Marathon?!

SO I somehow ended up running a second 10K marathon today as the elementary school I was at had their own marathon! Seriously these Japanese are serious about their running and just health in general. However I can only approve of forcing all of the children to run as it encourages healthy living and just not being a lazy blob in general. They had practice all week which entailed running for five minutes at a time during their morning recess and while this obviously can't prepare a child to run a 5K, it at least gave them some sort of training.

I suppose I should clarify as well on the actual length ran. It was only a 5K, but I ran it twice as the children ran in groups of two grades at a time. I ended up running with the first and second graders and then ran again with the fifth and sixth graders immediately after finishing the initial run. Again it was nice to be able to run something like this with no extra training and it only reaffirms my firm belief in healthy living. A very few of the children were somewhat overweight and I feel that if parents allow poor living choices at such a young age it will only cause problems later on in life. I know this will probably rile some people up, but I just feel it is the parents responsibility to teach proper eating and exercise habits as well as act as examples themselves. No child should have to face the added stress being unnecessarily overweight causes and while there are obvious exceptions for medical conditions and such, I feel the vast majority of the cases is that the child reflects their parents.

AGAIN living in Japan has really opened my eyes to just how unhealthy America is and I can only hope our government and society takes drastic steps to change the path we are currently on.