I’ve been distracted, but now I’m ready to finish this story. At the end of Day 2 I said that we got to the Ironman start at 5 a.m.

The race was supposed to start at 6 a.m. At the last minute the organizers changed the start time to 6:20 because they also shortened the swim course. The normal 70.3 Ironman has a swim of 1.2 miles. This was shortened to 500 yards because of the high winds. The water was very choppy and maybe they were worried about not having enough people to monitor the whole course under those conditions.

After leaving the transition bag with the bike we had to wait until athletes started to line up for the swim start.

To space them out the swimmers were allowed in the water two at a time every five seconds. It took over an hour to get all the athletes in the water. Each athlete wears an ankle band with a chip so times are recorded individually at the start and finish and at checkpoints along the course. We were able to pick Chris out of the crowd since he placed himself, based on expected time, near the front. There were a lot of black wetsuits and green caps, but his goggle straps were under the outer green cap and that was an identifying feature, at least at this point.

He is the on the left entering the water.

The original course would have taken swimmers out to that last yellow buoy, then left to the buoy at the far left and then back to shore. The shortened course had swimmers turning at the red buoy in the center of the photo, to another buoy out of the photo and back. There were at probably a couple dozen people in kayaks, rafts, boats, and even scuba divers to watch for problems.

Swim/bike transition. The wetsuit and goggles are left behind near the bike rack.

This is the only place we saw Chris on the 56 mile bike course.

Bike/run transition. Leave the helmet and switch shoes. The run is half a marathon–13.1 miles.

Chris’ support crew. We don’t provide actual support (food, etc) but can cheer him on.

This is the first loop through town.

This is right at the end.

The finish line.

These times are all different because they are measuring total time based on when the athlete entered the water. The stats on the Ironman app where we followed him throughout the course. show 34th out of 135 in his age group. That’s in the top 25% and that was also true over all.

It was a quick trip for all of us, but we’re glad that we were able to be there to support Chris and to hang out with Meryl while Chris was on the course. We didn’t linger after the race because they both had to be at work on Monday and we needed to get back here. Chris was finished before noon we all left by about 1:30. We made it home at 3:15 a.m. Monday.