Race Weekend Day 2

On Saturday we had a relatively early wake up (7:00) to head down to the beach for another open water swim. For some reason I didn't feel like putting the wetsuit on again so I just swam in my tri shorts. I felt a lot more confident and had a good swim. The coaches had us do some running starts to simulate race entry in the water; in the race each wave starts in a corral on the beach and runs into the water at the gun. There's some combination of leaping dives you can do to get out to open water faster, but I just ended up doing a belly flop in the shallows. I decided just to run out until the water got up to my thighs and then start swimming. The New York TNT team was there as well. Their coach was like some drill sergeant yelling commands and having them do crazy drills. He seemed a little uptight.

After a brief "lunch" break at 10:30 everybody gathered on the front porch of the hotel for a final bike inspection. It was one last chance to look everything over, get some lube on the chain if necessary, and take your bike out for a final spin to check that everything was in working order (or for some people to learn how to change a tire). We'd done this before the bike drop off and I was sure my bike was is good shape. I'm really glad that the coaches urged us to take a good close look at everything, because I discovered a scrape on the sidewall of my front tire that was deep enough to produce a pin point hole that the tube was just sticking through. There's a better than average chance that I would have at least flatted on a long ride. Even worse I could have hit a pothole or something that would have turned that pin sized hole into an actual tear. We don't carry spare tires, just tubes. That would have ended my day real quick. Anyway, back down to the expo to pick up a new tire. All the bike tents really had were race tires, but I was able to find one that only set me back $32. Hey, at least I had a faster front slick for the race now and got some extra tire changing practice!

After wrangling the tire on and thoroughly checking the tube (as well as a double check of all other important components) we walked down to the transition area to rack our bikes. It opened at noon and we were one of the first people down there. Transition was huge! Being in TNT we also had some of the less desirable rack spots with the longest walks to the entrances and exits. This is really where it first hit me that we were going to race in less than 24 hours. Not when we got our participant wrist bands the day before. Not when we did the open water practice. It was when we put the race numbers on the bikes and parked them on the racks. St. A's has assigned rack spaces so there's no fighting over spots at least. I was in among some other TNT teams that hadn't checked in yet, so my bike was looking a little lonely. We also walked over to the swim start to trace the path we would take from the swim exit to our racks. It was easy enough to find when nobody else was there and we didn't have to worry about getting our wetsuits off!

Some more down time at the hotel and then we went off to the TNT pasta party a couple blocks away at the really nice hotel where some other TNT teams were staying (what's up with that?). There were "Thank You"'s from the TNT staff and a speech by a cancer survivor who was racing. Then Dave Scott, legendary Ironman triathlete and TNT national spokesman, got up for a little pep talk where he informed a group of nervous first time competitors that we would be fine even if we would all "probably finish in the bottom 10% of our age groups tomorrow". Gee, thanks. Apparently this was better than last year when the message was "even though many of you might not finish at all tomorrow". Either he really has no understanding of the audience he's addressing and is using some bizarre reverse psychology to make people believe that it would be a really cool thing if they just finished the race at all or he is an arrogant prick. Your choice. There was some polite applause and we got up to head back to the hotel where the real pep talk by our coaches took place. Back to the room around 10:00 for bed. I didn't have too much trouble falling asleep all things considered.