Syracuse 70.3 Spectator Report

I wrote this last week.. forgot to post it. WHOOPS! The pictures are not in order which is not typical but I just need to get this report posted.

A few Sundays ago, just one short week after Ironman Wisconsin, was spent cheering on friends at Syracuse 70.3. This had been the plan for a while, but I felt truly terrible all week after my race until about Thursday evening, which made me debate whether or not to actually go. Between the race, lack of sleep, driving 800 miles, and then having to go back to work on the night shift, my body was rebelling. It was a wonder I even made it through those nights at work (one morning my supervisor sent me home early - that's how bad I looked). Miraculously, I was finally able to sleep for ~11 hours on Thursday after I got home from work, and then I felt ok enough to make the commitment to spectating the race.

I spent Saturday doing a mix of errands, lounging and cleaning my apartment. Now that it's the off-season, I have absolutely NO excuse for having a messy apartment! (Right.. just keep telling myself that). Saturday night I went to my friend Ari's apartment for a "ladies night" with 2 other friends. Ladies night consisted of the usual: margaritas, wine, food, talking about boys, giggling, pillow fights, crawling around on the floor with her 2 dogs.. what?

Mary and Kelly

After making it to bed no earlier than 12:30 am, my alarm went off at 5:30 am - race morning wake up call. Lovely. Commence trip to Syracuse in the dark. I have about HAD it with the stupid I-90 after driving back and forth to Syracuse a whole bunch of times last year, and then driving all the way to freakin' Madison and back on it this year! I got to the race site at about 7:45 am, just in time to see Mary running through transition, Matt C. running to transition, and my high school XC coach Mike Murphy running to transition in a matter of 5 minutes. I then found Matthias' girlfriend, Sabrina, who had flown out from California to watch, and Kenny as well! We saw Matthias come out of the water and head into transition. Then.. we waited, ate some food, waited some more.

Matthias about halfway through the run..
can you tell that he is colorblind?

 A few hours later, we started to see friends and teammates come through transition: Matt, Mike, Mary, Don, Chris, etc. We were standing right before the transition line and cheering! Chris and Don came in together. Mary had her Garmin in her mouth (she's the only one that I missed with my camera). Matthias waved as he came by and then almost wiped out at the mount line. We saw everyone come through except for Tim, at which point we decided to walk out to the run loop and cheer from there.

Chris and his 2 daughters who came to cheer him on

The run course was set up as a lollipop, so we walked out the "stick" and then parked ourselves at the bottom of the loop so we could see everyone going by. After we saw everyone go by once (either just starting out, heading into loop number 2, or coming in for the finish) we walked by down to the finish line. I saw Murphy at the finish and I chatted with him - he had a great race, especially for his first half IM! His wife, Rachel, was also out there, however I did not see her at all. She had a great race too - as this was her first triathlon EVER! Check out her race report here.

Murph and I after the race

After everyone had made it in, we hung out at Matt Kellman's beer tent for some post-race food and chit chatting. I then headed back to Rochester since my job was done!

Tim going to town on a plate full of cookies!

GREAT weekend! I <3 the off-season!