Triathlon

This past weekend my husband competed in his first ever triathlon.  He has been training with 4 other men  from our ward for several months.  I thought he was nuts getting up before dawn to go swimming. Crazy to be biking in traffic to work.  He has been running his socks off as well.  He looks great!  He has always been dedicated and just oozing with discipline.  This one time when he was at BYU, he had a goal to always write in his journal.  He remembered to write one night after falling half-way asleep.  So instead of blowing it off he got out his journal from under his bed, somehow found a pen in the dark and wrote a sleepy slanted line saying "discipline is the key to discipleship."  We still laugh about the irony of that sloppy line in his journal declaring his thoughts on discipline.  Then there's the story of how he rolled over all by himself as a baby at a very early age verbally insisting (somehow talking at 4 months) that he could "do it himself!"  That is some of his family lore I share with raised eyebrows.  Maybe he was rolling over at the age of two when kids normally begin speaking in sentences.  I think there's a great-grandma T out there who had her facts a bit skewed.  Oh well.  He is determined there is no doubt about that.  I, on the other hand look around for just about any excuse in the mornings to put off my workout.  I get up, read blogs, go into the basement, open up all the curtains, pick up a few things off the floor, organize the entire DVD collection while looking for my work out DVD and then realize that in one minute the kids are going to be up needing breakfast.  It's a strenuous guilt-ridden mental workout!  I am still getting up and putting on work out clothes so that must count as something right?

Anyways the triathlon was quite the adventure.  We went up to spend the night with friends to make things easier and I am so glad I did that.  It was a last minute decision and being with our friends who do this sort of thing often made all the difference.  For instance, when we got to the road that led to the spectator section they had closed it off 30 minutes early.  It was pouring down rain and that may have been part of the reason.  Due to rain they cancelled the swim portion of the race and the road we needed to drive on was now going to be used for running instead.  (I assume).  So my friend said that she'd find us a better place to watch and she surely did.  Her well trained eyes knew how to look for just the right cones telling her that we'd be in a good spot to watch the biking from a certain point.  Meanwhile my friends from church were walking in the rain with their young children in tow (leaving burdensome strollers by the side of the road).  They were just doing exactly what I would have done without the advice of my friend.  They parked in the designated area two miles from the spectator spot.  Then walked in the rain for two miles with a combined number of 9 children.  Press forward saints indeed!  We finally saw them at the end of the race looking like they were hanging in there but just barely.

T did great for his first event.  He placed 174th out of 377 finishers!  Our friend placed 2nd and even won a cash prize.  We felt all famous hanging around him in his sponsor's tent.  The next thing T wants to tackle is a marathon in October in Baltimore.  That should be hard.  I know he can do it!

Here are some of the lousy photos I got that day.  T likes to fiddle with our Nikon D90 and he doesn't set it back to easy mode for me so I couldn't get it to focus and it was so rainy I didn't want to risk having it out too long while I figured out the problem.  Next time I will have to train for 4 months in camera skills before he races.  I can probably get my head in that kind of game.