Hello Penticton!!!

Today was the trek to Penticton. I was pretty tired as I was up at 4am the morning before to do on of my two scheduled runs – this one was 1:45 hours. Yup, I actually slept in my running clothes; socks, leggings, HRM, and shirt.

Wearing my duds must have played tricks on my brain. I had the most bizarre dream!! (Could be that IMCDA is slowly creeping up too…) My dream started out with IronGreg (IG) and I on the beach waiting for the swim start of some foreign IM. Not sure which one, but we’d been talking about doing one so maybe that played into it as well.

So we are standing on the beach ready to go, and we are looking at 8 foot waves crashing in. People around were saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, just swim through it!’ Riiiiight. Then I flash to walking on the pier beside the swim start and I’m looking down into the water staring at scary red seaweed and king crabs. Then I’m back on the beach and I look at Greg and say ‘I forgot all my fuel for the race!’. So we run back to the hotel, which is beside the beach handily enough, and try to throw all my bottles into ripped white garbage bags. The bags were because we weren’t given transition bags. Too weird!

Then we notice the swim start has happened so we drop all the bags and run to the beach to swim. I figured I’d just drink whatever they had on the course. Then BLAMMO! My alarm went off at 4am. One word, ‘bizarre!’.

So that was Wednesday morning. I then rushed to work, then rushed home, squeezed in another run, this time an hour, then cleaned up and rushed off to a movie screening.

So on Thursday when we were driving out I was pooped. It felt like the drive took forever. I was happy to have company, Darryl, also known as Runningman in our little blog world. We’d never met before that day, just shared a coach, IG, and shared blogs. As would be typical for two triathletes we shared our triathlon stories and hopes for future races for a lot of the drive.

We rolled into Penticton at 2am MST. I should add I’m proud to report we made it on one tank of gas in my little Mazda! Yay. We found the hotel no problem, and the key to the room that IG put in Marks gas tank thingy. We were going to have to share the room for one night, then we’d make the swap the next night to our respective rooms. (This was done so we wouldn’t wake up our future roomies.) Here’s where the fun started…

We got in the room, checked it out, set some stuff down, then went to unload the car. I walked out of the room first, then Darryl. He did what most people would do when walking out the door, he shut it. Problem was, I left the room key on the kitchen counter. Shiiiiiite. I started laughing immediately of course, so he thought I was kidding that I didn’t have the key. He now knows that I will laugh in these types of situations!! We tried to use a credit card, then our home keys – just in case the lock was old and loose. Nothing. So we went to the office, but no one was there, nor did they come when we rang the bell.

I figured we were doomed to sleep in the car. First though we looked for somewhere to sleep outside, like picnic tables, chaise lounges within the locked fenced pool – nothing. We got our sleeping bags out and tried to get comfy in the car we’d been dying to get out just moments before.

I can sleep in cars – ask the parental unit – but this wasn’t going to work. After an hour of this it was time to try and wake up IG without waking Mark. I quietly tapped on the window…twice. Mark answered the door, of course. He told us to keep buzzing the front and the office gal would let us in. We did, and she did. She was surprisingly okay with the whole situation! Finally we got in. It took us no time to get our gear in the room. Darryl took the floor, I grabbed the bed.

Ah well, at least we can get in a couple hours sleep before it was time to get up for the next days events!

Peace out my friends.