Journal of Pier Luck

It's almost been a month since we completed the Ironman, and sorry to say that I haven't kept this updated. We were getting back in the swing of things. We met with our Team in Training group the Wednesday after and shared our medals and pictures with them. We had a "Return to Lazy Football Sundays" party the Sunday afterward which was a lot of fun. We kind of had an "open house" from 1 PM when the games started until 11 PM when the games ended. I had barely had a drink of alcohol since the last weekend in July, and decided I needed to catch up in one day I guess. It was pretty cool though, because people dropped by all day and night to tell us congrats and hear our stories. Many of them wanted to toast with a glass of wine, so I couldn't turn them down, could I? It was a fun evening! The day before that was a 5 mile beach run that we were talked into doing. I envisioned it as being a nice little jog on the beach with Dustin and about 2000 other...

UPDATED ENTRY with Angie, Dustin, and Kendra's renditions (in that order) of Ironman Wisconsin. We did it! ANGIE'S RENDITION We have been going non stop since we got back from Wisconsin and I know a lot of you are awaiting to hear how the weekend went, so here goes. If you only want to know about the actual race, go down to RACE REPORT below. However, the recipe for the most positive, fun, energetic Ironman includes the days before also! We left Jacksonville on Thursday around 5 PM and flew to Minneapolis. Dustin slept on the plane ride (he had an awful week of having to get up at 5 everyday for the Navy), and I wrote out in my journal what my perfect race day would be like. It just so happens that Dustin's brother, Travis, and his family live in Minneapolis so he made a trip over to the airport with Dustin's Mom and sister and her three kids to visit with us during our layover. They were already holding huge, bright green signs for us in the airport, so we knew we were...

We are officially an IronCouple! It was an unbelievably perfect day and I promise I will elaborate more when we get home. We will be moving slowly in the airport today for sure, but I think we have a good excuse! Thank you to so many people who supported us in Wisconsin and across the miles! We love you!

It is Ironman eve and everything is going great! We are sitting here in our hotel room of Fairfield Inn and they have wireless internet in the rooms so I'm typing on my laptop. Dustin's shaving, Dave is drinking a beer, Jeff and Jen are being assigned duties, Paula, Kendra's sister is getting last minute tips for cheering from Kendra. Now Jeff, Jen, and Dave's pizza just got here. Kendra, Dustin and I already ate our microwaved pasta about 6 PM, while we hung out by the indoor pool with some of the kids from our group. By group, I mean the best freakin cheer squad ever!!!! We had our lunch at Panera bread earlier at 12 and met up with most of Dustin's family and my parents old friends' Greg and Mary who they hadn't seen in 10 years and their daughter, Nikki who lives here in Madison who we grew up together! She is going to be a part of our cheering squad tomorrow along with Bill, Gwen, Jeff, Dave, Jen, Walt, Judy, Becky, Ken, Don, Carolyn, Shelley, Braxton, ...

We are here in Madison getting ready to get some breakfast on Saturday morning. It's been awesome weather so far and Ironman Village is really cool. We are registered and we are turning our transition bags in today. My parents are here already and then all of Dustin's family will get here today for lunch. We are planning on trying to stay off of our feet today as much as possible. Everything is going well; we're feeling relatively relaxed and ready to go. We went to the Pasta Party last night hosted by Ford and Mike Reilly was the announcer. We had some good pasta and got pumped up. Then the race directors got up and scared the living **** out of us about making the bike cut off and people having wrecks and all that crap. We have had such unbelievable support throughout this whole process, but we've been getting so many emails recently, like about 50 that we don't have time to respond to every one, but we want to. We want to say thank you for thinking of us...

Vacation? What defines a vacation? I had a meeting this morning at work and I told them I was going on "vacation" and they asked how a triathlon could be considered that? Well, I don't have to work for 6 days straight and I am flying on a plane somewhere to see friends and family, and hope to have an awesome time, so I think it's a vacation! with a little working out thrown in the middle! We are getting ready to head out to the airport now. We don't get into Milwaukee until after 11 PM, so that sucks. Using "the secret" from the movie, I am visualizing that both legs of our flight will go smoothly and our luggage will arrive quickly and we will still get to bed at a reasonable time. I am really trying to stay positive in every single thing that I say or do. I thought I was a positive person before, but try it, it really is hard to do! But, we are getting positive things in return. I will elaborate more on that later after the race! I keep sayi...

I haven't been writing too much in this because there isn't too much to write about. I've pretty much been taking it easy since the car accident. My neck was still pretty sore until a couple days ago. We did volunteer at the HOT triathlon and it went well; it felt good to do a little something, but my feet were definitely hurting by the end of the two days. My neck was still stiff and felt very weak at about my C7-T2 area of my spine. On Tuesday, we swam for about 30 minutes in our pool and my neck was still stiff. I got a back massage from Monica at Massage Envy on Wednesday night and that helped loosen me up a bit. Thursday was my first real workout and we did Bob's double spin class for 2 hours 20 minutes. Then, Friday morning, we rode 40 miles at the beach (how did we get our bikes there, you ask? Amber and Stuart let us borrow their four runner and we put our bike rack and bikes on it-they let us borrow it the day before to get our bikes tuned up too-thanks gu...