Before
This had the potential to be a very different, much more TMI, race report. My period started around Tuesday, during our drive up from Austin to Lake Placid. I knew it would start some time around the race, and hoped it would be enough before that it would be over by the time of the race. Or start the day after. I did a lot of googling trying to find race reports from women who did Ironmen while having their period. But fortunately for everyone reading, that's all you're going to hear about that, because it was done enough by Sunday morning that I decided that I could just ignore it and hope for the best. And it worked out! So.. sorry to anyone who ends up here via google looking for how to deal with doing an Ironman while having your period. I have no advice, still.
Alarm went off at 3am and we were up and getting ready. Most of my "getting ready" was just getting dressed, making two pb&j sandwiches and eating one of them. I did finally have to decide what I was going to wear, though. At CdA, I wore the same thing the whole time: tri shorts and a singlet. I waffled for months over what to wear for Lake Placid, packed my transition bags so that I wouldn't have to decide until race morning, and now here it was, finally decision time. I decided to go for comfort over speed, and to change after the swim and after the bike (just my shorts). That meant wearing my singlet and bikini bottoms for the swim, which horrified me a little, partly because I'd only practiced that once, but mostly because that meant running from the swim to transition in just bikini bottoms. Aaaack.
Sarah had been intending to drive in with us (letting Jamie sleep in), but I had a text message from her saying she had been up late, and would drive in with Jamie. So we did one last check of the weather, which reassured us that there was a 100% chance of rain, and packed up the car for our drive from Wilmington to Lake Placid. It's probably good Sarah didn't go with us, because we were pretty quiet and inwardly focused, especially while driving up those hills we'd later be riding up.
Once we got there, we got all of our bag and bike work taken care of pretty quickly. Stocked the bento box with food for the bike, pumped up my tires with a pump borrowed from another athlete, put chamois butter in my bike shorts, and put everything but my wetsuit, goggles, swimcap and bottle of water in my dry clothes bag for afterwards. Oh, and my sweatpants. Did I mention I was just wearing bikini bottoms? I wasn't parting with those pants until the wetsuit went on.
Actually, then we went to get bodymarked, so I had to pull down the sweatpants to get my numbers written on my thighs. I realized only afterward that she'd written my numbers above the tanline, so they wouldn't even be visible once I put on shorts. Ohwell.
My stomach hadn't cooperated well at the hotel room, but two portapotty trips later it was doing a little better. I still felt I'd probably have to hit a portapotty to deal with future intestinal needs on the course, though, and I wasn't too thrilled about that. I was thrilled when we happened by Betsy, who offered to take our Special Needs bags to the appropriate places for us, saving us a trip and some stress. She was a fantastic sherpa to all the Texas Iron folks out there.
So now we were done with chores, and headed to the lake to see about doing a warmup. Except there was nobody in the lake, and we weren't even sure where the swim start was. Or what KIND of start it was, though we were both assuming beach. As we tried to figure these things out, it started raining lightly. That dropped the temperature enough that we decided it was time to put on our wetsuits to keep warm, and I finally ditched my sweatpants (which was a little sad, because I couldn't find anyone I knew to take them, and these were the sweatpants I bought at WalMart in California for Vineman 2006 once we realized it was going to be colder than we thought; pants which were completely worthless monetarily, but had a lot of sentimentality attached). I joked with another athlete that now our 100% chance of rain had been fulfilled, and it could be dry and fantastic for the rest of the day.
We couldn't really hear the loudspeaker, but they must have announced that people could start getting in the water, because suddenly.. there were people in the water. We were quite a ways from where they were getting in, so we tried to cheat and go in from the side, but (fortunately) a race official told us we had to go through the right way, because we had to cross the timing mat. So we snuck in a different way that still got us across the mat, and headed into the water. Once we entered the throng of people, we realized getting separated was very likely, so went ahead and said our good lucks and goodbyes, and sure enough, lost each other shortly thereafter.
I waded into the water, and realized it was a deep water start. I did a short little warmup swim over to the other side of the lake, where there were tons of people amassed. Everyone seemed to be hugging the shoreline, and there were barely any people in the middle, up at the start line, even though my watch said 6:50, and even after the pros started their race. I surely didn't want to start from that far away, so after Bittersweet Symphony and the national anthem, I swam over to the place where nobody seemed to want to be, about 6 rows back from the front, right in the middle. It felt way too close to the front, but I thought that might help with congestion (or at least I'd be causing the congestion rather than trying to swim through it).
I was eerily calm as I sat there treading water. I realized at this point how very different Lake Placid was going to be from CdA. Nothing had felt the same so far; not the days leading up to the event, not the morning of, and not the panic at the swim start. I felt very .. I wouldn't say relaxed. Resigned, maybe. Matt says he thinks I was more ready than resigned, so we'll go with "ready". The swim would be chaos, the bike would be painful and long and dreadful, but if I could get through it, the run would be magical.
And then, with most people still sitting near the shoreline, the canon went off, and the event began.
