Track and Field

Nika has being doing track. At the beginning of the school year I asked the girls what they wanted to do for their extra curricular activities. They all wanted to try different things but since there are only 24 hours in a day, I told them that the oldest two can pick two activities, and the twins can pick one (and if they can keep up with their school work, then the next year they can pick a second activity). I wanted all girls to do some sort of sport, and they all picked figure skating. It has been really good for them. They have a great coach and they improved dramatically in their skating skills in the last few months.

Then Nika and Lina picked guitar classes as their second activity (the twins really wanted to do violin but we decided to wait until the next year). Those have been awesome! Again they ended up with a great teacher, and they love it!

All of the activities are done in the Children's Palace which is kind of like a huge rec center with all kinds of sports, art, science, music, linguistic, craft and many, many more activities. And here is how Nika ended up with the third one, absolutely by accident. She and Lina were at their figure skating class which consists of one hour on the ice and a half an hour in the gym every time they come to practice. During their first gym practice their coach had them run a couple of laps on the indoor track. Then all of a sudden Nika shows up in the waiting room and says that the coach wants to talk to me. It turns out that it was the track and field coach who wanted to talk to me. She saw Veronika running on the track and went to beg her figure skating coach to let her go, so she could come and do track with her team. She is a 7-time national champion for Kazakhstan in track and said that Nika was born to run. Nika decided to give it a try and after the first day she fell in love with it. But she didn't want to give up figure skating, so she is doing all three now. Her track coach is super excited to train her, which is nice.

Nika is a little too young to go to track meets, but her coach wanted her to get a feel for it, so she sent her to a couple of meets already. The second time Nika took 6^th place in a 300 meters event, which is great! She is really enjoying it, and we are proud of her for not being afraid of trying new things in a foreign country.

The following pictures are from the two track meets that Nika participated in.

Getting ready to run in her very first meet

Getting ready to start

Running 300 meters (Nika is on the left, in blue)

All the kids that participated in the meet