Families are hard. At training camp they told us, you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family. Sometimes your family annoys you; sometimes you feel misunderstood, but at the end of the day these six other girls are my family and I love them.
It’s month three on the race, and I can’t imagine doing this without my team. We have our differences, but we all understand that we are going to go through this together. We start every morning in prayer. Some of us are more awake than others, but we all make the effort to show up. Each night we debrief and talk about anything and everything. We talk about our frustrations, or what God’s been teaching us, or what we need prayer for. We laugh, we cry, we argue, we listen, we challenge each other, we support each other. When it’s all said and done, I know that these girls are more than just friends and teammates, they are my sisters.
Lately, however, we have been holed up in a house in Nis, Serbia, because it is so cold outside (yes it even snowed!). So here are a few things Benkadi likes to do in our free time…
– get on a bus/train and then try to figure out where and when to get off (not something I would recommend doing often!)
– ration out our limited supply of hot chocolate and tea while cramming onto a bed together and watching a movie from a laptop
– create our own aerobics classes
– pretend that everyday you’re wearing a different ourfit (when everyone really knows you’ve been wearing the same and only sweater you own since arriving in Nis)
– play a highly competitive game of Spoons which may or may not result in injury
– talk about our favorite foods, what foods we miss the most, and just talk about food a lot in general
