Goodbye

I hate saying goodbye. It's not really harder to guess where I get that from, since anyone who has ever had to say goodbye to my dad can clearly see that he's not a big fan of goodbye's either. I think I've gotten a little bit better here, because the goodbyes are always extremely long and drawn out. You say goodbye to someone and kiss them three times, then you talk for a while longer, say goodbye again, hug, and after this has been repeated a few times it's finally over. Still, I'm no pro.

Luckily I didn't have to say goodbye to Johanna right away on Monday. Her flight didn't leave until 1:20 in the afternoon, and first I had a 5 kilometer race. Milja, Johanna, Anita, Isabel, and Peter all came to watch. On Sunday night I had a hyper hour or so where I got really nervous to race on Monday. It wasn't a big important race or anything, but I hadn't done a race for a while, and I wanted to see an improvement in my times. Monday morning I was a little bit calmer than I had been on Sunday night and once I had all my clothes together and I'd jogged around a little bit I was pretty much ready to go.
In the end the race went fairly well. I'd wanted to run the 5 kilometers in 21 minutes, and I ended up running it in 21:31 or so, but I wasn't too disappointed. When you race sometimes you have the feeling that it didn't go very well, and sometimes you have the feeling that it did go well. On Monday I had the feeling that I'd raced well, so I was happy. Before I came here I would never have been able to run 5 kilometers that fast. At that same pace I would have had a 4kilometer personal record, so that is definitely something to be happy about. Portugal, here I come! Only two weeks to go.

After I got done racing Milja and Peter's taxi services both got to work. Milja went with Johanna to Schipol right away while I changed my clothes, cooled down, and stretched. Then Peter and I came afterwards. We still had enough time to drink something at the airport, but we all had that kind of melancholy-there's-a-goodbye-coming feeling, so we didn't sit for too long. We brought Johanna to the security gate, and then waited until we couldn't see her anymore to go.

Then she was gone...
I'm so happy that Johanna got to come. I'm happy that I got to show her everything here, that she ate Easter brunch with us and got meet my family here, and that she was there to watch me run on Sunday. Hopefully it won't be so long before I get to see her again.