Kade Lovell’s mom, Heather, jokes that her son “popped out running” when he was born, and he’s been running all his life. However, the nine-year-old Minnestoan had never run a race like he did recently, scaring the wits out of his mother along the way, and it’s entirely possible that no one else has, either.
To keep Kade on target for the Junior Olympics, Heather signed him up for the St. Francis Fanny Flyer 5K.
Everything seemed to be going well with the race, until Heather, standing on the route, noticed that her son wasn’t in the pack, and some kids she knew to be slower than him ran past her. She started hunting up and down the route, and she still couldn’t find him.
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Concern quickly turned to panic.
“I had everyone looking for him, even a fireman,” she told the St. Cloud Times . “I was like, ‘You need to go find my son.’ I was bawling. This had never happened before.”
Then a spectator noticed that there was a “little kid who was running really well” on the 10K route.
On a weaving, winding route, Kade had missed his turn and accidentally found his way onto the 10K route.
“I was just running,” he said. “As soon as I saw the 5K turn, a lady told me to keep going straight. So I kept going straight. I was a little confused.”
He only realized where he was when he saw the sign for the 10K turnaround, and at that point, he started to panic a bit himself. “I thought, ‘Mom is going to yell at me.'”
That panic seemed to put a little pep in Kade’s step.
At the end of the route, Kade was all alone. He thought he was in last, but when he crossed the finish line, a race coordinator informed him that he’d finished first overall, with a time of 48:17:39. The second place finisher, a 40-year-old man, was a minute behind.
Of course, panic turned to relief for both Heather and Kade.
“When he finished, I was like, ‘You are in so much trouble,'” Heather said.
“As I started crying,” Kade said.
But Heather couldn’t be more proud of her son all the same. “This kid just ran a 48:17:39 10K!!! I mean… come on!!” she wrote in a Facebook post. “He is incredible and I am so proud of him! Now if he scares my mama heart like this again.. I will have to ground him!”
h/t: St. Cloud Times
