Friday, July 24

Joe and I got up and did a 10 min swim in Chapel Pond, a 15 min bike ride, and a 15 min run from the camp just to get the muscles responding. It felt great. Kate and Jeff arrived at the camp from Phoenix (yes, people came from all around to see us do this race). My dad was at the camp and we just hung out during the day. My dad also cleaned and lubed our bike chains and helped put on our numbers to prepare our bikes for the day ahead. My mom and my nieces arrived in the afternoon with the t-shirts for our Iron Spectators which Lila organized very diligently for us. We had a very nice lunch at Cedar Run with Kate and Jeff and watched very nice bikes come down the hill – it was nice and relaxing. Then we started organizing our run/bike gear bags and special needs bags. I had made a list of all of the things I needed in my bags before hand because my friend Melinda said that that was the best strategy so that you knew you had everything. So, I was sitting on the floor with all of my bags out in front of me placing all of my gear and food in the appropriate places. Because I am horribly anal, I had my cousin Kate read off my list and show her that I had it, then I took a picture of all of the gear in each bag so that on race morning when I was freaking out that I didn’t have everything, I would have a visual of each thing in each bag. We then packed ourselves up and went in for the athlete banquet and mandatory meeting. The athlete banquet was fantastic. They played a video that was very motivational that at the end said “You WILL be an Ironman”. They brought up the youngest and oldest participants who were amazing. They showed the story of Matt Long who was the everyday hero. He was almost killed and is now doing an Ironman with his physical therapist in support of the I WILL foundation. They brought up the people who lost the most weight during training, they had those who did a previous Ironman stand up (the man with the most Ironmen completed had done 104 total); they had all of the IronVirgins stand up. The whole thing was so motivational and exciting!!! I was so glad that I had Joe with me the entire time experiencing this from an athlete perspective as well because it made it all the better. Then the rules meeting started and they started freaking me out with all of the rules and the constant reminder of the time cutoffs. I knew the cutoffs and was worried about them already but had gotten myself to a place where I knew I could do it and they were undoing all of my good mental work. I knew that if I could just make it out of the water and off of the bike, I was going to be an Ironman so having someone keep telling me about the 1:30 and 5:30 time cutoff was torturing me. We left as soon as we possibly could because I was getting too worried.

We met up with Kate and Jeff at the Lake Placid Pub and Brewery for a beer after where I found out that Jeff had proposed to Kate at the lake while we were at the banquet. We were soooo excited for them. (That story is probably for another blog) We were in for a fantastic weekend with a start like this. Then we headed home for a nice nights sleep.