Swim. . .Bike. . .Run!

On Saturday, our family participated in the Sherwood Family Triathlon. It was sponsored by the YMCA, celebrating 10 years in Sherwood. And, yes our whole family did the course, even 2 year old Tyson! Before you get too impressed, I must say it was a "sprint" triathlon in every sense of the word. The idea was for it to be family friendly and noncompetitive. The course was a 50 yard swim, 2 mile bike, and 1/2 mile run. I know, now you probably aren't too impressed! We had fun and lots of our friends were with us to make it even better. Because we were all participating I don't have any pictures along the course. The pictures are just before and after the race.

We started with the swim. The kids could use floatation devices, so Allison and Ethan used kickboards and we put a life jacket on Tyson. Next to the bike leg. The transition was a little rough on the kids because the weather was cold. We got out of the indoor pool and ran out the door to get our bikes outside and our kids were freezing. Trying to get the kids to take off their towels and put on clothes, shoes, socks and helmets took a lot of coaxing. We kept saying our friends were right behind us and we had to beat them. We put Tyson in the bike trailer and the rest of us hopped on our bikes. It was a really nice ride around our neighborhood. There are a lot of nice bike trails through the housing areas and we've been on several bikes rides lately so our kids knew the routes. This part was Ethan's favorite, although his bike pedal fell off not once, but twice! We just bought him a new 16" bike to replace his small 12" bike, but we don't know what's wrong with the pedal. Anyway, we made it through the bike leg. We dropped off our bikes back at the YMCA and left for the run. Our kids were tired at this point, but we kept going. We walked/ran the route back to the finish line. Ethan was wanting to give up until Earl challenged him to see which of them would cross first. Ethan's pretty competitive so he took that challenge seriously and ran his little heart out the last straightaway. It was fun to see many people we knew along both the bike and run legs cheering everyone on. Even people we didn't know were saying "Go #137!" (Ethan's number). We all got medals and our kids were pretty proud of themselves. We love living in Sherwood where community and family are so important. There was such a good turn out and it was so fun to be with our family and friends. I'm proud of our kids for finishing the race and hopefully this will become an annual event that we can do together.