I flew into San Diego on Thursday night, which was a little later than I had hoped to be there, but I couldn’t pass up being the mystery reader at my daughter’s kindergarten class that morning.
It’s about a 40-minute drive up from San Diego and I got checked in to my hotel in time to visit for a bit with my family and hit the sack around 11p.
Friday morning I headed with dad to registration and expo down on the waterfront. It’s a cool scene down there along the boardwalk on the beach. Registration was easy and went fairly quickly and then we walked the expo picking up swag and souvenirs. I was the best expo compared to some of the other 70.3’s I’ve been to.
I have a pretty strict pre-race day schedule. I like to get registration, expo, transition and warm-ups done by one or two o’clock. After expo we went to swim, but they were not allowing athletes in the marina (where the swim starts), nor were they allowing them in the ocean (some current issues). This was my first 70.3 without a swim the day before. After the swim disappointment we headed out for five miles or so on the bike and then for a mile or two run.
Happy with the events so far it was time to move on to the next part of my strict pre-race schedule…feedsack….relax….sleep-nap.
Although we were staying at the ghettoinn.com (or so it seemed), I did have a friend who lives in Carlsbad that happened to be out of town and offered up his place for us to cook up our pre-race meal. Part of the schedule is to eat spaghetti with marinara sauce and lean ground turkey, garden salad with ranch and fresh French bread with tons of butter.
This however, all has to be in the works by 4p. That allows an hour four cooking and relaxing, and hour four stuffing your face and your are done by 6p. After dinner I like to sip on Gatorade, watch some motivational movie like 300 and the hit the sack by 9p. I have to go to bed this time because it allows my body enough time to calm down and rest so I can actually, hopefully get sleeping by 10p or 11p.
Everything worked according to plan. We didn’t have to wait in busy restaurant lines or eat crappy restaurant food. We drove 11 miles to Carlsbad, shopped at Ralph’s and hit up my buddy’s apartment. We cooked, stuffed our faces and relaxed. It was quiet, we had a great meal and never worried about a thing.
We headed back (11mi) to Oceanside and visited a bit before making my 9p deadline. After checking and double-checking the gear and bike and breakfast preparations I finally hit the sack around 9:30p After about an hour of tossing a bit and “cooling off my mind” I finally checked out….on and off…..inconsistently….until the alarm went off a 4a or something like that. We had prepared Quaker oatmeal to cook in my “in room microwave” (a perk at ghettoinn.com) along with bananas smothered in a jar of peanut butter, coffee (for me to get the invaluable pre-race poo motivated), and Gatorade to sip on.
After a super filling breakky, bottle fill (with water Gatorade endurance and thermolytes) we drove to the race.
We had to park about a mile or so from the finish and ride our bikes and transition bags to the finish. This wasn’t a big deal and gave a small warm-up for a long wait to the start. I was in the second to last start wave so basically I could have come to transition about and hour or two later.
I setup transition, helped my Dad setup his, we gave that last minute pee and I saw him off to his wave start. Then I realized…I had 45 more minutes until my start….BORING! I walked around transition, peed again, watched the pro’s come in and then finally made it out to the swim start.
You get into the water at the marina boat launch, swim out about 50 yards or so and then tread for a couple minutes before the gun goes off.
And then…the usual swim start chaos full-contact swimming that goes with the territory….so FUN!
To be continued…..
nice race report...looking forward to part 2
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