Old-Fashioned Footrace

On Saturday morning, my parents and Sammi and I went to Jamie’s rec basketball game. Sammi and I find that it takes us about two and a half quarters to really get into the game, so during that time, we amuse ourselves by talking about the players and such.

Sam made a comment about Jamie’s running form, saying that it might improve if she ran track, and I told her I thought that Jamie was actually faster, even if Sam does have better form. Sam insisted she herself was faster, and suggested jokingly that maybe they should have an old-fashioned footrace to determine who was actually faster. We told our parents about it and they were amused, but then, since we had another quarter or so left before we’d be invested in the game, we started planning the old-fashioned footrace.

Since the old-fashioned footrace was inspired by the ten-step footrace, the planning was peppered with lots of Homestar Runner quotes that I can’t possibly remember here.

After the game, we forgot about the old-fashioned footrace until we were finishing up storing the last of our Christmas stuff. We told Jamie to go and get some running shoes on for the old-fashioned footrace.

Sammi went in the house and changed into shorts, a t-shirt, tube socks, and running shoes, and came back out to make a big show of stretching on the basketball court. Either Sammi or Jamie practiced jogging around the court while we made up the rules. We decided that we needed:

• A start and finish line;
• a line judge at each line;
• to change the distance from up and down the driveway to just up the driveway;
• and someone to act like Cha-Cha in Grease when starting the race.

Mom agreed to be Cha-Cha. Oh, I should also add that our driveway is really long, like several hundred feet, and goes up a hill, so it was plenty long for an old-fashioned footrace. Ginny was the audience.

Mom started the race and they were off. Sammi started out well in the lead, so we cheered for Jamie, but all of a sudden Jamie started to catch up, so we cheered for Sammi again. I had joked about needing a camera in case there was a photo finish, but as it turns out, it was so close that the finish line judges (Dad and I) had to confer before calling Jamie the winner, by inches.

We had to spend the rest of the weekend explaining to Jamie that winning by inches and “dominating” were not quite the same, and to Sammi that she did not, in fact, win the race.

They challenged me and Mom to race them, and so we went back down the hill to start again. Dad started the race this time, and I ran as hard as I could. I kept pace with them until we got to the top of the hill, and when the driveway flattened out they both left me in the dust. I blame my saggy-ass old weekend jeans, which began to fall down a bit during the race. At the end, we turned around to see Mom walking slowly up the driveway.

When we accused her of quitting, she said she HAD to stop because she felt sick.

We decided that everyone in our neighborhood now thinks we’re nuts, and that we should encourage this opinion by having potato-sack races and egg-on-spoon races in future weekends. But we probably won’t, because I don’t know where one would get potato sacks these days.