As the date of my first sprint triathlon quickly approaches, I’m getting nervous. Like scared. Terrified might be the best term. I’m not afraid of the event itself, I know I can do all of the things separately, and I know I can do them all in succession. I know I will finish. No, I’m afraid at how slow I will be. I looked at the finishing times for the last race (stupid, I know) and the slowest one was 1:30 something. My goal is around 2 hours. This means people are going to be standing around for at least 30 minutes waiting for me to finish. Or worse, they’ll leave bc I took too long. I’m fat, I’m slow, I’m not a real athlete. Why would they wait for me? I’m not in their ‘clique.’

As I was rapidly talking myself out of competing, my older son had a really wretched day today. I guess there was something in the water bc we were both breaking down. He is a super perfectionist, if he can’t do something perfect the first time, he won’t even try. He went golfing with his dad, the first time this year, and he didn’t play well, which became that he was a terrible person and hated golf. And I thought to myself, he needs me to finish this race. He needs to see me working really hard at this, finishing last, and being proud of myself. He needs to see people breaking stereotypes, that you can do anything if you try hard enough. It’s not going to be beautiful and it’s not going to win any records, but I am doing this triathlon and I will be proud of myself. I will be kind to myself. I can do this. For them, and for me.