Pictures from Coeur d'Alene

You may have seen most of these pictures already... most of them were taken by Kurt. He got a new camera a few months ago which was awesome b/c he just snapped away the whole time and now our whole trip is preserved digitally. Well, not all of it was awesome. Some of the pictures were (very much) less than flattering but luckily Nalani has a good eye for those and she spent much of our return flight last night hitting the delete button on Kurt's computer.

This first pic was from the first day we were there. It was 80ish degrees and sunny and my breath was taken away by the beauty of the place. I was ready to sell our place here and move to Idaho. But that only lasted about a day and then the cold rain came and I changed my mind. 

We swam in that icy lake every day trying to acclimate ourselves. One of the days (can't remember which one- it's all a very cold blur) it was rather windy in the morning which made for choppy conditions in the water. I like this picture- those are two of my athletes out front of me.

See how warm we look? Sometimes, when I get really nervous, I stick my fingers in my armpits and then I smell them like this... Maybe Nalani should have deleted this one.

Race morning we did everything we could to keep our core body temperatures up before the start. That included putting our wetsuits on in our condo prior to walking down to the start.

Notice the super stylish shoes!?! Scott found those at a thrift shop- socks too! And what you can't see are the chemical foot warmers inside the shoes. Our feet were toasty and we wore those things until about 3 minutes before the cannon went off and then just left them there on the beach for some lucky soul who might find them. Genius.

I saved this picture as 'swim start chaos'. That pretty much sums it up. There's a slight possibility that pink cap you can barely see there on the lower right corner is me or Nalani. We started near the front line somewhere around that area...

Running back into the water for the second loop (that's me in the pink cap with the orange stripe on my wetsuit)... There was pretty much nothing more unappealing at that point than getting back into that ice water and repeating the loop but those are the times you just shut your brain off and get it done. Like a robot. But it turned our that the 2nd loop was actually less miserable than the first because by then I had some room without too many people trying to swim on top of me.

Based on the fact that I'm no longer wearing my vest, I think this was about 70ish miles into the bike.

It wasn't always all smiles. Sometimes it was just ride. And check your HR on your garmin again.

I wore my helmet through T2... you know, just in case I fell over or something while trying to find my bag.

There weren't too many pictures from me on the run. Or maybe those were the ugly ones Nalani was smart enough to delete. Anyway, this one is from mile 26.155 of the marathon. I wasn't smiling because I had just been passed and I was watching the skinny gal dressed in black with the 36 on her calf crossing the finish line and winning our age group.

I regrouped though and smiled with Nalani after she finished! 11:11 was her finish time. That should be easy for her to remember... Ironman #1 and her finish time involved a bunch of 1s... I've secretly always wanted an 11:11 Ironman finish. Glad she has one! :)

Now you feel like you were there, huh? Kudos to Kurt for his photography skilz.