Someone else did a 1/2 Iron Man! (September 2018)

Hi Everyone!!!

So it has been a while since my last post and I waited for a most epic reason before posting.  A friend of mine, David, gave himself a goal of doing a 1/2 Iron Man before he turned 30.  With his birthday coming up in November, he made good on his goal and registered himself for the Santa Cruz 1/2 Iron Man .  Josh and I headed down Friday evening after work to spend the weekend in Santa Cruz and to support David.  

As usual, getting anyway in California required us to deal with Californian traffic.

After about 90 minutes of driving, we arrived.  It was fully dark at this point so I didn’t take any pictures of where we were staying.  What I did do was document all the great Japanese food we consumed for dinner.

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Since we needed to get a lot done , we went back to our accommodation and turned in early.  The next day, Kels and David had to leave early to check in for the race on Sunday.  Josh and I decided to head into the Santa Cruz boardwalk first before meeting up with them. 

I’ll say this, the boardwalk was colourful from the outside.  Josh and I decided to check out the beach first before stopping for a coffee. Unsurprising that at 10 am, the beach was empty.

After this we found a place to have a quick coffee while we waited to meet Kels and David.  The coffee was unbelievably garbage and we had to put two sugars in just to make it drinkable.  Also, they had no swizzle sticks so I used straws to stir the coffee and this is what the straw looked like after I was done stirring:

After the coffee/straw fiasco, we finally met Kels and David and decided to walk around the Santa Cruz boardwalk some more. 

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We found the Santa Cruz pier and went exploring.  At the beginning of our walk on the pier, the boardwalk looked like this:

By the time we reached the end of the pier however, the fog had lifted and it looked like it would be glorious day.

The pier that we were exploring was one of the legs of the race.  Participants do a swim around the pier and the pointy red things you see in the photo are what David would have to swim around. 

After exploring the pier and having lunch, we decided to head to the Iron Man village to figure out where we’d need to be during the race. David showed us where he thought he would likely end up at the end of the race.

With all the formalities sorted for race day, we began exploring Santa Cruz. First up, an outpost of the Monterey Bay Exploration Center. This was a cool little museum with fun facts about wildlife in the Bay.

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You can tell from the picture that it was turning out to be a really hot day.  So we all headed back into the Boardwalk to get ourselves some ice cream.

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So I read that one of the cool things in Santa Cruz is at the Seymour Marine Research Center.  And this is…

Would you look at the size of this thing? I would be so terrified being on the sea and having this come alongside. I mean look at its head!

After the excitement of seeing the blue whale skeleton, we walked around to take in the sights.  

At this point, David was getting nervous about his big day so we all trooped home where we spent the afternoon making sure he had everything he needed.

The next morning, Kels and David left at 5:45 am to go and prep for the race. Josh and I woke up at a more reasonable time and headed down to the Boardwalk. First we got brunch at a cute little cafe called the Beach Street Cafe.  By this point, David had finished his swim and had begun his bike ride. It was actually pretty cool because there was an app that allowed you to map whoever was doing the race.  When we knew that David was about 30 minutes from finishing his bike ride, we headed over to the Iron Man Village.

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And then David rode past with high spirits!

David quickly dumped his bike and got his running gear on and then he began his last leg: the run

When David ran past, we all screamed at him to put sunscreen on (there were volunteers stationed everywhere).  Obviously still high off his great bike ride, he screamed “NO” and kept running.

Once David began his run, there was about three hours before he would finish so Josh, Kels and I went to a bar and had margaritas. Once we knew that David was getting close to the finish line, we rushed over to catch his victorious finish.

David was all smiles but as soon as he could, his real feelings came out:

Letting him lie down for too long would not have been good for his muscles.  We dragged him up and made our way back to the Iron Man village.  Once back at the village, Josh and I fulfilled the one job we had that weekend…. we got David a beer.

And with that, David ticked off one more item off his bucket list. Well done mate!

Talk soon,

Sim and Josh