Triathlon Weekend - "Better Than Christmas"

When Kate gets obsessed with something, she doesn't believe in half measures. She has read all four of those ridiculous vampire novels over the course of the past two weeks. Prior to that, her obsession was triathlon training. Which culminated in triathlon weekend last weekend. Even before her race, Kate declared it "better than Christmas".

- People around here take their triathlons seriously. Kate (middle of the photo) and my sister Beth were practically the only ones in the race without a wetsuit.

- Best babysitting service ever - big cousin twins Sean and Erin kept the little twins happy all day

- Yes Kate did have a goofy perma-grin on her face throughout the whole race. She had an awesome bike and run to beat her goal time by almost 5 minutes. She finished 8th out of 55 women in her age group. She's already plotting her winter training to improve for next summer (at some point I'm going to break it to her that a 3rd child might make things tricky).

- Here's Beth finishing hard

- I didn't want to miss out on the festivities, so I did the try-a-tri (much shorter distances). Considering that I can't really swim (the joke was that I was doing head-up breast stroke in order to keep my hair looking pretty), I was quite proud of my finish. I was 133rd out of the water (out of 321 competitors) and moved up to 17th after the bike and run. I missed an agegroup medal by 30 seconds. So next year I'm going to try to move up to the real triathlon. If I can just learn to swim before then.

- In the Kids of Steel race the previous day, Erin dominated the 6-7 year old girls' field, winning by 30 seconds. She is my inspiration! And Sean was in the lead after the swim but had a nasty fall on the bike. He picked himself up and finished the race like a champion. We resisted entering Jacob & Molly in the 4-5 year old race, although Jacob could have ripped up the field on his Skuut bike.