Ironman Austria: day 3 - ohhh yeahhhh, it's bizniz time!

Not going to prattle on too much today as, in spite of today being the busiest day for 'doing proper stuff' most of that was relatively uneventful.

The day started with the English language briefing. At this point I really need to point out how amazingly slick and well-organised Ironman Austria is. You can tell they've been doing it for ages coz it really is a class act across the board. The briefing was standard except for.... drum roll please... the announcement that the water was too warm for wetsuits.

It's amazing that a group of people who are going to ride 180km and run a marathon can be such lame-ass pussy bitches when it comes to swimming. The room went crazy, hands went up, people started shouting... heck, I think there may have even been tears. Man-up people. As far as I'm concerned, all swims should be non-wetsuit! That, or I get to use a little bike motor and wheels in my run shoes...

No, but seriously, while this obviously works to the advantage of the stronger swimmers in terms of final positions, I was a little disappointed too. I'm focusing on the process rather than the time but I still wanted to do the best time possible, and wetsuits are responsible for a 10% quicker swim in general. Still, is what it is and no point crying over warm water.

Rest of the day: 15 minutes each of swim, bike, run. Bike check-in, bags dropped off, then mainly chilling and trying to commit carbocide (following the Ben Greenfield advice to stay high fat/low carb till the day before and then go nuts on the carbs... let's see how that works!).


Time for movie in bed now. I'm not one of life's great sleepers, especially before a big race when I find it extra hard to drop off, and last time around I think I got about 90 minutes of sleep. So just not going to force it tonight - the benefit of all those heinous 2-3am bike starts in Dubai is that tomorrow's 4.30 wake-up seems like a lie-in.


Final thoughts: Austria is supposed to be a pretty quick course and I can, therefore, only assume that the bike is 30k short and the run is only 30k... we ahve a non-wetsuit swim on a swim course that, apparently, measures a bit long; then, seeing T1 today, it involves getting out of the canal, running through the Swiss cheese hotel and crossing a main road (which I assume is closed, rather than us having to dodge the traffic or wait for the lights to turn red...) before getting anywhere near the huge transition! My T1 could be longer than my swim split!


Oh well, whatever, this time tomorrow...

prepping bag before dropping them at transition

the steed is ready to roll

huge transition - this is about quarter of it!

bikes being checked on the way in

there's an amazing festival atmosphere down in the race area - very cool

swim exit from canal

then you run under this bridge at the Swiss cheese hotel

down along this road in front of Swiss cheese hotel (don't think that's its official name, by the way!)

then across the main road and down that road opposite...phew!