Here at last

Arrived in Kona last night just after sundown.  Had a lovely dinner with authentic Hawaii pizza--a little cliche, I know--but I love Hawaiin pizza and I couldn't pass it up with roasted pork.  Also couldn't pass up the musician playing his uke for the restaurant.  He played a few songs, took a break, and came back to let us know he would only be playing on more song as he was being summoned by the kitchen to step in at his other job.

Amazes me that this thing fits nicely in that little box.

The finished product.

Got to our vacation home at 10ish, settled in and went to bed as soon as possible.  We hadn't sleep on the plane rides to try to fight off jet lag.  As we were driving to our destination, I realized this meant I had gotten a full 7 hours of sleep in the previous 72 hours.  I was exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open.  We woke up with the sun this morning and I put my bike together before we went into Kona for the day.

The feel here in Kona is different than what it was in Wisconsin.  I'm not talking about the locale, as we're a long way off beer brats and cheese curds, more the feel of the triathlon community.  The feeling is friendly but certainly more serious than what I found in Madison.  There are so many top notch athletes here.  Hard to not be intimidated.  I have to remind myself of the first Ironman I did in 2008 with my 1995 steel-frame Specialized road bike.  As Lance Armstrong's book suggests, It's Not About the Bike.  I have to remind myself to trust my training.

I got in my last real workout of my training.  Did 2 miles swim, tackled the Queen K for 25 miles, and ran down Ali'i Drive for 4 miles.  Walking through the town and embarking on my swim, I felt vastly out of place.  I didn't know how I belong here.  Everyone one seemed to know everyone, and if not, they knew where they were going and what they were doing.  Everyone is uber fit with rock star caliber bikes.  This is the center of the long-course triathlon universe after all.  Again, Do I belong?

The swim itself was gorgeous though.  It exceeded all expectations as just 10 to 15 feet below the ocean floor was covered with beautiful corral surrounded by tropical fish; even swam over a sea turtle.  Glad I'll be swimming here the next few days so I'm not too distracted on race day.

Photo from last year's IM Hawaii swim start that won National Geographic Sports Photo of the year.  Photo by Donald Miralle.

The bike course.  An interesting challenge. 

On my bike I discovered a couple problems with my gears and brakes that I'll need to address before the race.  I actually only have use of 1/2 of my gears at the moment & it won't shift for me.  I had a major tune-up last week with some new components and with that many new pieces, it is bound to require a little tweaking before it's full ready to go. 

After the workout, I caught up with Melissa and we had a delicious lunch before driving out on the Queen K to see the full course.  There are a lot of hills and it will be a difficult balance of going hard on the bike but saving some for the run.

Getting ready for bed now.  Need some rest.  Tomorrow is a day off for me.  Going to have nice breakfast with Melissa, enjoy a walk at the beach near our place and see what else the day brings.

Traveling

On the plane now from LA to Honolulu, then Kona this evening.  So far, travel has gone on without much difficulty.  We have 3 flights to get there totaling 12 hrs airtime.  This past week the workouts have been brutal—not in a difficult sense, but in the sense of just being awful.  They have not been anything close to what I was hoping for.  I didn’t go hard and then easy as planned, I just went soft throughout.  As mentioned before I’ve been trying to stay off my feet and keep pressure off my left forefoot.  I fashioned a foot pad from tape to remove the pressure from my metatarsals which has helped a lot during the workday and a little with running.  Unfortunately I’ve cut all of my runs short the past two weeks to put less stress on it and refresh my legs.  This doesn’t make me feel very confident.  It just makes me feel weak. 

Usually with my taper I know it is going well because I start to get ornery.  I have difficulty standing still during my taper but force myself to do it anyway and it puts me in a foul mood.  With work commitments being what they’ve been, I haven’t had the luxury of standing still & thus, am looking for a break.  I don’t feel ornery right now, just feeble. (Melissa may beg to differ about the ornery part.)

I haven’t been able to give the mental attention I need to the past few weeks.  I’ve been in denial these past two weeks of the approaching race.  I imagine waking up & working out on the course tomorrow will be the awakening I’ve been looking for.

The most common question I’ve heard the past few weeks is “Are you ready?” 

Not yet.  I feel I would have been able to complete the race months ago but in reality I won’t feel ready until the morning I wad into the water before the canon goes off.  I don’t want to feel ready any sooner than that.  If I do feel that way I know it will be because I wasted time by tapering too soon and didn’t get in as much fitness work as I could have a couple weeks back.  Hopefully this foot injury is just getting me to rest so I can get my legs under me before the race.  It really isn’t important that I only ran five miles this morning rather than six.  It is important that I get to the starting line as healthy as possible.

The computer battery is going to die now so I’ll post this and try to give a new update later.  Thanks for reading.

For those interested, the race starts this Saturday, Oct 13 at 7am for me (pros go off at 6:30am).  That is 11:30 am and noon Chicago time.  It is streamed live on ironmanworldchampionship.com.  It will be shown on NBC on Saturday, Oct 27  at I believe 3pm. 

Final preparations

I wish I had better stuff to write about.  This has been a somewhat difficult week both physically & mentally.  The mental aspect has been a struggle mainly because I feel far from focused right now.  Nothing overly stressful or burdensome but work and life have been demanding of my mental energies right now and I simply haven't had the time to focus and mentally prepare for the race like I would prefer to right now.  Perhaps that's why my mind started wandering this morning about things I haven't done yet after my pager went off at 1am so I had to get up to tackle a few last minute work details before we leave (in about 25 hours) and still don't feel like I could fall back to sleep so I need to ramble some things off with this blog. 

Oftentimes the best time for me to focus on a race is while I'm working out.  Many things occupy my mind while working out; one frequent tendency is running through the scenarios of how the race could play out but my workouts have been lousy for the past two weeks and I can't focus on the race if I can barely get myself moving to a normal pace.  My legs are still dead (which I'm fine with at this point) but I'm also limiting myself given a minor foot injury.

This foot problem wouldn't ordinarily be anything to write home about.  Typically I would modify my training a little, do more swimming & biking, wear better shoes, and be done with it after a week or two.  I have a slight sprain of a flexor tendon in one of my toes and a bone bruise in an adjacent part of my foot likely caused by me running slightly different from the first injury.  It doesn't really slow me down but I'm trying to get it better before the race as one of the limiting factors in the running speed for this race is the heavy legs and constant ache on the feet after all those miles and I know any change in gait given even the slightest of injuries will make tolerating that even worse.  It's not the after that concerns me.  I'll have plenty of time to rest.  It's the last 10 miles of the marathon that this gets the worst and I don't want to approach the race with a sore foot if possible.  There are certainly worse things that could be going on right now so this is still certainly minor but just a constant battle this week of trying to get off my legs but that really isn't an option with work and with packing for the race.

Sorry for the rambling this morning.  After getting some work emails out and updating this it's now about 4:25 am and I feel a little sleepiness setting in so I'm going to take advantage while I can.  It must be a pretty lousy blog if it's even putting the writer to sleep.  The pool will be calling in about 2 hours.