Race morning

It's 9am, half an hour before the first of four waves at the Squamish Triathlon will start in Alice Lake. I am at home, working on preparing my book Running Shoes Are a Girl's Best Friend for the iBookstore. The job is a reformatting one, time-consuming for a book with 54 chapters since they all need to be saved separately into HTML files before they can be converted to a proper epub file, which is the format required for the iBookstore.

Our day started at 6am. Tim decided to sign up for the Squamish Triathlon yesterday afternoon. While he walked Luka, I sat down to work on the manuscript for my fifth book with my usual pot of hazelnut-flavoured coffee and before I knew it I had added 900 words to the first draft that is now nearly 39,000 words.

After giving Luka fresh water and his kibble for breakfast, Tim and I jumped in the car at 7:25am and drove to T2, the transition area from the bike to the run. He put his running shoes and a few other items in transition while I checked on where I need to be to take the timing chip off the cyclist from my relay team.

We ran into Paul and Volcker, who were both surprised to see Tim there as he hadn't planned on racing, and wished them well. Tim then went to get body-marked. While I had been told yesterday at the race package pickup that I didn't need to get body-marked as the runner in a relay team, I just thought I'd ask again.

Turns out I did need to get body-marked after all, so a volunteer drew our team number 369 with a waterproof text marker on both my upper arms and upper legs. Good thing I asked. As Tim and I got ready to walk back to the car, I ran into my team's cyclist, gave her a hug and wished her an awesome race.

Because the race starts in a different location, where the swimmer of our team covers the 1.9km in the lake before handing our team's timing chip to our cyclist, who then cycles four laps before handing me the timing chip in place that is a good distance from the race start I cannot watch the race start. That's a shame but the way it is.

So after dropping Tim and his bike as close as the organizers would let me to the race start area I drove back home and arrived there at 8:30am. It's good for Luka as he now has company until 10:30am and I can give him a short walk before leaving him again. I will be able to watch and cheer on the competitors since the route is close to the spot I need to be to tag the team's cyclist.

Until then I can work on reformatting my book, feeling thrilled I increased my manuscript by 900 words in the coolness of the early morning. I can't wait to race!