Grow where you are planted,

then sprout out whenever you

can.

From the beginning of my health journey, there are things I had to do out of necessity and I decided that working on doing them cheerfully was better than making excuses or complaining about it. My kids have special needs and I work full time. Because of my responsibilities at home, getting to the gym is usually not feasible, so most of my workouts are at home and have been from the beginning since over 4&1/2 years ago.

To enter a race with my family, it’s not just as simple as sign up and pay the fee. My husband and kids are legally blind and the kids have additional disabilities, including autism, intellectual, learning, developmental, and executive function disorders/disabilities. I need to make sure there are guides with whom they are comfortable and who will guide them safely. Sometimes we don’t have guides so not everyone participates if they wanted to, but since Nini is my running buddy, we always suffer—I mean run 🙂—together. 🙂 But we LOVE when it all comes together like when our friends Tim and Heather from Fatmanrants.com came all the way from western NY to visit and run with us and we had such a blast! The kids still talk about how great that weekend was. And all the Bessons will be able to do the BAA 5K together the weekend of the marathon because several disability sports organizations have organized to register and provide guides for everyone and there’ll be runners of all abilities on the course of ten thousand people.

Like I said, we can’t always participate in a live race and traveling to distance races may not always be feasible budget-wise as well as the other logistics that I mentioned. And that’s where VIRTUAL RACES come in. There are several groups that put on virtual races where you can run a race anywhere—in your backyard or your treadmill as we’ve done. We’ve done several 5Ks that way and have more planned. We receive running bibs and metals too!

I don’t have time to train for an ultra marathon then travel to compete in it. But I’ve now completed two virtual, at-your-own-pace, mega mile races. The group Yes.Fit has a lot of those. I couldn’t travel to Brazil but was able to run the Road to Hannah Brazil race over time for 59.5 miles and Yes.Fit sent me Google Earth images of my sights along the run route at certain checkpoints. And yesterday I finished the Turtoise Creep (I’m slow and steady so was so excited to do this one)! It was 155.1 miles and took me 71 days. This one was in Thailand so I got the virtual pictures via email. We would love the camaraderie of meeting up with friends for a race in Leadville, Colorado in June but budget-wise and safety-wise we’ve accepted that running on that mountain will not happen for now. But we’ll once again do it in solidarity as a relay, virtually from Boston.

So, I guess my message is one that I keep trying to remind myself: Grow where you are planted, then sprout out whenever you can. Let go of excuses to not do anything just because you can’t do some things when and how you want to. We can all do something, by God’s Grace. Let’s be grateful with what we CAN do and get moving!

#BackYardRunners

#TreadmillRunners

#VirtualRunners

#Grateful

#BigChangeBigResults

#PlantBasedGodsGrace