South-Eastern Area Day of Service / Lengthen Your Stride 5k

Today was a big day of service across the South-East. Every stake of the church in the area held a Day Of Service and organized huge service projects. Our project was a food/clothing drive. The catch was that it was also a 5k race. To enter the race you were supposed to donate 10 cans of food for the North Carolina Food Bank. We were also collecting clothing for an organization that helps young single mothers. I was on the committee that organized the race and when we first started planning it, we had hoped to have about 250 participants. By the time Internet registration ended yesterday, we had over 700 participants, and when walk-up registration ended and the race started this morning, we had over 1,000 people racing. That's over 10,000 cans of food for the food bank!!! Later today, more people are going to walk through neighborhoods and knock on doors to ask for more food, so who knows how much it will be by the end of the day! It was a beautiful morning for the race- not a cloud in the sky and about 70 degrees when the race started at 9am. All 4 of us entered the race. Michael and I took turns pushing the boys in the double stroller. Matty would get off and run occasionally. Here is Matty doing jumping jacks to warm up before the race started. We had the primary children sing "I Am A Child of God" before the start of the race. Here's Matty with a couple of his friends getting ready to sing.
Here we are before the start of the race. Eric got a race t-shirt too, but it was humongous on him and he wanted to wear his Thomas shirt instead.
We kept a pretty good pace the entire time. We probably jogged about 1/3 of it and speed walked 2/3. I think we finished it in about 45-50 minutes- they probably wont have the official times posted until Monday though. The very last part of it was a lap around the church building, so when we got there we parked the stroller and had the boys get off and run the last lap with us so we could all run across the finish line together. Here we are after the race.

The boys enjoyed all of the food they had waiting at the end for the racers- all kinds of breads, bagels, bananas, and sports drinks. They had the primary kids sing again- this time they sang "If the Savior Stood Beside Me" and they gave the kids little cards with the words on it. Matty was so cute- he concentrated so hard on reading the words. He could probably only recognize about 1/8 of them though!

We weren't able to stick around for the awards- Michael had to come home and shower and then get to work by 11am. I will be interested to hear what the final canned food count was though- hopefully we were able to do a lot of good for the food bank!