Busselton, we're here!

It's all happening.  We're in Busselton, Western Australia.  Got to Perth on Thursday morning and  then drove down south to the host city...in km/h and on the wrong side of the road!  By afternoon, we found our rental house, dropped off the stuff and headed into town

Our first need was to grab CO2 cartridges from the local bike store.  Knowing that there are 1500 racers here and a huge number of them who flew to the west coast not carrying the airline-prohibited flat tire inflators, we wanted to make sure we beat the rush.  Bad news, the shop was closed.  Good news, the people are so nice here!  The shop owner was getting in his car to head home, but welcomed us in to buy some replacement gear.  Problem solved.

We then drove to the beach to see the mile-long jetty we are to swim around on Sunday.  Yeah, it's long.  The water surrounding it is nice, though!  We left the beach to drive the bike course.  It's about a 37 mile loop that we repeat three times.  No problem - it's beautiful!  There's a nice coastal portion, a wetlands area, and a forested area where we saw wild kangaroos staring back at us crazy Americans!

That was enough of a day, so we headed home to do the things we really need to do, eat and sleep.   Friday morning, we officially became participants as we signed our waivers and picked up our race packets.  Then I stared for 30 minutes at the Ironman finish line that I hope to cross on Sunday.

Arriving back home, we assembled our bikes, which have to be dropped off in transition on Saturday.  Check.  Ready to go.  And that night, we had our pre-race instructional meeting where we were informed of the Australian racing rules, which in some cases, are quite different than those in the USA.  Of particular concern is judging the 12 meter buffer we are to keep on the bike course.  They tell us that it's around 7 bike lengths...4 longer than we're allowed to follow back home.  Yikes.

Now (after that bike drop-off) it's just final preparation, a little more food, and as much sleep as I can get.

If you care to follow as I race, you can log on to www.ironmanlive.com and search for "Maxfield". We start racing at 5:45 a.m. here in Australia, but that will be 1:45 p.m. LA time.  The website should be up and ready to go then.  I hope to hit all the checkpoints along the way so that the reporting to ironmanlive goes as planned!

Until my post-race report...g'day!