First, my beloved Detroit Tigers beat the New York Yankees in the American League Divisional Series in dramatic fashion last night, and now go on to play the Texas Rangers for a chance to play in the World Series. The first game is Saturday night, so I'll get to watch maybe an hour or so before I get some sleep for race day. The time hasn't been set yet, but knowing MLB, it'll be 8 PM. I usually go to bed between 9 and 10 on race night.
Today, I'm working a half day. Legendary actress Ava Gardner is from a small town near where we live and they have an annual festival in her honor. The focus of the festival this year is on the relationship between Ava and Frank Sinatra who she considered the love of her life. At 4 PM they're showing From Here to Eternity to kick off the film festival associated with the event. Ava isn't actually in the film, but it's the role that validated Frank as an actor (he won the Oscar) and won 7 other Oscars that year. As Rach and I are both Sinatra fans, we're looking forward to seeing the film, and wandering around the Smithfield outlet mall beforehand.
I also picked the 4 PM film because it should let us get home before hockey starts tonight! My Blue Jackets start their season at 7 PM against Nashville. Lot's of great positive changes for the team (better players and a more certain future in Columbus) so I'm really stoked for the season. Normally this would be the biggest event of the weekend in any normal year, but this is evidently not a normal year.
Saturday, morning we drive out to Anderson, SC for the race. A couple hours after we get in the car, the Ironman World Championships start. In the past year, I've been fortunate enough to meet Pros and Age Groupers good enough to participate in this race. In fact, Marc Saucier, one of our WWMS teammates is participating, along side Cait Snow, Ange, Mirinda Carfrae and a host of others. We won't get to watch most of it, but Rach can follow along on her phone while we drive, and we can catch the end at the Rev 3 event Expo.
Tomorrow night, after check-in, there's a "Taste of Anderson" food event which we might go to before turning in for the night and if there's time meet up with friend and cycling journalist Neil Brown.
Finally, there's that little thing called the race! I start Rev3 Anderson at the unusually late time of 9:25ish AM, so we don't have to be up super early for once. We'll probably get up at 7, eat, get ready, and head down to do final bike prep as transition closes at 8:15. Bike check-in is Saturday, so it should be a pretty simple final setup on Sunday.
As for race prep, I really feel ready for this race. I'm doing a final swim after work today before we head to the outlet mall, but other than that I'm ready. I've gotten in some decent runs and good swims, but most importantly, I've done a good bit of biking this week, up to and including last night when I got in my long ride for race prep:
According to the Rev 3 site, I did more riding and more climbing yesterday than I will in the race, and I missed averaging 3 MPH by just over 3 minutes. I set up some segments (portions of a ride you can compare your performance over multiple rides) and got King of the Mountain for those climbs, which is a bit funny as I'm evidently the only Strava user who rides these roads, and at just 10 MPH average on those climbs it won't take much for someone to claim them from me. Mostly I wanted to be able to isolate on my climbing to try to track my performance as I ride more of the roads in the area multiple times. We're blessed to have quite a bit of good riding without a ton of stop signs.
My goals for the race:
- I haven't officially finished a race since May. So, my number 1 goal is to finish under 4:15 which is the course cutoff.
- Swim: .9 miles in 40 minutes. I could potentially do this in the 35-38 minute range if I'm feeling really good.
- Bike: 24.8 miles in 1 hour, 40 minutes. That puts me at 15 MPH Avg. There climbing looks to be mostly slow extended climbing with one segment that's a little steeper right at the beginning, when my legs should be nice and fresh.
- Run: 1 hour, 30 minutes. I'm still going to be mostly walking, but I actually got in some good run/walks this time. Most of the past week it was at Campbell's track because I was walking too late to safely be on the road, but I did some running on the hilly roads around our house as well.
- Transitions: No more than 10 minutes in transitions combined, but I'm seriously looking to cut down these transition times by quite a bit. Other than the wetsuit take off, I think I'm really ready for some quick transitions!
- Total Time Goal: 3:59:59 or less
Have a great weekend, I'll be doing some quick posts from the phone over the next couple days to help share in the fun.
Sounds like a great weekend indeed! Good luck to your sports teams, but more importantly, good luck to you in your race! Have fun, be strong.
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