Post 1st day of school and 1st Greece race

So, a lot has taken place in the last week.  I survived my first day of school as well as my first open half marathon!  I'll start with the first day of school.  I am the type of person who is never really ready.  By that I mean being able to sit down and breathe before the chaos.  I always have five minutes to do ten more things before I can take a breathe and find myself bored.   So, of course, on the first day of school I wasn't ready for the kids to come.  But they came and went and all was well!  They are a bit more talkative than I expected but they seem to be a fun bunch of kids.  There are kids from a variety of different backgrounds, Greek, American, Finnish, Australian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian, Pakistani,  and I am sure a couple of other nationalities.  It is pretty cool to be around so many different nationalities!

I am not quite in the rhythm of this school yet, but it will come with time.  When I was in Salt Lake everything was new at first too...my school...teaching...my friends...my environment and that turned out great!  Now, I get to do it again but where the language is also new.  It will come, I just like routines so I am excited to get into a good one. :)

So, I did my first race here in Greece.  It was a little spur of the moment race that my friend Eddy signed me up for.  He has been such a great help and I can't even imagine what life in Greece would be like if I hadn't met him!!  He was doing the half marathon of Marathon, Greece and so he signed me up too.  Since I got here I haven't really gotten into a workout routine yet either.  I have been running consistently and swimming twice a week in the Mediterranean Sea, so I wouldn't lose all of my fitness but I wasn't doing proper half marathon training, which I do want to do someday to see how fast I could run.

Anyways, the race was pretty cool.  There were around 1,500 people there running, which was really fun to see.  The race course is the same as the first 6 miles in the Athens Classic Marathon and then it turned around and went around the Tomb of the Athenians, where all the soldiers were buried, including the solider that died carrying the news from Marathon to Athens.  My plan for the race was to just see how I feel and run.  However, once the gun goes off, of course the competitive juices start to get the best of me!  I decided that I wanted to run at roughly a 7:00 min/mile pace, which would in turn get me to the finish line around 1:30, which I decided I wanted to be my goal time.  I felt good the first half and really mostly the whole race, except the last 1km, I was totally wishing that the race would end soon.  Other than that little part I felt pretty good and had a good time during the race too.  My final average turned out to be 7:10 min/miles with my final time being 1:35.  So now I have a starting point and with some proper half marathon training I know I can get my time down.

This up coming week I hope to start getting into a routine and figuring out how school works and how workouts work.  I am going to try a spin class later this week, which I hope will work out.  I haven't been on a my bike in about three weeks!  I really need to get some spinning in!  It'll come.  I just need to be patient. :)

I hope all is going well with everyone.  I miss you all soo much!

Sorry Aryn...your eyes were closed on this one.

Eddy and I at the race. 

What I won at the race this morning.  3rd place.