The way we were

The IMC gank met with Mark H for dinner. Mark has been to IMC 9 times, 5 of which he was racing. That was insane. Why would somebody want to do the same IM 5 times? but at the same time, it was reassuring that IMC is a race of a lifetime. A few things that I learned from that night: Spokane is the best place to fly in to from Atlanta and from Spokane, we would drive 4.5 hours to Penticton. Our hotel reservation is from Wed to Tue following the IM. We can fly to Spokane Tuesday night, spend a night there and drive on Wed morning. Tribike transport can carry our bikes so we don't have to worry about losing our baggage at the airport. Bike Barn is a great local bike shop. It's actually where we will need to pick up and drop off the bikes. It's really close to the start/ finish area. The swim course is a rectangle as we swim out, we can sight the top of the mountain, whoo hooo! This will help a lot as I suck in sighting. By the way, that's not the mountain that we will be riding to. A couple of turns and head back to the beach. The bike course has 3 climbs. The first one is relatively short and not too steep. The second one, Richter Pass, is at mile 40. The third one is Yellow lake which is long and steep. Between the last two climbs, there were seven rollers. After getting to the top of Yellow Lake, then you start heading home downhill. The special need bag is at mile 75. The run course is out and back. We run 2 miles heading West/ East, which we will run by our hotel, Shoreline Motel, before we run South, through downtown Penticton, parallel to Lake Skaha. We were talking about glow sticks. I don't know if it's necessary to bring a head lamp, in case it's way too dark. Mark said not to worry about that. Eric checked out the moon forecast and it will be full moon that day. Too funny.
Before we parted ways, we took a picture in front of Jason's Deli. Here's the winning team: Sarah, Eric, Susan and me.