D Minus 1 and It Is Starting to Get Cloudy

Transition Area Beginning to Fill Up

Woke up with a pounding headache. Had a little coffee. Felt a little better. Went for a 15 minute run; felt a little worse. Hopped on the bike for 30 minutes and felt great. Came back to the room, and we packed up our swim-to-bike and bike-to-run transition bags with shoes, helmets, race belts, hats, sunglasses, fanny packs of food and electrolyte tabs.

We put race number stickers on our bikes and put them back on the rack to take down to the transition area. First we hopped in for a quick swim. The water felt a couple degrees warmer than Thursday--was still A$$ cold, but manageable. It's about 57 now they say. We swam about 11 minutes and hopped out.

One couple was taking pictures of Tommy and I getting our suits on (and laughing at us). Tommy wondered who's blog we were going to end up on. She asked for our race numbers, so it's possible we gained a couple more fans today.

After the swim, I went back for another round of ART while Tommy picked up some more water bottles. I had this big bloke named "Matt" from St. Louis helping me this time. Dude ripped into my right hamstring and abductor like nothing else. Then he went after my neck a bit.

My body is kinda happy/mad right now about the whole bit, but my range of motion is a ton better than it was during the run this morning thanks to Matt.

Turns out they DID have an underpants run. We saw them run through the Ironman village around 10:30. They were a smallish band, but lets say they were, Ahem, high quality.

After ART we headed back to the car, dropped off our swim gear and grabbed our bikes and gear we packed and proceeded to check them in.

On the Rack

It turned out I was missing my run special needs bag, so I had to get another one from the race volunteers when we went to drop off our Transition 1 (T1/swim-to-bike) and Transition 2 (T2/bike-to-run) bags.

Would You Place Your Behind Here for 5.5 - 6 Hours?

Before we headed to lunch, we walked the transition area. It was, unfortunately, still kind of a cluster in there--we'll have to determine the flow, we will have to figure it out tomorrow.

For lunch we meandered back up the main drag in town and ate at Toni Macaronis--an Italian place that is going to be a mad house tonight. We both had an enjoyable lunch, then headed back to the hotel for naps.

No More Basketball This Weekend

Must Remember ... Row 12

It's almost 3PM as I write this--Thomas and Maureen should be touching down in Spokane soon, so I'm presuming they'll be in CDA with my Fam around 4:30.

Our pseudo-reservations for dinner are set for 6 tonight, so that should give them time to get checked in and settled before we head off to eat.

Baseball Field Full of Volunteers: I Got Juiced Just Walking By Them

I must say, I'm a bit sad to have missed Rae's Kindergarten graduation. Those pictures are awesome.

Final disclosure: I do love having a "vacation" with just one of my buddies centered around when is the next workout and when do we eat? I owe my Redhead pretty big for this one.