We did not have an alarm clock in our room, so I set both cell phones and one of my watches to wake us up.  I set them staggered 5 minutes apart to make sure any sleepiness got kicked in the butt!  Around 3:15 I woke up to use the bathroom, and in glancing at the clock on the microwave I thought it …

Friday was a pretty uneventful day.  We went down for a swim, and I did a short run.  I skipped out on the bike because I broke the valve stem extender on my front tire “ and we had to spend some time searching for a way to fix it.  I ended up just falling back to the previous valve extenders I had …

Thursday morning we woke up pretty early and walked down the beach to see the swim start.  After spending a few minutes down there we walked back to our room and I put on my wetsuit and we walked back down there for a swim.  I did one loop of the swim course “ trying to swim easy at what I felt would …

Mary and I both woke up early.  I had some coffee and pop tarts for breakfast.  Then I went down to the beach to do a swim.  I swam about 30 minutes “ nice and easy.  When I was about 20 minutes in I was swimming along, and all of a sudden felt like I got stung by a bunch of insects on my face. …

We left Milwaukee around 7 AM, and flew to Atlanta and then on a small jet to Panama City.  The flight as a whole was uneventful.  When we got to Panama City “ it turned out our rental car was a Mini-Van.  It’s actually pretty sweet!  The bike arrived without issues too.

We headed to our condo, getting lost “ …

That’s me at Ironman Florida – 317.  I think that’s a good number, primarily because it will give me a constant reminder to HTFU on the Marathon and run – need a run split under my bib number.

Training has been pretty good, I’m starting to feel pretty sharp.  This past weekend I did a swim, followed by a long ride, …

19 days from now I’ll be in Panama City Beach, FL and hopefully about 8 miles into the bike of IMFL. (It’s 8:15am as I write this).

I don’t know what to expect for the race right now.  On the one hand, I have been fanatically watching the water temperature and am thrilled to see it come down to 74F, from the 84F it was …

I had decided to do this race a couple of weeks before IMWI.  I thought doing it would be fun, would force me to do a threshold workout, and make sure I had an intermediate target between IMWI and IMFL.  Long story short, it was a success on all counts!

My wave was projected to start at 10:55 AM, so Mary, my parents …