I WANT to wet my pants

… but I’ll hold off for now. This is quite possibly my most exciting week in recent history. I leave for Tempe on Friday to race in my second Ironman (my first branded one). The weather forecast is as close as Arizona can get to Texas—a high of 86, no rain, and a merciful 21% humidity. Assuming I don’t evaporate into the desert, I should be able to handle the heat with strength and grace. I have racing wheels. I trained about twice as hard as I did for my last IM (and have marginal weight loss to show for it). To say the least, I’m excited! I’m so very stoked!

If you want to sneak a peek at my progress, you can look on ironmanlive.com. They provide full coverage (even for the slow people like me!)--just type in my sweet sweet name or my number (886 for life, baby!) and point and laugh. If you get FSN Arizona there’s a highlight show on Sunday at 10PM. Since I may not even be finished yet, don’t look for me there.

My last IM was just under 16 hours, and I’m hoping to keep my head in the game and really improve my time this go-round. Wanna know my goals? Well, tough. I’m afraid I won’t make them and therefore don’t want to share. But I suppose there’s no harm…
1) Finish. Short of near-death experience or complete bike failure, I will see
this through.
2) Beat my last time of 15:58:43. Because come on, I could kick October Mishele’s ass.
3) Finish under 14:30. Fourteen hours has such a nice ring to it.
4) Run a 5:00 marathon. This is 11:27 min miles, way slower than my training pace, slow training pace, or super slow training pace. Seeing as I’ve run marathons without even training and come in around 4:30, I can do this with some focus.
5) Goal splits: 1:13 swim, 7:40 bike, and 5:00 run (with 7 min transitions… slow and attainable changing time)—total 14:07.

During a bickering point this spring I told my boyfriend not to go to the race. It seemed like a good idea at the time because he’d surely distract and annoy me: not because he’s distracting and annoying, but because traveling and stress make me just about as unpleasant to him as possible. I figured I’d spare him the heartache and me the additional stress—but still, I’m sad. I don’t want to be there all alone. College buddy George will be competing as well, so at least I’ll know someone. I'm pretty excited to see George; he's the hardest-training triathlete I know, and he's a cool guy to boot.

In other triathlon news (is there other news?), I got an email yesterday from the Snickers Marathon Team. Anyone who’s been down the Bar Aisle at the grocery store knows that Snickers offers some lines of energy bars called Marathon bars (They have energy and low carb and protein ones... something for everyone). Anyway, they have a team of age-grouper athletes--like me--that they sponsor. I applied to join the team with the reasonable expectation of a consolation prize (box of Marathon Energy bars, please? Any flavor will do). But imagine my surprise when I got the team acceptance email! I’m so stoked! The thing that makes all of this better is I really like the Snickers Marathon bars--I don’t even have to fake it! Yessssss. I’m officially a sponsored athlete. In case you're wondering, I don't know how many people make the "Team," so it's entirely possible I'm extremely special or extremely non-special. At any rate, I now have yet another reason to train hard. Ooh, I hope my picture ends up on their website... then I’d be a celebrity. Wouldn't that be so cool?

I’m off again. I am so excited I can hardly sit still! Look for an update next week. :-D