By Abby Underhill
Marafun is a running program that we do at NCPS on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings before school. The goal of the eight-week program is to run a marathon – which is 42 km – by the end of it.
We run 400-metre laps of the school field and for each lap that we complete, we get a wristband. By the end of the half hour, we count how many wrist bands we have and the number of laps we completed gets written down. We can go on the Marafun website to see how many kilometres we’ve run, or we can ask the parent helpers.
One thing that made it more fun was when we got a bracelet with one charm on it at our first session. Then each time we participated, we got a charm to add to our bracelet. Some people traded charms with each other.
We are now in our second last week. We’ve run about 20 times now, and I feel that the running is getting easier for me. I think other people thought this too, because lots of us are running more laps now than we did at the start. Some parents and teachers are helping, and sometimes they run with us.
We participated because it was something new to do and we could run with our friends. It wasn’t competitive; we just had to keep moving for the whole half hour. Each session we could set a goal for how many laps we wanted to do that day, and then obviously our bigger goal is to complete an entire marathon. This is a pretty big goal but if you do it bit by bit, it is easier.
Abby Underhill is in Grade 7 at NCPS.