Our Parents Come to Visit… A Week Before School Ends?!
Co-authored with Ryan Khodadadi
So, our parents came to Nashville this past weekend… a week before we are due home. While other students’ parents have come to pack up their children’s dorm rooms and take them home, our parents just came for a casual visit. Well, that’s not entirely true. Us Khodadadis are known for multitasking, so while our parents were here to visit, our mom ran the Country Music Marathon.
- The Country Music Marathon logo.
The Country Music Marathon is hosted in Nashville annually, and all proceeds are donated to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Our mom really enjoys the course and Nashville in general (because it’s a great city!), so she has been running this race since before we were both students at Vanderbilt. We first met up with our parents on Friday afternoon, after completing a Biology final earlier that morning (Allie) and an Organic Chemistry final the morning before (Ryan). Together, as the reunited Khodadadi Klan, we went to the marathon expo at the Nashville Convention Center next to the Renaissance Hotel downtown. After collecting our mom’s information, we had a carb-loaded dinner at Buca di Beppo Italian Restaurant in Brentwood.
Being the children of a mother who has run over 50 marathons, we are quite used to race-day routine. However, this event was very different. Our mom’s friend came to Nashville to run the race as well. She brought her ten-year-old daughter along, and she needed someone to watch over her little girl. Of course, my mom offered the services of her favorite child, Allie (just kidding, Ry!). The only problem: I had to get up at 5 AM on a SATURDAY to trek over to their hotel. Luckily, I dragged Ryan into driving me over to the hotel, so he had to be tortured as much as me. We had both stayed up late studying the past two nights before the race day, so we were sluggish all of Saturday morning.
Despite our fatigue, us Khodadadi Kids were successful support systems for our mom. The full and half marathon started at 7 AM in Centennial Park, right across from Vanderbilt’s campus (around our Bookstore and the Towers Dorms). There were over 30,000 runners! The runners finished the race at LP Field, home of the Tennessee Titans NFL team. We greeted our mom at the finish line with smiling faces. We are both proud of her for completing another marathon, and we are glad that we got to spend a weekend with our parents (even though we are coming home in a few days)!
- Our mom and her friend, Beth.