Tristan’s race

A couple of weeks ago, Tristan came home with a permission slip for the running club at school. It said they were preparing for a 5K race in Osgoode, and the kids would be working their way up to the 5k during lunch hours over the next few weeks.

Tristan loves to run, and I am always in favour of finding new ways for the kids to burn off energy, so this sounded like a great idea to me. I have to admit, even when I signed the permission slip, I had vague ideas of backing out of the actual race by the time it came around, but the more Tristan talked about the perks (a t-shirt! a MEDAL!) the more I realized I was firmly committed and should make peace with the sacrifice of a Saturday morning to the run.

I was a little less enthused when a note came home about a week before the run saying that the school couldn’t be responsible for overseeing all the kids during the actual run, and parents were at all times responsible for the supervision of their own kids. Suddenly I was faced with the idea of actually RUNNING the 5K instead of simply spectating it. And I was not amused.

In the days leading up to the race, I resigned myself to donning my trainers and hoping that my weekly trips to the gym would be enough to keep me from embarrassing myself too thoroughly. However, in passing I spoke to one parent who was also spouse of an organizer of the run, and I was assured that he would need no supervision, that the runners were on a closed pathway (the newly minted multi-use pathway in Osgoode) and in fact out of sight for only 10 or 15 minutes. And really, does my lightning-quick 9 year old really need his lumbering mother like a ball around his ankle, slowing him down?

That’s how we found ourselves in Osgoode on Saturday morning, just Tristan and me, in the pouring rain.

Here he is at the starting line, twitching to go. He’s number 52, in the blue jacket.

Did I mention the rain? Not just a sprinkle, either. Driving, cold rain.

They were out of my sight down the path within minutes, but it seemed to take hours for them to run the kilometer or so to one end of the course and turn around. They’d run past the start, run another kilometer or so in the opposite direction, and then back to finish at the same spot they’d started. I peered up the path for what seemed like hours watching for him after the first turn.

He really doesn’t seem to think the whole run thing was such a brilliant plan anymore, does he? Once he saw me, though, he kicked his little engine back into gear.

I’m sure a week passed, maybe two, before the runners made the final turn of the circuit and headed back to the finish. I was wet and I’d been hiding under an umbrella. As the first runners crossed the finish line, I peered up the path watching for Tristan and staked a strategic spot for myself at the finish line. When he finally approached, I was so excited for him I almost forgot to take a picture. This is about four feet from the finish line.

I honestly thought my heart would burst from pride. It’s one thing to run on a warm sunny spring day, but this was the most sucky day imaginable, and his determination never wavered.

He crossed the finish line in 30:52. Was it really only half an hour? Because it seemed about five times that long. He was wet and dirty, red-cheeked and sweaty, but rather than beaming in pride, he was rather stoic about his accomplishment. Between you and me, I think it was way harder and way less fun than he’d imagined.

He’s the introvert to my extravert, but he’s got his mother’s need for external validation, and when I realized that there were no medals to be had, I thought we were in real trouble. No medals? The only reason he ran was so he could get a medal. Lucky for me, he’s also got his mother’s short attention span, and a medal was easily substituted by the promise of a stuffed yellow Pikachu he’d been coveting. He certainly earned it.