Hey All, I’m Katie Anne, both a first time Epic participant and Ironmaner. Living in Calgary, Alberta and doing the early season IM CDA at the end of June, I’ve come to this camp full of crazy ( but great!) women to get in my first true high volume road rides of my IM training and most importantly to tackle my open-water swimming inexperience.
Day 1 has passed and I survived but to give a true recap I need to start back at Day 0 yesterday. Yesterday we kicked off the camp unpacking the bike and I went for a nice 1 hour ride with Joey ( the Singaporean/ Canadian who is putting us to shame with her jetlag fighting skills!) to test the bike. It worked awesome thank to the efforts of my great boyfriend mark and the guys at TCR sportlab. After the ride we had the option to do a private session with Karlyn Pipes to work on our swim stroke. I saw with her videos the brutal truth about parts of my stroke but I also learned more or less how to combat these and how to become a much more relaxed swimmer.
After a great welcome dinner last night at the Kona brew pub, we jumped out of bed super early this am ( easy, thanks to the Canada -Hawaii time difference) and went out for a first open water swim. I didn’t drown! I swam about a mile ( with some new techniques picked up by Etienne) and actually semi enjoyed it.
Post swim and a great breaky, we headed out for our first epic ride. The weather today was perfect for my transparent skin as it was warm but not overly hot and slightly overcast. While the 150 ish ride was challenging for sure we got to see some pretty great Hawaiian scenery. The traffic at times on these Big Island roads can be a pain, especially compared to the wide open, no traffic roads I normally get to ride near Calgary and in Montana, but the near perfect pavement and mainly wide shoulders almost make up for this.
Post ride and after a quick chug of some delicious Diet Coke ( I’m back on the bandwagon after giving it up for about 2 months) I headed out for our prescribed 10km run into Kona and back. The first mile was really tough but after that it was kind of enjoyable.
After getting cleaned up we had a fantastic meal of grilled salmon. Thanks so much to all of the support we have had so far on this camp. This white vans are such a beacon while on the long rides for a quick snack and water top up and encouragement!
Sorry for any typos, I did this on an iPhone. Off to bed!!
KA