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.