Oliver Half Iron-man

For the past week when people asked me what I was doing on the weekend I would tell them I was going to Oliver for the Half Iron man. After waiting just long enough for them to assume that meant I was participating I would break it to them that I was going to drink wine and sit on my in-laws deck to watch the event. The half Iron-man is exactly what it sounds like. The same as a full except all the distances are cut in half. That still means a triathlon with a 2 km swim, 93 km bike and 21 km run. All of this needs to be completed in less then 8 hours. I could probably do the 93km bike in that time but I would drown about halfway through the swim and probably use up about 2 hours of my time getting to that point.

The reason we decided to go was that my in-laws have retired there and their house is situated perfectly to view all three legs. You can see the swimmers in Tuk-El-Nuit, the bikers across the lake via binoculars, (or noculars as Carter refers to them) and the run goes right in front of them 4 times. It ended up being the first really warm day there with temperatures in the 30's and we had a lot of sympathy for the participants as we ducked inside to the air conditioning periodically to ensure we kept our strength up for the entire event.

One other reason for attending was that Kerry has a colleague at work who participates with her husband. She's in the 45+ age group and had a very respectable time of under 7 hours. I just may have to learn to swim properly so I can at least try out a mini-triathalon. Or we can just continue to go up each year and drink wine on the deck.