meeting up with ironbuddy Carole and racking the bikes and bags

The next day, Saturday, i met up with a fellow ironman buddy, Carole, who I’d met in Austria. She had been staying at the same guesthouse as me (see extensive Austria report on my blog for details of that) with a bunch of her mates including one who knew Angus who trains with me in Dubai (small world and all that but won’t go into that now). So she also booked into the Holiday Inn so we could hang around together and provide some moral support. It was nice to have a friend to kick around with especially when it was a bit of a drag out of town to the race venue and good to have a navigator.
An aside here but the Holiday Inn guests were a curious contrast of a series of wedding parties over the weekend and Ironpeople. So in the lift or the lobby there’d be people in their finery holding glasses of wine and someone with a bike and wearing wellies or mud splattered legs. It was like there was a glass wall between us as the two contrasting bunches of people were so at polar opposites to the other. One evening myself and Carole could barely stifle our giggles in the lift as this trussed up champagne bearing couple looked at us with such disdain.
Anyway back to the Saturday, after brekky and a good catch up we went to check in our bikes and when we got there we were turned back by a ferocious marshall type person who said we’d have to come back at 6pm because the mashed up field car park was closed because of the waterlogging. We said stuff that and along with a bunch of other increasingly stressy pre IM race day triathletes drove past him up onto the narrow lane and found a space, shoved the police cone out of the way and stuffed the car half way up a grass verge. Other people were doing the same. I mean who was going to come back in the evening before the race to rack the bike and bags??!

When we got nearer down the lane between the campsite and the transition area/expo returning ironpeople were warning us to take off our shoes to wade through the mud!! They were not joking. The queue to check in consisted of people standing knee deep in a particularly dark sticky smelly combination of churned up mud and cowshit and holding aloft their precious bikes and bike/run bags. It really was very smelly a bit like standing in a sewer. Nice. Taking the bike over to the transition area (see pics)
a bit of mud!
on the way to rack the bike!

was gross, people who still had shoes or wellies on were losing them into the quicksand type mud and we were sliding and falling about trying to keep upright. Mr Felt was so not impressed cos his shiny zipps were not so shiny anymore and were covered in mud by the time he got racked so he was bit sniffy with me as i think he thought it was affecting his modelling career. What a diva.