Busy Weekend and IM AZ gossip

I had quite the busy weekend, though I didn’t do much training beyond a 1 hour OD run on Saturday.

First of all, the 7^th Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, came out at midnight on Friday, so I spent all night and much of Saturday morning reading that. When it was finished (very satisfyingly finished) I caught up on my missed sleep, then went for the aforementioned hour-long run.

Sunday morning I volunteered at Bike Aid Station #2 where Dieter dressed up as He-Man (or Skeletor or Spartacus depending on who you asked) and Tim dressed up as Spider-man (go figure!). I wimped out on the costume thing, but it was still a great time. Overall the athletes were appreciative of our help (aside from two people who wanted cold Gatorade, Ha!) but we also saw something so odd and shocking, I had to share it here in detail.

The pros started at 9am and by the time they got to us, pretty much all the age groupers had passed us and we were enjoying seeing the pros fly by or nearly take our hands off as they took bottles of water from us (and checking out the Pro HAC’s). At one point we look down the course and ~100 yds away we see what’s clearly a pro female yelling at one of the judges on a motorbike. We believe what happened is that she was having a problem with her bike of some kind and crossed over the yellow line in the road, which resulted in her getting the hook from the race. She wasn’t happy, to put it mildly. She yelled at the judge (We couldn’t hear anything) then threw her bike a good 15 feet across the road into some bushes, yelled some more, got her bike back and was pointing at it to indicate there was some kind of problem with it. She yelled some more, threw the bike on the ground, then sat on the ground, her legs out in front of her for about 10 second, then got on the bike and started riding toward us.

We were all dumbfounded and as she came up the slight hill toward us, it sounded as if she was quacking or clucking like a chicken. It turns out, she was actually saying “F***! F***! F***! F***! F***!” all the way up the hill. As she got to us, someone asked if she needed any help… her charming reply? “No I don’t need any F***ing Help! I hate this F***ing sport!” and promptly saluted us, the sport and the world at large (i.e. she flipped us off), as she rode by. As she shrank into the distance, one of the female volunteers called out “Have a nice day!”

I’ve never seen anyone melt down like that (never mind throwing what was very likely a $10k bicycle) and it was as much amusing as it was shocking since she was so clearly overreacting. She was last among the 9 pro women already and had to know it since the trailing motorbike was right behind her (thus why she got spotted on crossing the yellow line). She took a bad situation (being DQed when already in last place) and made it much worse (losing her temper at the official, her bike and the volunteers). I’m not going to mention her name, though anyone who wants to figure that out isn’t going to have too hard a time of it.

***EDIT-IMPORTANT NOTE***
The athlete in question wrote us all a very polite and sincere apology. I know how difficult it can be to admit when you've made a mistake or lost your temper and it's even harder to make such a public apology. She made a mistake and she owned up to it, for that, she has earned a fan.

News on the My First Ironman front… Apparently IM Arizona is moving from April to November, possibly as soon as 2008. Participating in an Arizona Ironman would be much more feasible in November than in April. That’s something to keep an eye on and see what happens, IM Arizona may have become a contender.