Update from Kona on Tuesday

Wow, what a long night last night. Right after I made my last entry while on the plane over the pacific ocean, there was a medical emergency with a passenger on board and we had to turn around and fly back to Los Angeles. It took quite a while to fly back and unload the passenger, refuel, recheck everything before we could take off. This put me well behind of my connecting flight but I was lucky enough to get on the last flight to Kona. To make a long story short I got in bed at 5am (east coast time) and was pretty tired obviously.

Today was a new day though. I woke up very early (3:30am) still on East Coast time, and decided to assemble my bike. This actually went very smoothly and, yes, the pictures I took while disassembling it came in handy and helped me avoid problems reassembling my bike.

After I finished that I decided I would go into Kona and take a quick training swim. I figured I would see what the water is like here at 7am, the time the race actually starts here. I figured there may be a couple people there so I could jump in and get the swim done pretty quickly.

When I got to the swim start line where I was going to do my training swim, there were several hundred of people already swimming!!! I should have figured a bunch of triathletes who are use to getting up at 4-5am every day would already have been out here at first light to jump in the water.

This was great though and the swim was unbelievable. The first 15 minutes of the swim I couldn’t even concentrate on the swim because the water I so clear I was busy looking at all of the tropical fish below and the barnacles and coral. No matter how deep the water got, you can always see the bottom on the first half mile of the course.

Kona is beautiful and has a quaint little main street with shops, restaurants and bars right at the start finish line. I now can understand why there are so many people in the last mile of the race when you see it on TV.

Lastly, today I drove the bike route of the race. It will be tough. Once you leave Kona, the hills are very long and it is hot and once you get about 30 miles into the ride it gets windy, very windy (see vegitation blowing in pic. near Hawi, Hi on the course). That may be why they have a big wind farm at this point where very large propellers are turned by this constant wind. The road goes through lava fields which are black, absolutely no vegetation and very hot!

Something of interest, in these black lava fields there is a very long history of locals placing these white Lava rocks on the black lava fields to spell words. These white rocks are lava rocks but they are very smooth and do not fit in with the lava fields.

It’s very strange to see these rocks there and nobody seems to know where they come from. I talked to one local who said it has gone on so long that nobody can remember when it started and that it was bad luck to keep these white rocks because they bring bad luck. He told me that the City of Kona receives white rocks in the mail every year from tourist who have taken them home with them only to incur bad luck to the point where they mail the rocks back. Quite interesting.

I am getting ready to take off for the opening parade and the start of the Ironman Village, which opens up at 5pm today (Tuesday). This will be fun to see this part for the week long events that are going on.

I will touch base once again tomorrow.