St. George Training Weekend - Friday

Some of you may be wondering why I'm writing from St. George.

St. George?

As in Utah?

And my response is, "Yes, St. George, Utah." Site of Ironman St. George on May 1, 2010.

Please flash back to this quick post back in March, here.

I expressed my nervousness on that day. Something that likes to sit in pit of your stomach. Well the someone I referred to in that post was Aimee.

Aimee is the one who signed up for Ironman St. George. She has several half-distance races under her belt and when this race was announced it just felt right for her to take the step up to the Full distance.

Aimee ran her first marathon in St. George back in 2003. We had a nice group from Cleveland doing the race and it was a great experience.

The IM training cycle began in November. Things are going well so far with the base training. We are putting the plan together ourselves and I like how things are progressing. We are working together on this pretty well.

So we looked at our calendar and decided to take some time off and travel out to St. George. Some early training on the course and see what this race is going to be like.

So we flew out today. It was a long travel day. The flight from Ohio departed at 6:45AM which means we had to be up at 4AM to get ready. My dad transported us to the airport with our bikes. This is a new thing for us since all of our races have been drivable. It was more convenient and actually cheaper for us to fly the bikes out with us.

We flew to St. Louis where we had a 3 hour layover. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be as we read the paper, talked and ate some lunch. The final legs of our flying took us into Las Vegas...3.5 hours of flying. In Vegas we got a rental car and drove the 2 hours to St. George.

During our travels we had stops in all four time zones.....Vegas is Pacific and St. George is Mountain. It was confusing the keep our times straight.

After we checked into the hotel we drove the run course and headed to dinner. I'll save my review of the run course until I actually run it and will put my comments in a separate post.

We ate at a highly recommended local restaurant, Scaldoni's, and absolutely loved it. Our waiter, Dave, was awesome. He made some recommendations that were perfect. While Aimee and I were reviewing the course maps Dave made comment about seeing the maps. We started talking about the race which he is very involved with locally. Dave is an avid cyclist and is on the city's race committee.

He provided us with some brief insight regarding the course and made us feel very good about how the race is really being embraced by the city. Being able to talk with a local about the race was very nice.

So far the weather is not the best. Average temperatures in St. George for this time of the year ar 58 degrees. It's the mid 30's this weekend. Possible snow/rain for the weekend. We are going to do the best we can with the weather. We do have plan B.

Saturday we run the course and will drive the bike course. More information to follow.