About 3 years ago, Kerryn, my Kiwi friend and swimming tutor said "Let's do Iman NZ in 2007" and my first thought was "Doing an ironman is crazy but sounds fun (and anything sounds fun that far in advance)!" The seed was planted and we decided to do Austria in 2005.
It is a scary feeling knowing that you will begin the day with swimming with 2000 people at once (similiar to a washing machine), then cycling for at least 6 hours and running a marathon - so many thoughts go through your head "What if my bike breaks down" is the biggest worry on my mind. Since Tim and I are not the top athletes in our tri club, we hope to earn a bit of street cred by doing these longer races - and endurance races are definitely meant for us! It is such an amazing feeling crossing the finish line after all the months we spent training.
Our first race, we wanted to finish. This race, we would like to beat our time from Austria (as we did spend 7 weeks training in sunny and hilly Australia). But as we felt yesterday, the wind can kick up and slow our bike time down by an hour! So every race is very different.
We are at the tri expo right now and feeling very excited (the coffee we are having is giving me eyes of grandeur - we are going to conquer this race - grrrr!). We cycled part of the course yesterday, registered this morning, going to swim part of the course today and get pre-race massages later this afternoon. We have the pasta party tonight which is always great fun to size up the competition.
We will give a post race report when we can. Please send us positive thoughts for the race because it is a tough one! The race starts this Sat at 7am - that is 8pm on Friday night UK and noon on Friday for the Californians. Check it out here (keep your eye out for Kerryn Gardiner, Jason Bell and Elliot Keys as well as the Phillis duo): http://www.ironmanlive.com/events/ironman/newzealand
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