Seven-year-old Sweetie Mack, you may remember, was learning to ride a bike in order to compete in a triathlon on August 9th. Lo and behold, there’s youth triathlons all the time in northern Virginia, so Mack got his first taste of competition today.
Jill, Mack’s mom, and official older daughter of NewMexiKen, reports. Click the image for a larger version.
Mack completed his first youth triathlon today. Yay, Mack!
He had fun and seemed to do it with little problem…physically. Unfortunately, this was the first race put on by a new organization and it was a mess. The volunteers made many mistakes. In regard to Mack, [the mistakes] led to him riding extra mileage on the bike (luckily, Byron and I caught him before he rode an entire extra loop, like many kids did), then completely missing the run when they sent him directly from transition into the finish chute.
So he’ll have a great .68 mile time of about 15 seconds!
At first when the error was realized (too late to do anything about it, officially, as they’d already removed his timing chip), Mack was despondent and I wasn’t far behind. Then Mack decided to complete the run anyway, with no timing device on. He did a great job and kicked it home in an impressive time.
So, Mack is really happy with his morning and said, “I actually got to do extra on the bike and run Mom, that’s good.” We are, of course, very proud that he did the run even knowing it wouldn’t count. None of the other kids who were similarly misdirected did so, that we saw.
I’m trying to get over the fact that his time was messed up and that he was therefore unable to win one of the trophies for first, second or third place in his age group. Trying. Trying hard. And I’ll keep trying. At least my seven-year-old has his priorities in line.
Congrats to your posterity.
A math thing : more than 2/3 of a mile in 1/4 minute is about 160 MpH.
Just to clarify, as I understand it, the official running distance was .68 mile, but the volunteers sent Mack directly to the finish and so he only ran a few yards in his 15 seconds.
Yep, Mack only completed a tiny portion of the run (while being timed).
The official results are posted today and four of the eight boys in his age group made the same mistake.
What’s Mack’s mother didn’t say is, that thanks to his 160 mph run, Mack had the best time overall for the three events among the 28 boys in the 7-10 age group.
Yeah, what a mess this thing was. Of the 50 kids in the 7-10 age group (boys and girls), 23 have times which indicate that they were sent around the bike loop an extra time.
Then 13 of the 50 have no run time, indicating that they were sent directly into the chute before they ran.
At least Mack was the fastest of the kids who messed up!