The "Crazy" Madison Trip!

Let me begin this post by saying... I LOVE WISCONSIN!!

Amy and I got a little bit of a late start on Friday. She had to work half a day, and I had to get Gracie to and from school, so after finally getting situated, we pulled out of Amy's house Friday afternoon at 2:30 for a 13+ hour journey!

The 12-13 hour drive ended up being a 14 and 1/2 hour drive because we got stuck in Nashville during rush hour and of course, there was a wreck, so we eeked our way through there. As it got late, we decided we needed coffee. We came upon Champagne, Illinois, which is close to where Amy actually used to live! It's also the home of the University of Illinois, so we pulled off in search of "the best" coffee! It was dark, and late so it took us a little longer to find it... but it was totally worth it! Plus, apparently it's rush week there! It was like 1am and kids were EVERYWHERE! We were laughing of how tired we were, but these kids were just getting started! Man we're getting OLD! :)

*Me and Amy in front of the capitol in Madison which is also the Finish Line!

Back on the road and a LONG drive through what has to be the longest USA state of Illinois, we FINALLY arrived to Madison and our hotel. Our reward... the very nice Adam of the Sheraton Madison Hotel let us go ahead and check in for our Sat. reservation. SO... we got a "free" room for Friday night, which is fortunate considering we only actually slept on Friday for about 4 hours!

Why did we do it this way you ask? So we could get up early and go to the Gatorade swim of course! :) So with a 14+ hour drive and 4 hours of sleep under our belt, we drag our happy selves out of bed and head out to the lake to swim 1.2 miles! We actually felt great! The water was as flat as ever! The temperature was perfect! The course was great! One loop around and I could have kept on swimming what seemed effortlessly!

*Us after swimming at the Gatorade swim!

Saturday seriously flew by. After our swim and a MUCH needed shower, we come over to the Expo and ended up being good girls once again by not spending hundreds of dollars on glorious Ironman merchandise! We walked all around and took in Madison, which is the coolest, hippest town ever! We went in search for lunch and found ourselves in a sea of RED where the Wisconsin football game had just finished. It was seriously one gigantic party! So now we can say we were a part of two college parties this weekend! Well… sort of :)

*Atlanta needs us one of these! It's a cycling vending machine full of tubes, c02, nutrition and other bike needs!

Saturday was slipping away from us and we still had to get in a 3 hour ride. The Ironman course in Madison is approximately a 12 mile ride from Madison into a little town called Verona. Once in Verona, you do 2 quite hilly loops and then head back into Madison for T2. To avoid the traffic and really get a sense of the chunk of the course, we drove out to Verona and did one loop out there. It’s definitely a hilly course. 5 or so major climbs and one pretty nasty decent if you aren’t really careful. Our friend we made Mark, actually took a dive on that hill. So I made a mental note that I’d be taking that curvy downhill cautiously! Mark was great too! Only 3 miles into our ride and Amy unfortunately had a flat. Of course, us girls are standing there yanking at the tire trying to change it when he comes by and offers to help. We ended up doing pretty much the rest of the ride getting to know our new friend who was also in town to sign up for next year!

*Us with Mark during a pit stop for more co2. Yes... I'm in my aero-helmet because my other one was stuck in my car at home. That's a long story for another day! :)

The 3 hour ride was a little short as it was getting dark quickly out there. We did get in the one loop though, so that was the important part. By this time, we head back to the hotel room, take some quick showers and couldn’t even make it out of the hotel for dinner because we were so tired. We went downstairs to grab something from the hotel restaurant before completely crashing.

Of course Sunday we’re up early again to get to the race start. I’ve never watched an Ironman before, and it was SOOOO much fun! And what an advantage to watch this particular race before competing in it because transition is FUNKY! You swim out to the buoys and start in the water. Do 2 loops in the water and then run through the chute UP the helix! It’s a hotel/parking deck that has this 3 loop circular hill that most people drive to park. This is part of transition! You run up the loopty-loop to the top deck of the garage. You’ll go into the building to get your T1 bag and get changed, back out to the bike area, grab your bike and run down to the other side only to ride the opposite loopty-loop down! Its nuts! But works, so I’m glad I got to see that before showing up next year and being like WTF?? :)

*The Swim Start!

*This is the helix loop that you run up on one side and then there is another one just like it that you bike down! Needless to say, transitions are kind of slow at this race!

