The days leading up to the event and shortly after were a blur. After spending a whole year with a team planning up a one day event, I can only imagine the race day as something along the lines of a wedding day. After months and months of laying everything out, the actual day is overwhelming and wonderful and a lot.

This is my second year on the planning team but the first I’ve made it to the event (thanks, stomach flu) so it was amazing to see it all in person. I helped with publicity so my task was done before event day so I had the chance to be a volunteer and enjoy the event as an attendee after that. My mom volunteered with me to be race course monitors during the actual race. I cheered the 10k crowd on as they ran and was pleasantly surprised at how kind runners are. Many thanked me for volunteering or took time to say Hi to me or Thanks. There were so many people, and I can only hope that through runners, attendees, and everyone else present that we raised a lot of awareness and funds for foster kids in my county. We had a pinwheel garden that had over 1,000 pin wheels in it representing every child in the foster system. It was probably the biggest visual impact we had and new this year.

One of the sweetest surprises of the day was a phone call from my boyfriend. I was a major grump after trying to find parking again post course monitoring and practically yelled at him for asking me if I wanted a starbucks. I scratched my head at that thought since he doesn’t live that far away but it was totally out of his way to get me coffee (but Lord knows I needed it). It turns out, he was super sneaky and signed up for the race and walked/ran it without my knowledge! I was greeted by a java chip light and his smiling face with a race medal around his neck. ❤

This weekend we did our debriefing where we discuss how to make next year even better. It was from 8am-5pm and really did take that long to go over all the bits and pieces. A lot of the team was there and we really have bonded over this event. Our hearts our unified in benefitting foster kids and the rest is history. I will never take a non-profit event for granted after knowing personally how much has to happen behind the scenes.

I’m glad our 2017 planning year is officially done until 2018 planning starts back up in August. That means being able to sleep in again on Saturdays which I could use. Ahhh.

I’ve taken one vacation day this year so far and I realized next month is a halfway marker for the year. I was definitely feeling a little work and home life (renter) burn-out and it happened to work out that one of my best friends and I worked out an 4 day lake getaway. I’m looking forward to some R&R and best friend time with one of my favorite people in the world. 🙂