I Rescued A Kitten During A Triathlon

Hi folks,

Cat nursing kittens. From: http://goo.gl/BaK56

I had one of those days, today. Running around all the time, in a hurry, never quite caught up. Then Deb said, as I was driving along, “Aren’t you going to stop and help those girls with their car?” I didn’t want to stop, I was in a hurry, but I did, reluctantly. It turned out that they had a flat, and they were blindly following advice from a previous passerby. They said that a school bus driver told them to loosen the lug nuts on the wheel with the flat. I guess he assumed that they would first jack up the car. So the whole weight of the front of the vehicle was resting on one lug nut, which they were vainly attempting to loosen and had fortunately failed. I fixed the problem, gave them a lecture on the dangers of driving on a tire with exposed steel belt (that cut me a couple of times), helped them on their way, Deb was happy, and I was even later still but I didn’t mind. It was nice to help grateful, reasonable people.

This reminded me of my having stopped to rescue a young kitten in the road during a half-ironman race. The thing that concerned me as I climbed off of my bike was how I was going to get back on again. I was on a steep incline in a sharp bend on a narrow road with no shoulder and cars on my tail. Yes! The road was open to traffic. Once I had the kitten safely back to her mother in an adjacent yard, I returned to my bike and was surprised to see a line of cars all waiting where I had stopped. They were waiting to let me back on my bike and into the race, and they were smiling. Guess I won’t win many triathlons that way, but I won in another way.

The moral of the story is to stop and help people (and animals) in distress, and you’ll probably find that you weren’t in such a hurry as you thought. Furthermore, what goes around comes around.

-k @FitOldDog