We watched almost the entire swim and a lot of people go through T1. It was so much fun standing there cheering everyone on! Afterwards, we grabbed some breakfast and went out for a run ourselves. The weather was PERFECT! I don’t think you could ask for better race weather! Unfortunately, Coach Jen warned me that it isn’t normally that way. Wisconsin in September is kind of tricky. It can be really hot, or really cold, so maybe we can go for 2 years in a row of perfect weather! Our run was great on this trail around the lake in truly fall weather. And when I was finishing up my run, Chris McDonald, who ended up winning the race was finishing up his bike ride. I was screaming for him as I was running by and he was smiling. Apparently, he has a nickname of Big Sexy. Well…. I will validate that statement by saying he is super cute! :)

*This was a really cool handmade poster by a spectator made from foam art I think!

*A picture of 1/2 the transition area. There is a duplicate on the entire other side!

We finally got the opportunity to try to take a short nap that afternoon. We really needed some sleep at this point, but I just don’t sleep well in hotel rooms, so… oh well. Good thing there was so much excitement going on that we just kind of fed off of it! We went back up to the race and checked out some of the run course, which by the way… I’ve never seen so much crowd support on another course before. Tons of people lining the entire route cheering people on! College town, it had the best feel! We got to see Hilary Biscay run in for her 1st Ironman victory and Amanda Lovato run by with a big smile on her face looking great!

*Out on the race course!

If you follow Ironman than you probably know this, but we knew that both Chris McDonald (Big Sexy) and Hilary Biscay were racing in Wisconsin this weekend after finishing Ironman Louisville only one week earlier! Back to back Ironman’s and Big Sexy finished 2nd in Louisville while Hilary came in 4th. They BOTH won Ironman WI this year! How cool is that! And furthermore, we read Hilary’s blog to figure out why in the world she was doing this and it was a dare! Her and McDonald did it in a matter of trash talking because they’re both on the same team and apparently, it worked out very well for them!

*Hilary with about 2 miles to go to her finish!

*The finishers area at night! I thought it was beautiful!

So after hours of spectating, which is very exhausting, we go to head home. Unfortunately, we hadn’t noted where we had parked. Unbeknownst to us, there are like 10 parking decks in Madison that look a whole lot alike. It was dark and everything looked different as the race had cleared out quite a bit at this point. We walked around for about 2 hours before FINALLY getting a police officer to help us locate our car. I called Adam not sure if it had been stolen or what! Yes… a little stupid on our part, but I will say Madison is very confusing! So 3 hours later, we finally get to our car! We don’t make it into bed Sunday night until after midnight and then yet AGAIN get up less than 5 hours later to go stand in line to get our slot!

*Adam says it's pretty obvious at this point that we had both had 2 margaritas! :)

We arrived at the registration area at 5:30am and we were already about 75 people back! There were maybe 20 people that actually camped out and within 30 min there were hundreds of people! What we didn’t know going into this was that a new thing this year is if you volunteer for the race, you get priority registration. So at 7am it split into 2 separate lines with volunteers in one and slackers like us in another. There were at least 600 volunteers in that line. So at 9am the doors opened and we sat back and watched all 600+ people walk through the line before us. Some that had even gotten there just minutes before. Oh well… you live and learn. It went pretty quickly though, and finally after waiting in line for 4.5 hours, we got our number!

*In the first picture, you can see part of the line and how it is looping around where the transition area was. There's me also on my computer. It was cold and rainy that day, good thing it held off for one more day for the racers! I felt like I was back in college trying to score football tickets! :)

A few more quick stops later, we were on the road by 12:30pm Eastern time. Amy is a wonderful travel partner. We got to talking so much about everything and were going off of the directions TO Madison and just reversing them. Unfortunately, after traveling for what seemed like FOREVER through that horribly long state of Illinois, and many phone calls to my chastising husband, we finally concluded that we had gone the wrong way. For AWHILE! Had it not been for the interstate making this weird change, within an hour or two we would have seen the “Welcome To Wisconsin” sign and been completely out of our minds. So… our 13 hour trip home on Monday turned out to be an 18 hour trip that had to be split between two days. We drove on Monday evening until 9:30pm when we were so tired and it was storming, we had to stop. We spent the night in Effingham, Illinois I kid you not! And just to commemorate this quite memorable part of our trip, I bought this in the gas station in Effingham on Tuesday morning on our way home!

Finally, after another 9+ hours in the car on Tuesday, we got home! Oh I was useless on Tuesday. I couldn’t even think straight. I just kind of set there as I talked with my family. I’m still not even quite 100% yet, but things are starting to get back into the swing of things!

However though… even if I knew what I know now, I’d do it again in a hearbeat! Other than the little parking issue and the extra day of driving, it was a blast! I had so much fun with Amy! I am so looking forward to training with her over the next year in preparing for another new Ironman experience! Congratulations to all of you Ironman Wisconsin people! I can’t wait to be one of you next year!