It has been the first day of the CrossFit Games world championships, and of course we have been glued to the screen.
Fortunately for the rest of our lives, the important bits have been spaced out at long intervals during the day, indeed, I am writing these very words now in such an interval.
They are happening in a place called Wisconsin, in America. I did not know where this was, and had to look it up. I mean Wisconsin, obviously, not America. I did not pay much attention at school, but even I know where America is. It is on the other side of the Titanic.
It is hot there, and thunderstormy.
Number One Daughter is competing with her team. There are four people in each team, two men and two women, and there are forty teams from all over the world.
It is a jolly big thing. If you are a person who does Cross Fit, it is your Olympics. The advertising slogans on the side of the stadium tell us that it is a competition to find the fittest people on Earth. They are also recommending that we purchase Monster Energy Drinks, which we won’t because it is a disgusting concoction made of a solution of sugar, and some upmarket sunglasses. We will not be purchasing these either, because we have already both got a couple of pairs of perfectly good sunglasses that people have left in the back of the taxis.
It looked to me as though they had already found them, the fittest people on earth not the sunglasses, that is, because everybody who is there is already pretty much the fittest person in their country, or at any rate, the fittest person that anybody who knows them has ever met. There were several heats, and some semi finals to be got through before the athletes got to Wisconsin, and the very best few got there.
Number One Daughter is one of them.
We had to stick our tongues out to navigate our way through the complicated array of alternatives available on You Tube to find them, because the whole thing is set up to be understood by young people, and probably American ones at that. We knew we had reached the right programme when there was a lot of loud music and an enthusiastic American bellowing over the top of it.
They started this morning. That is to say, it was this morning in Wisconsin. Here is was lunchtime, which was just as well, because we had slept like Snow White in the bit in between the apple and the non-consensual kiss, and did not wake up until almost lunchtime. Nobody kissed us, consensually or otherwise, but the dogs were grumbling that they wanted to go out, which worked just as well.
We had got ourselves set up for Viewing, on the big television. This was exciting in itself, because we have not switched it on for weeks and weeks. I had set up my ironing board, in the spirit of filling the unforgiving minute, and brought down a huge pile of Oliver’s school uniform from the loft to help the day along. It felt very reckless to be watching the television during the day. We have never done that before.
Mark was outside nailing my taxi back together, with an alarm set for five minutes before it all started, when he rushed back in and sat down to watch.
The first bit was a competition in which the teams had to swim five hundred metres across a lake, and then pick up a kayak and row it for a mile.
It was so exciting that I even stopped ironing to watch. The girls had to do it first, and the men could not start until both girls in their team had got back. Then both men had to splash round and cross the finish line together.
It was terribly windy and looked to be very hard work. We could not see very easily which one was Number One Daughter, because there were lots and lots of them, all in identical swimming costumes and goggles and caps, but fortunately she was standing behind an American at the beginning, and so she appeared on the television and we could follow her.
The television cameras are Americans and they are only watching their own teams, occasionally turning away for a grudging second or two if a team from another country wins a heat. You can only see everybody else if they happen to stand next to an American. Indeed, rather to our amusement, there are about five British teams there, and the commentators and cameras have not alighted on any of them at all, not even once. They have not merited a single mention. We know that they are not actually invisible, because we can mostly tell which is Number One Daughter, even at a distance, and our viewing is punctuated with yells of: There she is!
The second and third events came this evening, except there it was the middle of the day. The sun was high in the sky, and the excitable American commentator told us that it was thirty degrees there, even in the shade. It looked it. She is going to be dreadfully sunburned.
These events ran together, and were an excruciating combination of pushing and pulling a half-ton sledge, and doing co-ordinated gymnastic swings up and over a bar. These are called muscle-ups, I think, and look to me to be almost impossible. I do not think that I could even jump up to reach the bar in the first place. Perhaps I ought to consider doing some more exercise.
Maybe next week.
It is now late evening, and we are waiting for the very last event of the day before we go to bed. It is not over after this event, there are more tomorrow. At the moment Number One Daughter’s team are in seventeenth place, which we think is absolutely brilliant.
It is almost time for the last heat and I am going to rush back downstairs.
It is too exciting for words.
