insert your favorite tri pun here

As much as I love a good road race, I had to skip the State Championships today, even though it could have been my last race as a 5. Instead...I played support crew to Ella in the (kids') Chicago Triathlon.

Technically, this was her third one, but since the lake was creeping with microscopic bugs last year, it became a duathlon, and her other event at Oswegoland was kind of a "Are you ok after the swim? Here, take a rest and when you're ready, you can do the bike" kind of kids' event. (For the record, she got second in that one to a kid named Julia who's also been spotted at Northbrook.)

She was pumped. One kid was crying, many were nervous, but she was digging in the sand or rocking out to thumpy disco on the PA. In the early heats, we noticed a number of older kids pulling repeated butterfly dives off the bottom of the lake when the water was too deep to run in, and she was practicing those in the interminable standing around period. They helped quite a bit, both starting and finishing the swim.

If you don't get in early, you end up kind of walking through the water in a pack while a half dozen swimmers open a gap, so she got a great spot at the rope and protected it, even joking around with another racer, making fun of the big stupid clown at the start. She got in the water pretty well, and she was 11th coming out. She picked off a few spots to get into 8th before reaching transition.

We'd walked through transition earlier, and despite picking out some landmarks (at this garbage can, look for the American flag and the big tree) she lost a bit of time because there were two garbage cans, a bunch of flags, and a few trees. Oops. Next time we really should buy a silly balloon. Still, she found her bike pretty quickly, and thanks to mom's number belt and her awesome "tri-suit" (actually a bathing suit for four-year-olds) she didn't have to put on a shirt. She also skipped the socks, and it paid off big. She was in third coming out of T1!

The girls ahead of her also had "proper" road bikes, so she wasn't getting free Huffy time, she had to reel them in honestly. She was pretty solid in the bike, and other than one punk ass little shit who blocked her a bunch of times, saying "that's racing," thankfully that leg was uneventful. In the future she has permission to call kids like that Big Fat Losers and point out that they started four minutes ahead of her.

She came in to T2 in second place, and held it starting the run. I saw the leader and fed Ella her time gap, 20 seconds. A cranky woman with sharpie-numbered arms and skin like beef jerky scowled and said "You shouldn't tell her that." I laughed it off because the funny thing is, you might think that we're typical uber-parents who are overgrooming their kids for sports (er, um, guilty as charged on that, these kids have a frickin' stable of bikes), and that we're just pouring on the pressure, but she's so much more suited for this crap than I ever was. I remember wanting to barf before C-league baseball games, and she's lining up with 40 bigger girls, trading elbows, about to tear off into a scrum in Lake Michigan, and she's digging it.

I laughed even harder when I found out that my wife was 50 meters away, and she fed Ella the same time info! I guess we're both a little uber...but hey, some kids are out here to finish...so what if she's out here to win? It's a race, for chrissakes!

In the end, she gained about half the time back to finish her heat in second place, as it turns out, to the same girl who beat her in Oswegoland last year. Her age group had one other heat, and after they sorted the times, she finished 4th of 83! Holy Shit! Not bad for her first "real" triathlon. The best part was that all day she kept talking how much fun it was.

As a footnote, I have to add that I generally find triathletes wound a little too tight. I won't go into the whole Tri experience, the dorky Tri jokes on everyone's shirts, the Expo, the carbon-fiber shoelace aglets that everyone has to have, the conversation I overheard from a racer who made a spreadsheet of the magnesium/sodium levels of 20 sports drinks because he was suffering from cramps...you get the picture (for the record, a number of roadies fit that mold as well, and I've been known to geek out on training, but not like that). Then you have to factor in that parents with our socioeconomic status are often prepared to fight to the bloody death over a bad call on the soccer field...But the one thing that really bothered me was the fact that many, many of the parents were simply not cheering for anyone but their own kids. I had a clown horn, a rattling noisemaker, a cowbell, a camera, a 6-year-old, a wife out there somewhere texting me every two minutes, and an eye out for a kid in a day-glo orange suit, and I still yelled for every racer that went by. A disturbing number of people just stood there, clapped for their own kid, and then watched wave after wave of kids suffering just roll by. It makes me want to show up next year looking like Mysterio: