Lavaman – Day 3, part 2

After practice we spent the two hours showering and being lazy, checking email and all that.  Then we had packet pick-up at 11:15.  This was one of the most unorganized things I had ever seen.  They had the tables in all the wrong places to keep a good flow going for 800 people.  How do some of these event people end up in their positions?  Needless to say, picking up our numbers and shirts took much longer than it should have and we missed the beginning of the first basketball game.  But eventually we escaped from the twisty never-ending lines and headed upstairs to the Malolo lounge to watch Memphis-UCLA.  I was starving so as we watched I ordered myself a chicken sandwich – $17!  This place is nice but so pricy.   I’ll take the Holiday Inn with their free breakfast and internet anyday!  At halftime we headed backto Kelli & Dean’s room to watch the rest of the game from bed.  It’s kind of sad to be in this warm wonderful place and stay inside, but we also didn’t want to lay out in the sun and get our energy zapped.  So, in our room we stayed for the afternoon, watching hoops until our 4:15 meeting for team pictures.  From pictures we had a mandatory meeting with the race director to go over rules and course changes.

Apparently there were some major changes from last year’s race due to construction and the fact that the race has grown to about 800 people.  The biggest change was in the swim course – last year they swam two circular loops, but this doesn’t work well timing-wise to decide when to send the waves without having the Elite field swim over a wave that’s just been launched.  So this year they planned to change it to a single loop which would be great.  BUT, there was a low-tise in this week, so in order to do a single loop, they would have to send us pretty far out in the bay.  The compromise instead was a funky “M” shape course.  We’ll see how that goes.

Another change was on the run course, where there will be one section we have to do two loops on.  For the second loop, we will pick-up a popsicle stick from a volunteer, and the return the popsicle stick to a volunteer as we end the second loop.  Seriously?  Again, we’ll see how that goes.

From the meeting we headed outside to our Team in Training Pasta Party, with all five chapters particpating:  Washington/Alaska, Silicon Valley/Monterey Bay, Greater Los Angeles, North Texas and New Jersey.  We loaded up on carbs while listening to an amazing guy who is a 4-time cancer survivor and had a heart transplant last year.  He’ll be racing with us tomorrow – impressive.  All the chapters together raised over $1.2 million for the Lymphoma & Leukemia Society in this race – THANK YOU again to those of you who donated!

By the time the pasta party ended it was 8:00pm, so we all headed back to our rooms to organize our gear and get some sleep.  Meeting time for race day = 5:30am.