Starting Again

After not being able to run for three or four months I finally got out again...
I'm Krystin Haser and I am going to be on the Capo Cross Country team next year in school. I had a bad virus that left me in pain whenever I walked for months. Finally I came out of it, but now I face the problem of being able to run miles upon miles again. In previous summers I could run four or five miles straight. I LOVED running. Now it just isn't quite as easy.
The cross country team started running independently two months ago and then started their team runs a week ago. Today was the first time I have been running in months. My brother and I woke up this morning at six to eat breakfast. His name's Logan and he's going to be a sophomore on the boys' team next year. He's an awesome brother. I ate some Ovaltine and a banana and he had the same except cereal instead of Ovaltine. After that we went back to sleep. This was so we wouldn't get cramps when we went out at eight.
So, at eight we woke up again, got dressed, put on proper shoes (my puma running shoes), through on our hats and sunblock and then headed out. Of course we brought water and phones as well. It was nice walking to the high school, seeing that it's so close to our house.
Once we arrived we ran a warm-up lap around the track and then he showed me how to do a lot of different stretches. After that we did a lap. We made it in 2 minutes and 21 seconds which was better than my original goal for it. I'm suppose to be able to run five miles with a consistent 11 minutes per mile pace tomorrow. Since it has been such a long time since when I last ran I wasn't nearly as good as I would've liked. We had to stop after each lap. Logan was very supportive. He told me stories from his team while we ran. He normally runs about ten miles up hills a day, so I'm sure he probably thought I was very inexperienced, but he didn't show it. He just encouraged me and ran besides me, telling me to slow it down a bit at some points.
The hardest thing was probably the fact that you aren't suppose to guzzle water when you're going to be running. I was only able to take small sips of my water after each lap because otherwise I'd feel like I was going to throw up.
Our mother came and watched me train halfway through. I only ended up doing two miles because I don't think I could really take much more than that. We stretched afterward as well, Logan informing me that it is more important to stretch after running than before.
My mom ended up driving us back to the house, which I was very thankful for. Tomorrow I'll be running with the team for the first time. Hopefully I'll do alright. I'm going to do the five mile run and try to keep up with the slowest runners on the team. It's going to be hard jumping for nothing to two miles then five, but I think that in time it'll be alright and I'll catch up. Thanks for reading and you'll hear from me tomorrow after my first "official practice"!

Puma Runner,
Krystin Haser