Day 160 : Summary
I made my way to Augusta today, and it was a fun filled day of pre-race excitement.
The day began with the drive kicking off around 9am and arriving in Augusta a little before noon. I decided to head right for check-in since I really didn’t know how long that was going to take and wanted to have plenty of time to get my biked checked in and get back to the hotel to meet Dawn and Emma. Hannah stayed back with friends so she wouldn’t miss her soccer game.
Upon arriving to the conference center at the hotel I quickly noticed it was already buzzing with hundreds of athletes. My first thought was how amazingly in shape everyone was…much more so than a sprint tri. It was obvious that I was going to be participating in this event with people in much better condition than I was.
Before you are allowed to check-in, you have to attend a mandatory race briefing which unfortunately didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know, but it was still mandatory. I did have a ‘celebrity’ sighting at the briefing: Tara Costa from last season’s Biggest Loser was there and apparently planned to participate.
After the briefing, I headed over to get my race packet and goodie bag. Once the necessary waivers were signed, I was handed my race packet and it was official…I was all set to participate.
I decided to head over to the hotel and get checked in there so I could go through the race packet and get my bike all setup for drop-off in transition. Bikes had to be in transition by 8pm the night before the race.
In the hotel room, I dumped out my race packet and was surprised that Ididn’t see any of the famous ‘transition’ bags or ‘special needs’ bags. Instantly, I started worrying and thinking “what the hell!”. I called my buddy JD and he thought that it was a little odd too so that didn’t help calm the nerves.
I just put the missing bags behind me for the time being and figured I could go back to check-in and get them after I dropped my bike off. With the bike all setup and checked out, I headed out to drop it off.
Shortly after arriving at transition, I asked another athlete that looked experienced and found out that the half is handled much like a sprint tri in that everything is just staged in transition…no bags. Crisis averted!
The bike was nestled in its new home for the night and I headed back to the hotel to get my bag packed for the morning and to wait for Dawn and Emma. I must have checked my gear 5 times to make sure I had everything I needed.
After that, it was a pretty relaxing evening. We went to Cracker Barrel because it was close and I wanted chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner. The meal really hit the spot! We made our way back to the room where I cleaned up and slipped into bed around 7:30pm. I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep, but I just wanted do my best to get as close to sleeping as possible. Oddly, I think I did drift to sleep around 10pm and slept pretty well until the alarm went off around 3am.