Day 2 Recap!

Sitting in bed right now, after a decently long and busy first full day here in Panama City. We started the day w/ a trip over to the ironman village to register and pick up our bikes. For those who don't want to read the whole story, and just want the quick hits, here are a few very distinct things that have become apparent after today:

1. I'm reasonably sure I have the ghetto-est bike here. Not that mine is some beach cruiser or cheap 10 speed bike, but seriously I have NEVER seen so many nice bikes in one place before. For those not in the know, triathletes can easily spend $3000-$5000 on their bike setups, many often getting up closer to $10000!!! In comparison, my bike was about $850. In fact some people's WHEELS cost more than my bike. And I don't even mean both wheels! Oh well, it's usually more about the indian than the arrow, right? (when in doubt, always turn to the good old golf words of wisdom) I saw some of the nicest bikes from Trek, Specialized, Cervelo, etc, etc. Mine is a Scattante. Most people ask what brand is that? Sounds exotic doesn't it? I often illustrate w/ a simple SAT analogy. Kirkland is to Costco as Scattante is to Performance Bike (where Performance bike is the Costco of bike shops). P likes to rag on it all the time, but I think he's just jealous cause my bike is more ghetto than his ;).

2. Only in Panama City will you find 3 Waffle Houses within a mile of each other.

3. Most of the participants seem older than us. Not quite sure what to think of this yet.

4. We've got LOTS of bags to prepare for this race (a post on this in the future).

5. The bike course is FLAT.

6. We wore our Team MPG shirts for the first time. No compliments :(.

Now for the day recap:

Registration was nothing too out of the ordinary. Except they weigh you. You might ask, why? It's because at the end of the race (or at any point during the race), they will weigh you if you stop by a medical tent, and use that to help determine if you're OK to try and continue on. The train of thought being that if you lose a certain % of your body weight (usually from dehydration), then it might not be safe to continue. Here's P at registration looking tough:

After registration, it was a bit early to pick up our bikes, so we headed over to...THE WAFFLE HOUSE. Now i had never heard of it before getting here, but apparently it's quite popular in the south? We've seen some "interesting" things in Panama City so far, so the theme has become to take a picture at anything we'd probably only see here. So here's a pic of dad in front of the waffle house!
After waffle house, we headed back to the registration area to grab our bikes from TriBike Transport. Waited on line for a bit, but luckily our bikes made it here mostly in one piece, along w/ the gear bag we paid for.

After getting our bikes, it was back to the hotel to do some real work for P and G. Dad went to play golf. Then a bit later in the day, we took the bikes out for a quick ride, w/ a short run after. Then it was dinner time, a little baseball and basketball, then to the bed where i'm sitting right now writing this blog. Will try to post some pics tomorrow, have some pretty cool ones.

Time to hit the sack, getting up early tomorrow to swim!