Race For The Phewwwww....

Weird day today. I am currently working as a cafeteria lady, but I also spend Tuesdays and Thursdays as an intern. Being an intern is fun, and gives me quite a few new things to experience. Today my internship led to me waking up at 6am! On a sunday, gross. I got up nice and early because I was in charge of coordinating a group of volunteers. Today was Portland's 16th annual Susan G. Komen "Race for the Cure."

We (Kevin and I) took a shuttle (school bus) down to the race and headed straight to our crew's truck. We had tons of bananas on a table and Kevin and I got to work blowing up balloons. After passing out balloons to small children, and wrangling our team for a team picture, the real work began.

We headed north up Naito Parkway and claimed our spot to cheer on the biggest race of the day. Our small team of cheerleaders, from young children to adults, jumped and shouted and waved pom poms as racers passed. We spent the bulk of our time (3hours) screaming for the 5k walk. The 5k walk had over 35,000 participants. I yelled into a plastic megaphone and encouraged the walkers to finish strong. It never ceased to amaze me that each new wave of walkers was happy to hear the same things I had yelled at the 10,000 people before them.

I yelled things like:
"You're almost done!" "Only three more blocks, don't give up now!" "You can do it, bring it on home!" "You're so close now, I promise."
They loved it! So I yelled, and yelled, and yelled. All under the watchful eye of my boss who seemed impressed with my ability to scream non-stop for 3 hours. Kevin got quite a few laughs when he yelled "I'm here because I lost a dare!" Hardly true, we all know he was there because he supports everything I do. The crowd also loved when he would yell "If me yelling at you doesn't encourage you, then nothing will!"

On our way home we picked up some food and after filling my tummy I took a deep-sleep nap that felt so good.