theSmudge.com

Click here for Part 1 (pre-race).

On Ironman day, I arrived downtown around 11:30 a.m. I walked to the corner of Kuakini and Palani, the big turn the racers make as they come in off the 112-mile bike ride. I got there with time to spare, which was what I had planned in order to get my bearings and figure out the best spot to spectate.

(Click the photos to see them full-size. All photos copyright Layla Bohm. You may use them, but please credit thesmudge.com.)

The first athlete to come in from the bike ride was Chris Lieto, who lives near me (though he doesn’t know or care). In what seems to be a common theme of “Layla finds people from her world,” I was chatting with a fellow spectator and discovered that she also lives near me, and that her husband trains with Lieto.

In second place off the bike, Luke McKenzie had just averaged 25.4 miles per hours for 112 miles:

Craig Alexander. In the triathlon world, I don’t need to say anything further, because everyone knows his name: nice guy, family-oriented guy, and super-fast guy. When I saw him, he was in fourth place off the bike. Then he proceeded to run a 2:44 marathon (fastest of the day) to win the whole race and break two records while he was at it.

This guy, Andreas Raelert, was 19th out of the water, moved up to eighth place after the bike, and then surprised many people by coming in third overall.

Julie Dibens was the first female off the bike and had a huge lead. However, she injured her foot during an Ironman a couple months earlier, so the run did her in.

Rachel Joyce, fourth-place female. See how she already has her feet out of her shoes? That’s how the fast people do it, to save time transitioning from the bike to the run.

Andy Potts, who had the fastest swim of the day, was grinning coming in from the bike ride:

And here is Chrissie Wellington, who holds the women’s world record for fastest Ironman race — she’d also never lost one of the 11 full Ironman events she’d raced. She’s known as being a truly nice person, and for always smiling. On Sunday, she came off the bike 20 minutes behind the leader and in sixth place, and everyone knew her bike wreck two weeks earlier was playing a factor. But she hit the ground running and by mile 7 had passed every woman ahead of her.

After watching for a while, I made my way over to the volunteer tent at 1:30. My shift would start at 2 p.m. inside the finishers’ area.

Coming next: Catching the finishers