Turkey Trot troubles

Let’s just start off with the fact that I am the worst runner in the history of the world. It takes me almost an hour to run a mile…Okay that is a bit of an exaggeration, but seriously, I am the Worst. Runner. Ever.

However, this past Thanksgiving break I took on the challenge of participating in the North Texas Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving day. Although it took some mental strength to not sign up for the “Miracle Mile,” my siblings, mom and I decided to sign up for the 5K race.

The evening before the race, we picked up our shirts and even edited them a bit to fit our personalities. The original tee said “I get turkey after this,” but none of us actually eat turkey, so I crossed the word turkey out on all of our shirts and wrote “salad” on mine, “ham” on my brothers and “soup” on my sisters.

But even with all this hype, when Thanksgiving day came along, I literally had to be dragged out of bed. If you couldn’t tell, I did not want to go. I was not prepared to run for thirty minutes straight in the treacherous freezing temperatures (Okay, well it wasn’t that cold but I’m from Florida so give me a break) and at the end of it all, leave with sweat stains and a rubber participation medal.

On the ride to downtown Frisco I began to mentally prepare myself for what I was about to get into. I kept telling myself, “it’s not gonna be that bad” and “you’ve done this before, how hard can it be?” Let me tell you, by the end of this ride (and about two motivational Katy Perry songs later) I was ready to take on this challenge. Here’s what was on my list of motivations:

1.The money went to a good cause

2. I would need to burn some calories off beforehand if I wanted to go all out during dinner

3. No matter how long it took me to finish, I was out exercising while most people were still sleeping in

When we got to the race, I felt ready to rumble. As we walked in a group towards the start line I heard a very familiar voice over the microphone motivating runners as they took off. My sister and I argued back and forth on who it was until we figured it out. It was the radio host of Hot 93.3, Scotty K. When we figured out this out, we fangirled y’all. I listen to his show everyday in the morning before school and he always made my day a little bit better. To make things even better, as we walked by him and his microphone to start off the race, he noticed our edited shirts and commented on how funny they were, basically boosting my self-confidence even more.

We eventually passed the start line and took off. I am proud to say that I jogged the entirety of the race and didn’t stop to walk nor drink water once. I’m actually glad I didn’t drink the water they were passing out because I later found out they were filling the paper cups up with hose water. Yeah, that’s a “no ma’am.” When we crossed the finished line there were tons of people cheering us there and handing out bottled water, fruits and the participation medal.

At the end of it all, I can definitely say that I, in fact, did not hate the experience. I has lots of fun listening to the music they were playing on the speakers, petting the puppies that joined their owners and meeting new people in the area, all for a great cause.

I would definitely recommend people who are debating whether or not to take on the challenge of doing something they’ve never done before to just go out and do it. I felt a thousand percent better after I ran the Turkey Trot and it honestly made me feel like I could tackle any obstacle that came my way, I even registered for a couple more races coming up in the DFW area and hope to eventually take on my first half-marathon in 2019.