IronKids Alpharetta

About a year ago, Zachary came home from school one day and said that he wanted to do a triathlon.  It was so out of the blue, that we had to ask him what made him decide that.  He said a girl in his class had done one over the weekend, and she brought her medal in for show & tell.  I asked him if he wanted to do one because he really wanted to do it or if he wanted to do one because he wanted a medal.  He said he really wanted to do it.  Unfortunately, that was about the last one of the season, so we had a long wait ahead.  When summer rolled around, we confirmed that he still wanted to do it, and I got to research local triathlons (I wasn't about to travel to the ends of the earth for this – I felt certain we could find one nearby).  I found a couple that weren't too far away, but then I found IronKids.  The distances for each part were a little longer than some of the other ones I had found, but it was practically in our back yard.  It was to take place at the park where they play baseball, and where they went to summer camp for a couple of weeks this summer.  I knew this would be his tri.

Given that triathlons were new to all of us, we really didn't know what the best approach would be to training.  We had him focus primarily on the swim, because we felt that would be the most difficult for him.  We would have him swim laps in the pool (we had calculated how many laps in our pool equaled the tri distance).  He did that almost every weekend morning through July, August, and early September.  The boys gave me a bike for Mother’s Day, so that he could practice longer bike distances, and still be supervised.  We didn't have him train much on running – he can run, and he’s good at running.  That was the least of our worries.  We also did a couple of mini-tri’s, where he would do all 3 at a time (but never the full distance of anything).  And we pretty much always had him practice putting his shoes and shirt on quickly after getting out of the pool, and anytime we rode bikes, I’d have him park his bike and take off running to the end of the street and back.  I’m sure there were more effective ways he could have trained, but nobody was going for record times here – we just wanted him to finish, and have fun doing it (and maybe not be last).

This past Sunday was the big day.  MomMom and PopPop flew down to watch, and Grandma spent the night because we had to get up EARLY…like, way before the sun.  That’s tough on a Sunday…especially after the long days & nights I’d had from attending the R+F convention).  We had dropped his bike off the day before, when we went to pick up his packet, so all we had to do was set up his transition area with his shoes, towel, and bike helmet.  We were smart enough to think to bring him an extra shirt, so that he wouldn't have to be shirtless while he waited for his group to go, but we weren't smart enough to bring extra shoes for him to wear.  Sigh…so he had to be barefoot while we waited, since the transition area closed before the first group started.

We got to watch the senior group (12-15) swim, and bike before the Intermediate group (9-11, Zachary’s group) had to line up at the pool.  They lined the kids up by age and gender – so 11yo boys were at the front, followed by 11yo girls, then 10yo boys, 10yo girls, 9yo boys, and finally 9yo girls.  So Zachary was kind of near the back, but he was close to the front of the 9yo boys.

He did OK in the swim – it was more people in the pool than he was used to, but he did fine.  We saw kids who clearly looked like they didn't really know how to swim, and he managed to make it the whole distance with no trouble.  As soon as he got out of the pool, we moved to the sidewalk by the road to watch him on the bike.  He was pretty fast in transition because he was on his bike faster than we thought he’d be.  The bike was weird because he’d go by, and then we had no idea how he was doing until he’d come back the other way.

Once he finished his 2 laps on the bike, he went in for the run.  His transition there was super fast, and he was on the run course before we could even get back there, so we just headed for the finish line.  Once again, we had no idea how fast he was running, since we weren't stationed along the course, but it sure was sweet when we saw his neon yellow shirt come running up towards the finish line!

I am constantly amazed by what he can do.  He was barely even sweating when he finished!  His final times were:

Swim (150m) – 7:26 (he had been averaging somewhere between about 5:07 and 5:23 when practicing, but that was in a still pool)

Bike (4 mi) – 19:45 (we had been averaging about 23:00 when practicing the full distance)

Run (1 mi) – 11:23 (this is a little slower than he would normally run a mile, but he also wouldn't normally swim 150m and bike 4 mi beforehand)

His total time was 38:34, which I thought was pretty good!  We had though it might take him between 40-45 minutes, and this was faster than that.  He was a little disappointed in his place.  He had set a goal to finish in the top half of his age group, and that didn’t happen, but what we hadn’t considered was all the kids on triathlon TEAMS.  This is their sport – it’s what they do.  It’s going to be hard to compete with kids like that.  He came in 51^st (out of about 71) in the 9yo boys, and 278^th (out of 440-ish) 9-11 year olds.  We told him that next year instead of making his goal be about where he places, make it about beating his time(s) from this year.

This was SO fun to watch, and I’m excited that he has already said he wants to do it again next year – and maybe even do a 2^nd one.  We will never push him into it, but as long as it’s something he wants to do, we will happily watch, because it was a lot of fun to watch.