Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Uh, what just happened?

On Monday afternoon, The Wife and I, along with our daughter, met up with The Wife's mom for lunch.  During said lunch, I received a text message from Old Wise One (you may have seen some comments from this person on some of my previous blog posts.  He is The Wife's mom's husband...or more simply, step dad.  Make sense? Okay.).  In his text message to me, he wrote, "I just signed up for IM Coeur d'Alene...get on the web and join the party.  I will need the company."  I showed this message to The Wife, and received a very different reaction than what I was expecting.

I was expecting The Wife to give me the look of "Don't even think about it", but instead she gave me the raised eyebrow look, which is the universal look for "Is that something you really want to do?"  We began talking with The Wife's mom, and things just started to take off.  Once it was all said and done, it seemed as if this was going to be an opportunity that would be tough to pass up.  But would I be able to get registered?

Certain Ironman races sell out in a matter of minutes.  Ironman New York, which is going to be held for the first time next year, sold out in 11 minutes!  It was now about an hour after Coeur d'Alene had opened for registration, so I was a bit skeptical.  We went straight home after lunch, pulled up www.ironmancda.com to find that sure enough, registration was still open!  I filled out all of the required info, paid my arm and a leg for the entry fee, and hit "submit".  So somehow I went from planning on racing Ironman Arizona every other year, to racing Ironman Arizona this November, followed by Ironman Coeur d'Alene in June 2012...crazy!

There's a few reasons why this opportunity was too good to pass up.  First off, I have always wanted to do an Ironman somewhere other than Arizona.  Having someone else that I know signed up for an out of state race was just the push I needed to pull the trigger.  Secondly, have you seen pictures of this race?  You should absolutely check them out.

Ironman Coeur d'Alene swim start
A small portion of the bike route
And a bit of the run
Probably the biggest reason that I couldn't say no to this race was the opportunity to not only race, but race with a bunch of The Wife's family members.  All together, there's going to be four family members, and The Captain (yes, The Captain succumbed to my peer pressure and signed up too!).  The full lineup of the people racing in our group:

Old Wise One from Phoenix
Pappy from the Philippines
The Music Man from Chicago
The Captain from Phoenix
and me!

It's pretty awesome that we're all going to meet up and do an Ironman together!!

As you can see, Monday was a pretty eventful day.  A bit surprising, but in a good way.  Everyone's pretty excited.  Now we all just need to keep our fingers crossed that we stay injury free and we all make it to the start line together!

2 comments:

  1. That is awesome - I have heard great things about CDA. Excited for you all :)

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  2. Thanks Karen! We're all very, very excited. I'll have some posts along the way with updates on the trip, and of course the training (once I finish Ironman Arizona first!)

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