Race Report

Through some combination of being overwhelmed by how long this post is going to take to relive and record, and the recent resurrection of my pre-Ironman social life, it's been a week and a half since the race and I'm just sitting down to write this. Every time I think I know where to begin or end, new thoughts or memories make themselves known. I suppose 3:30 am, Saturday, August 1st is a good place to start.

Just like before Wildflower, I woke up about 45 minutes before my alarm was going to go off, completely alert and ready to be up. Since it was 2:45 however, I went to the bathroom and then laid back down. My eyes re-sprang open at 3:29, and I waited for my alarm to go off for a minute. Then Rizzi and I both hit snooze and got up at 3:40. We sat up in our beds, looked at each other, and then said "Wh-ha-ha-ha-what??" Then we swung our legs over the beds, looked at each other, and said "I guess let's eat breakfast! This is ridiculous!" They had taken our bikes from us, our run stuff was already at T2, and they were going to drive us in a bus to the race start. They had made tri-babies of us.
We ate - cereal for both of us, and a PB&J for me - and dressed in our bike clothes. We went through our swim bags one last time and I realized I had lost my goggles; Rizzi lent me a pair of his. Scary. We kept giggling and telling each other we were about to do an Ironman, realized how strange it would be to be back in the room in 19 or so hours, and then headed to the lobby.

4:20 am at the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country was Nerve O'Clock - 28 pacing teammates in a too-small lobby, looking and talking, laying on the floor, getting up again, taking pictures, here and there someone humming the Rocky theme. On a day where you will have such intense inner focus driving you forward, and focus constantly on your own will to keep going, its strange to just stand and wait to be told that the bus is here to take you away - there are no decisions to make or power to exercise, and it made me incredibly anxious. Maybe I was already anxious. I blame something! I blame helpful infantilization!
Got to hug Momm-ee and Dadd-ee before the bus came, which was nice even though I was fundamentally distracted. Eurie and I found each other and did our routine of being funny and cynical but really happy and proud, and went outside to sit on the steps away from Jiggle Nerve Party.

The buses arrived and the team distributed across two of them, so that everyone had their own seat; they turned off the lights and we descended down the hills in pre-dawn darkness, and we all fell quiet. This was the first time that I got a little calm, excited and overwhelmed by the feeling of sitting on this bus with these people, my team who I had been with for ten months, all being shuttled to a riverbank to begin doing what we all knew we were all going to finish. There was this question of how hanging in the air, but there was no disbelief - just waiting. Everyone in their heads, alone together on the bus in the cold quiet morning.
The drive is about 25 minutes, most of it along vineyards and through redwood forest. Just before we got onto the winding wooded roads, out the window the fog was pulsing some where it hung over a distant field. In the seat in front of me Carlos said, "Is that lightning?", as his nervous brain scanned for the race-worst possibility that flashing light in the sky could be, and we watched and quickly realized the pulsing was too quick and too rhythmic for nature, and thought maybe it was runway lights for a mini airport. We traveled closer and the light doubled and continued to pulse, and we realized it was a RAVE in a field at 5 in the morning, and I loved this. We hurtled up closer and then past the rave, a bus full of people up far too early to do too much exercise, still waiting for our day to start, past a field full of strangers winding down their epic night, the silhouettes of their lights in the trees slipping behind us and then gone.