Ryan's First Road Race

Before the Race

I've been wanting to put this up for quite some time but I couldn't find the cord to my camera. Ryan, my nine year old did his first 20 mile road race about 3 weeks ago. I could tell he was pretty nervous but he took it on like a champ. It's a small local race and being scheduled the same time as a local triathlon, there weren't as many racers as usual.

It's a mass start so my goal was to have Ryan stay out of the fast guys way and then find his rhythm. I could tell from the start he was going to learn the hard way about pacing himself. As soon as the gun went off, he took off. Not quite as fast as the lead guys, but definitely faster than he could hold for 20 miles. So I finally got him to taper it back a little. About 4 miles in, two older kids passed him. I told him not to worry about it and that he would catch them by the turn around. He insisted on picking up the pace again. Right away he caught to two boys that had passed him. We were only about 6 miles into the race. I was actually pretty impressed. He was kicking butt. Suddenly his left pedal fell off. I couldn't believe it. We quickly pulled over and I had to take his shoe off to pry the pedal off of his cleat. The two boys he passed earlier quickly passed him again.

I had no tools so I could only hand tighten the pedal back on to the crank. We were off again. We passed the same two boys and sure enough it fell off again. Long story short, this happened six times. I'm not sure the distance, but he ended up pedaling quite a bit of the race with one leg. He was a tired boy. The final mile he was behind one of the boys that he had been leap frogging throughout the race. The other boy had blown up a few miles back. He ended up crossing the line with one leg and second in his age group. I was super proud of him. Not one time did he complain about the pedal. He just kept pedaling.

On our way home he was exhausted. I don't think he had ever ridden this hard in his life. He laid down on the floor of the van and was out. It was only about 9:30 in the morning!!!! He was wiped. I was super proud of him. He's already been driving me crazy about what ride were going to do next. What sucks is that I haven't been able to ride so this has really limited his riding as well. Hopefully soon we'll be able to hit the road again.

After The Race