IMChoo: Leading up to the race...

Weds pre-race - Great day of driving and eating

I started the drive to Chattanooga after 1 last track practice and had an uneventful drive. The only good part of road trips is planning in good food stops so for this trip, I had

1. an unplanned gas station CrackerJack refuel stop
2. lunch at Harvest Table in Meadowview
3. coffee and a snack for later from Blackbird Bakery in Bristol
4. and a pizza to go to eat in my room from Community Pie in Chattanooga 

Harvest Table was even better than I had hoped. The town of Meadowview is rather desolate, but ending up at a place that is so committed to local/seasonal foods that they couldn't have tomatoes on the hamburger since they had stopped growing for the year was a great find. I had the trout cakes and it was an entirely appropriate lunch size portion. If I hadn't been aiming for Blackbird Bakery in less than an hour, I absolutely would have had dessert as well.

Blackbird Bakery overwhelmed me with choices as usual and I took away a slice of chocolate pie for later after sotcking up on iced coffee, water and ice cubes for the next long leg of the drive.

Community Pie, thankfully, still carried the Sweet Fig pizza that I'd enjoyed there in May, so I got that, and started vacation with some binge TV in my hotel & pizza and pie. mmm.

Thurs pre-race - More eating! Checking off checklists

Breakfast - Check!
Julie Darling Doughnuts - Salted Caramel on the left, Oreo/Vanilla on the right

Registration and packet pickup - Check!

I had a pretty extensive race plan document that included a number of checklists, so I was excited to start checking off things.

Registration went super well, I bought my mug, which I decided I wanted to own, even if the whole race day fell apart in some dramatic manner, and picked up a new Little Debbie water bottle, two Oatmeal Creme Pies and a Little Debbie magnet.

The athlete briefing was good as well. It was rather sunny, so I was glad to get it done at 11A instead of waiting until it was hotter in the afternoon. When I watched IM Mont Tremblant last year, they got buoys every 100m on the swim that were numbered. I was hoping for that for us as well, and the announcer said that the buoys would be about 100m apart, but I didn't go down afterwards to ask how many there were, which was one of my prime questions that I wanted answered from that meeting.

Lunch - Check!
At Milk & Honey, I had a turkey, brie and raspberry jam sandwich. Yum!

After lunch at Milk & Honey, I went to The Hot Chocolatier and bought loads of presents for my extensive support network. It was great fun, and even more fun to hand out surprises to people.

Then finally, some downtime before meeting a rolling group of friends for dinner at Taco Mamacita, which I found while in the plaza for lunch. It was a great find and it was nice to enjoy a margarita, trying to put some of the fears to rest. Luckily I was joined at first by people who had done this Ironman thing before, so they kindly didn't laugh at me for wearing my timing chip on my wrist because I was so anxious about misplacing it.

I wrapped up the day with a massage to work out twinges that had built up over the last 6 weeks and new ones that came from the driving.

Friday pre-race - More eating! And some much-needed seclusion

My Friday checklist was much less extensive. I briefly considered getting the short bike in that I had skipped from Thursday, but it was rainy, so I mostly hibernated in my room.

I'd intended to go to Waffle House, but realized that what I really wanted was a fluffly waffle with whipped cream and strawberries, like it should be, so with a little help from Google, I found the perfect solution at the Wafflez Factory

Then some foam rolling, lunch at Cracker Barrel, and more television watching, and finally my family came to town.

After spending the day mostly with myself, I was ready to talk as much as was needed to hopefully make my family feel ready to share in this selfish adventure. I hadn't explained much about the race before hand, so we took a wander around the river front and used my dinner voucher at Pucketts where my dad had his first (of many) tastes of BBQ for the weekend, and looked at maps, and talked about time lines, and so on.

Saturday pre-race - Brick and more planning

Saturday had another fairly extensive checklist, mostly concerned with packing, but before I could pack my bags, I had a quick mini-tri on the schedule.

Swim with friends, bike carefully on rainy roads, and a happy run finish.

After the brick, I changed into dry clothes and we had an early lunch at Mellow Mushroom. This was super important, because I needed left over pizza in my hotel room in case I was post-IM-starving! Also, it was another chance to let my family ask questions and plan for race day with some more experienced Ironman racers, Mary and Katie (my main sherpa for the weekend)

Then I packed my run and bike bags, using a lot of ziplocs for sub-bag control. Like, 1 gallon ziploc had everything I had to put on or use in some way from swim to bike, so I knew in T1, if I touched each item in that bag at least once, I would be ready to go biking. There were also a few optional things, so I put those in a separate ziploc so I wouldn't get confused. After dropping these off Katie watched me pace the room while packing special needs bags, and basically doing a terrible job of staying off my feet.

More checklists means more control, right?

Pre-race dinner at Alleia was amazing, though it was rather too crowded and noisy for me to enjoy at the time. I got to hand out support-crew treats that I'd got on Thursday, and got to enjoy extra helpings of the family style food that wasn't vegan by carefully seating myself near vegetarian and vegan friends. I also got a second helping of the chocolate cake for dessert by seating myself next to Katie - the non-chocolate-liking anomaly :)

Ed and Alexis had an amazing skit that helped introduce some of the crazy and disgusting things we get used to in training to our families while relating a (supposedly real) Waffle House interaction, and then it was time for photos and bed!

Racers and team-mates who came down to cheer, with no particular direction on where to look

Lights out at 9 meant there was a chance for at least 7 hours of sleep before race day, which was really reassuring, so at 9, I stopped chattering about everything in my head, and settled down to try to sleep.

The sleeping was somewhat disrupted, but I told myself that my goal for right then was to go back to sleep, and all of the race morning tasks and checklists would be waiting for me when it was actually time to wake up. This worked surprisingly well, and I'll have to remember it for regular days as well.