Photos of the IM Texas 70.3 in Galveston - 2012

A side benefit of a (more or less) local race is that some friends may be in attendance cheering for you, and in some cases friends with good cameras taking photos of you as well! This blog post is my chance to post some of those photos to which I did not have access when I wrote my initial race report.

This photo is prior to my setting up of my transition area. Can you tell that I had just taken off my bike helmet?

 

 

This is very early in the bike portion of the event, probably about 2 miles into a 56 mile ride. I spent nearly the whole ride in the aero position and my friend Corey manages to catch me sitting up and out of that position!

This is in the middle of the first of three running loops. I must be flying as no feet are currently on the ground!

This is in the middle of loop 2 of the run. I'm not sure how I managed a smile here but it probably had something to do with my friend Tommy saying something about how fast I was going.

For some reason Tommy took this photo after I had passed by him but I thought I would still throw it up here for fun.

That's the last of the photos that I am posting from friends, and I don't plan to buy the professional photos. However, I do have one photo that I consider somewhat scary in retrospect. I've been told by several people that I should start setting more aggressive goals. So instead of just trying to get under 6 hours I decided several months ago when I first started planning to do this race to write out what I thought would be my most ambitious goal that still had a chance to be realistic at the same time and here is a photo of the note that I wrote out.

The reason I call this photo somewhat "scary" is that it was so close to my actual race. None of the individual events is off from my actual time by more than 36 seconds and the overall total was off by just 5 seconds. Seeing as how I didn't fully taper for this race and wasn't 100% prepared to give me best possible effort (I was probably more like 90% prepared.) I must admit that my coach and friends are right about my goal setting needing to be more aggressive, even though I am not sure how much more aggressive I can be and still feel I am being realistic.

Finally, I think I will have a special item to be able to announce in the next several days but I want to wait until Tuesday just to make sure everything will work out as it should.