Friday afternoon – decide to be the helpful and loving wife and prepare packing for Dave’s race – have a fair idea of what he needs and having done this many times before I neatly place everything in piles ready for Dave to triple check and pack when he gets home from work. After making sure I didn’t accidentally pack two left injinji socks like last time, I feel pretty good about ticking most items off my list. Then destruction hit – Dave announces he needs his 113 arm guards, and for the life of me I can only find one. Spend many hours (far too many) searching high and low for it and finally decide it must be left on the side/abandoned somewhere in Majorca. I dare not tell Dave this – I’ll let him make that conclusion himself. Finally, he allows me to call off the search and emails the race director to obtain another one. Oh well – at least it gave me at least 5k steps looking…. I’m pretty sure he was grateful for the effort I put in.
Saturday morning – Alex super excited, I’ve been telling him all week that we’re going to a hotel and it’s going to have a swimming pool that he can go in. He can’t wait. I start talking to Dave about our plans for race morning, and how we were going to manage logistics to get to the start – I’m pretty sure I was told that the race started at 8:10 and that by staying in the hotel the night before meant that we wouldn’t need to leave the house at crazy-o-clock. It seems that I was wrong. Dave was due to be in the water at 6:10, which meant we needed to leave the HOTEL at 4:30 to allow time for him to get ready and rack up his bike in transition. I don’t know about anyone else, but I didn’t relish the idea of getting up at 3:30 myself – let alone waking a 3 year old so he could take daddy to his race. Panicked phonecall to the grandparents, rearrange their entire weekend so they can look after Alex and throw in the fact that he’s been promised swimming so needed them to factor that in too. Up and down the motorway to drop off, then a mad rush to get everything in the car and ready to go so we could make the first race briefing.
Registration and briefing all went to plan – I got to take in a couple of laps of the lake while Dave did all his checks, rechecks and triple checks of rules/route and the all-important arm guards.
Check into the hotel and the worst disaster ever strikes – they tell me that they have no tables for food that evening in their pub. Deciding that this can’t possibly be true, I take the decision to walk straight over to said pub and find myself a table. I think I told Dave that it was super important that he got a good meal pre-race, but in all honesty, by this time I was ready for a nice meal and a good glass of wine. Found a table – crisis averted. I’m getting pretty good at sorting these problems now.
Race day
I’ve got a nice plan in my mind – get Dave off on his swim and when he gets out of transition, head back to the car for a nice gluten free brioche and coffee while he does his first bike lap. Might even get a cheeky nap in if I’m lucky. Unfortunately, weather was not kind and as per Dave’s report, the start was delayed 90 mins while fog lifted from the lake. Once the race started, I watched the swim and after cheering Dave out onto the bike I patted myself on the back and headed back for that well deserved breakfast. Time passed too quickly in the car and before I knew it I had to head back out to see Dave complete his first lap. Saw him fly past me, ran around the corner, saw him fly past me again and start his second lap. I heard him shout something to me about going faster on the second lap but Dave doesn’t have much concept of how much someone standing still on the side of the road can hear/take in while he is hurtling past you and you are ringing a cow bell. I just shout my standard, ‘whooo! well done you! keep going’ then head back to the transition area.
Had some good fun cheering on racers coming back in to transition, and got talking to some other spectators for company while I waited for Dave to arrive. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and although it was quite a tight turn from the dismount line to run into transition, nobody seemed to really struggle. I checked the tracker and predicted Dave would be arriving within the next 5 mins. A screech of breaks, a massive skid and marshals screaming ‘bike down, bike down’ was all it took for me to turn to the lady next to me and say ‘that’ll be mine’. I leg it around the corner and peel Dave off the road while really checking to see if his silly expensive bike was damaged. I’ve told him to practice riding it more – and made a mental note to bring this up on the car on the way home (I’m sure its going to be well received).
Without wanting to encourage him to drop out, I bombard him with a quick health check before allowing him to carry on into transition and start the run. I run the first bit with him to be sure he’s not going to keel over, and after about 500m I let him go while I run to my next spectator point. I want to do the run with him to be sure he’s ok, but he’s not having any of it. Apparently that would be ‘cheating’. I work out a system where I can see him at 3 points on the run course, and at each point, I can run about 400-500m with him. I get to my second stop and Dave realises that in his dazed state, he’s still wearing his cycle shorts over his tri suit and then gives me a row for not meeting him somewhere discrete for him to take them off… erm… ok (yup clearly my fault)! I get him to throw me his shorts from behind a tree somewhere slightly off course and he’s away again. The run is pretty uneventful to be fair – stressful for me, painful for him but uneventful. If anyone is wondering – no he didn’t wear the arm guards!!!!
Suns out now and its getting pretty warm. I find the last two orange callipo’s in a shop and buy them for a finish line treat. Was well received. I realise that with all the stress, I hadn’t eaten all day except for my brioche and at this point I was starving. We’re having a curry tonight I decide – and we can relax and reminisce about the race. Dave had better plans – so we spent the evening in A&E people watching while we waiting for xray results.