In Penticton

I arrived in Vanouver late on thursday evening (2 hours late) compliments of air canada. I was meeting Greg and Corena who flew in earlier. Greg decided to book a room at the hotel at the airport. We got up early on Friday and drove to Penticon which took about 4 hours. It is beautiful here and we are staying at a really nice condo. It is also quite hot which is a bit of a concern for the race. We took our bikes to get checked over at the Bike Barn which proved to be a good move. I have a lot of difficulty getting my back wheel on and off and in doing so i bent the derailler a bit. Otherwise, my bike was fine. Corena's bike had a lot of problems which they fixed. Corena and I went to the athletes dinner Friday night. These are fun but pretty much the same at every event. I got a good nights sleep Friday night . Today (Saturday) we are going for a short bike ride and 15 minute run and then we will just try to relax and eat and drink lots. Penticon itself (although it has beautifuk scenery) does not seem to be a particularly interesting town.

Getting ready to head to Penticton

It is a busy week getting things done at work and getting packed to go away for a week. This past weekend i had one of my best results ever in a race coming third in the Sackville Sprint triathlon out of 90 people. I do feel pretty good in terms of my training and don't feel like there is anything else i could have done for this ironman. So, my performance however it goes will not suffer from lack of training. There may be other factors such as heat to contend with. I ran yesterday for a half hour and felt great and today I am going to cycle for an hour. Tomorrow is a short run of 30mins and that's about it.

My goal with every ironman is to try to get as much out of the weekend as possible interms of enjoying the experience- which includes travel, meeting new people, shopping and generally having fun. I want to enjoy the race as much as possible and do as well as I can. I will be happy if I get through the race safely and complete it without any major problems. That is my primary goal; my secondary goal is always to improve my times. Last year, my time was 11:39 with what I thought was a slow bike ride but a good swim and a very good run. I would like to improve the bike time by 10 minutes or so and keep the other times or improve on them slightly. My marathon time last year was slightly over 4 hours so I am sort of shooting for under 4 hours. We will see.