It’s May 2019, we finally go to St. George 70.3!!! bucket list race and 6 team athletes make it! we are very excited to be there and plan our trip a long time ahead! We fly into Las Vegas and drive to St George (no one wants to risk loosing their bike on a connecting flight!) so we fly direct and drive there…
Once we get there the weather is chilly and we hear the news that the venue has just been named the 2021 World Championship venue for 70.3, plus the full IRONMAN will be back for 2020. This is even more exciting! we can’t wait to get on ur bikes and go for a spin!
St George Town is very nice so we walk around, grab some lunch and head for the Registration Tent and hop around the sponsors tents for a while! we are VERY lucky to run into 3 of our Sponsors! Rapid Reboot has a huge tent with a lot of compression boots so we hang around the comfy chairs for a while taking turns on the boots! Also Zealios tent is nearby and we also for a while…and Carbo Rocket provides us with some Aqua electrolytes and other carb drinks, they too have an awesome tent. Not all race venues have equal set ups and I most say this is one of the best ones I have seen in a while.
After a good day of rest, trying our bikes, swimming in the lake and checking out those legs for the run…we head out home for a “nervous” night rest and wake up very intimated by the 54 degrees at 5 am! we head out to the cold, dark lake…as soon as the sun starts rising in horizon we can’t believe the beauty of the completely blue and orange skies and start to forget about the cold.
It’s go time! the swim is cold, most of us wearing head warmers and some with booties, but it’s also a fast swim for most of us! Off to the bike: cold, beautiful, brutal! the beauty that surrounds truly has no comparision with any other IRONMAN event I have attended, more than 20 in the books, but this has to be the most breathtaking of all! The bike ends with a 10 mile descent were you basically go as fast as your bike lets you, this is a great recovery for the legs after more than 40 brutal miles, so we go out to run with a good spirit and legs feeling confident! Again a brutal run is waiting for us, but the view keeps you distracted on every hill and you try to #embracethesuck , this ended up being our phrase of the trip hahahaha, we knew how challenging this race would be so we decided we just had to embrace it from beginning to end!
Crossing that finish line with a perfect weather (not cold anymore), and sharing a beer afterwards celebrating being lucky enough to have done such a challenging race and all wanting to come back for a revenge was a perfect way to close the day!
One more thing to do though… Zion, yes! we spend the next day walking (barely) around Zion amazed by that magical place before heading back home to Miami… we’ll be back!
Vanessa