This morning, we hosted the long-awaited field day at Tambohuacso (the local public school where we had been working on the track). The day began at 8:00 with a team meeting where we broke into groups to hastily prepare for the activities. Some prepared food, some bought supplies, some advertised, and others finished clearing rocks from the track.

At around 8:45, Tyler did a radio interview with the local station where he talked about our plans for the day, as well as our work here in Pisaq. About 10 minutes earlier, the owner of a store had told us that we could go to the station and get some sort of publicity.

The real events started at about 10 AM with various relays and 100 meter races. Our expectation of 50 kids was roughly met by around 10:30, and the kids were having fun competing in races such as potato sack, three-legged, bear crawl, crab walk, and others.

Some of the kids practiced standing long jump with Dave after they ran the 100 and got their ticket for free lunch. The kids surprisingly loved the 100 – many came back and ran it 2 or 3 times. At about 11:30, after completing the relays, we played a couple rounds of sharks and minnows.

Unfortunately, the kids were less interested in sharks and minnows after they saw their friends run the 100.

Next, we split the kids into teams of 4 based on age and set up some shuttle relay races on the home stretch of the track. We ran 4 teams at a time, and the races were fairly even. The hand-offs were less than stellar, but nobody dropped the baton.

After the shuttle relays, the kids were all hungry for their lunch, so we served it ahead of schedule. While the kids ate sandwiches—jam, egg and avocado, or ham and cheese—and fruit, some of us were warming up for the much-anticipated STRIVE mile, which was to take place on the track at 1:15. The field consisted of the favorite Dalton, as well as the seasoned marathoner Tyler, the dark horse Spike, the rabbit Reid, the pretty boy Jake, and the underdog Dave. Reid took the race out hard at the gun, coming through the 200 mark in around 27.xx. He then promptly dropped out of the race and left the rest of the field to finish the last 1400. The pack was tight at the 400 meter mark, coming through in about 74. On the second lap, Tyler started to separate from the kids. He held that lead to the finish, winning in 4:48. Spike was 2nd in 4:52 and Dalton 3rd in 5:05. Dave was a bit further back, but still happy with his time of 5:43. Keep in mind that they ran these times on an uneven dirt track in training shoes at 9700 feet.

After the mile, the field day had mostly concluded, with some kids still playing games of soccer as we cleaned up. In all, the day was exhausting but successful, and some kids even asked about whether we were planning on doing it again next year.

Due to Wi-Fi issues pictures of the field day will be uploaded to facebook tomorrow.

– Scott and Riley