Day 1 was the travel day. Day 2, Saturday was when the bike was to be checked in and we would drive the bike and run courses. We weren’t due to meet up with Chris and Meryl until mid-morning.

I decided to go on a walk since I’ve been doing it regularly at home and I sure needed to get some exercise after that 13-hour drive the day before. I took this photo for Dan because I thought he’d get a kick out of those cars.

The staging for the Ironman gets complicated. After the athletes get out of the water on race day they move to where the bikes are staged. The clock is already ticking so they want transition time to be as quick as possible. The bike needs to be ready to go and some people leave their gear bags there the day before or may plan to bring them back on race-day morning. Transition from swim-to-run requires a towel, whatever clothes you are going to put on over swimwear (after of course removing the wetsuit at the end of the swim–there are usually volunteers to help pull it off), and cycling shoes and helmet. The bike-to-run transition is usually just switching shoes and leaving the helmet behind with the bike.

After Chris checked in he was given all the numbered stickers for his helmet and the bike. He takes great care to make sure that sticker is on perfectly straight and even.

This is NOT the gear he will wear on race day, but after putting wheels back on the bike he needed to take it for a short test ride.

There are racks set up for all the bikes. Gear bags are left with the bikes or brought the next morning. We drove the course, checking out the long uphills on the bike course. After we had seen the course and spent some time exploring the lake shore roads we went back to the hotel for awhile. Dan was out of reading material and saw that there was a book store on the same street as the hotel. This place was called EntertainmentMart and it calls itself an entertainment superstore. It was a pretty amazing store but we didn’t explore it all–just the books, used and new. Here’s an abrupt change of photos.

There was a table set up just inside and an author was there with her first book, a fantasy adventure. I talked to her and her husband for awhile and they said asked if I wanted to put on the gloves and helmet that were for their display. I chose the gloves. And I bought the book.

The store also had music and a section of vinyl records. This was an interesting use for some of the none-collectable LPs.

Back to the main event.

On Sunday we set the alarm for 4-something so we could meet up with Chris and Meryl by 4:30 and drive to the event. You never know what traffic will be like when almost 2000 people try to get to the same spot at the same time.

Walking to the start at about 5 a.m.

To be continued.