our information.  The date was correct, the location was accurate.  Woah!  We were one year late.

Thus the tradition of the King Family Run was started.  We can just SAY we did our annual race, any race.  This doesn't have to make sense... If we're a year late we can pretend we've already run and go straight to breakfast!

Fast forward back to this year.  Laura chose our Christmas event which was the Holly Jolly Half-Marathon, 10K and 5K race. We got there on time!

 Laura did the 1/2 Marathon while Andy, Bo and I did the 5K.  Bo is one of Laura's sorority sisters from the University of Washington. Bo's first race was awesome.  Andy placed second in his age group and I placed sixth in mine.  If I run for the next decade or two I am a slam dunk for first place in my age group!

I wish I could just publish this photo in my blog, but in the interest of protecting another artist's copyright here's a link to see me finishing the run.  If you dig around on the site you can find the rest of us too.  They did a nice job with these.  I'll post more links later if anyone expresses an interest.

http://santabarbarapix.net/media.details.php?mediaID=MDc4NjIzNGE0NzkyNDUy#.UM7LwKVAs22