Return to Ironman Arizona

I still remember the first thing I said to my friend Leslie after I finished my race in Tempe five years ago when she met me behind the finish line.  "Don't ever do this race."  I had spent the prior few years racing only in Lake Placid and Hawaii, where it's actually pleasant to race... sort of.  The water is clean and the roads are inviting and the courses offer some beautiful scenery.  None of these things are true with Ironman Arizona.  Tempe Town Lake is the least inviting body of water I've ever swum in (you know it's a bad idea when nobody swims in the lake EVER, except on race day), three loops of the bike course riding along mostly dead landscape that includes the occasional tumbleweed and the luxury of riding past a landfill six times.  And finally a run that twists and turns on lots of random pathways around the lake so that they could somehow find the miles to make up the three-loop marathon.

And yet, I've come back.  It took me over five years, but here I am.  Even worse is that it was mostly my idea.  I'll let you know tomorrow night how I feel about my decision.  Last time I was here I was at my best in terms of triathlon performance.  It didn't result in my fastest time, thanks to some killer wind on the bike course, but it will be an extremely difficult performance to match.  Not to mention the fact that the level of competition over the last five years has increased dramatically.  Five years ago I somehow managed to come in 8th woman overall.  Including the pros.  There were hardly any pros.  I won my age group by an hour.  Yeah, I somehow don't think that's going to be happening tomorrow but I'll do what I can. 

It's been a long and strange season.  I don't even remember when I officially started back up last year after my stress fracture.  October, maybe?  Surely over a year ago.  I was in a pretty bad place physically after being injured and totally out of it for so many months.  But, a whole lot of races later, here I am, about to do my second Ironman of the year, my eighth race of the season (I think that might be a new record for me) I drove from New Hampshire to Florida to Alabama to Texas to Alabama back to Texas and back to New Hampshire.  Flew to Phoenix and Orange County and Hawaii and now Phoenix again. 

And less than a week before Thanksgiving, it's time for Ironman #14.  Why do I keep signing up for these things?  What about getting up at 3:30 tomorrow morning and shoveling applesauce down my throat is appealing to me?  I don't know, but I paid a lot of money to do it so I might as well go. 

Things have been fine.  The trip here was easy and uneventful.  I still remember how to drive around here.  My mom came with me this time, and she came out here last time, too.  Although this will be the first Ironman I've done since Dad died where she was here but he wasn't.  We haven't really done much since I'm trying to rest but she's gone to some art galleries she wanted to go to and I've managed to keep my feet up a lot. 

This morning we went to breakfast with Pat and Courtney and Kim, and fortunately I steered us away from Denny's and to another place I remembered going to when I was out here that serves up outrageously huge but also delicious pancakes.  We all left stuffed.  Then I pretty quickly got all of my stuff together to drop the bike off just after 10:00.  I've done plenty of these races and I think this is the first time I've ever encountered a line at bike drop off.  And not just any line, but a really long one.  Apparently for some reason they decided it was important to take a photo of every single bike before they got brought into transition.  What the purpose of this exercise is, I have no idea, but it seemed to only serve to make a simple process ten times more difficult than it needed to be.  But eventually the bike got dropped off, and I have an end spot on the rack, the bags got where they needed to go and now it's time to just sit back and relax.

I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow and it's a bit odd to know I've got so many people paying attention to it, but I guess we're about to find out.