Woke up this morning and we went for a ride on the half Ironman’s bike course. It is a 56-mile counterclockwise loop that goes out of Georgia, into South Carolina and back. I rode the hilly part on the back half:

The Yankee was driving along, making sure I didn’t miss any of the turns. She took that picture at one of them, and had I known she was going to do that I would have really leaned into the turn.

I saw several people training today, they’ll all be riding harder tomorrow. I’m just hoping to get up and over the slow, gentle climbs tomorrow. It felt pretty good today, but I only did about a quarter of the route, which seemed pretty fast.

Afterward, we got cleaned up and did the formal check in down town. We then walked from the convention center to the transition area. Walking was a mistake.

You can’t help where the civic center is in relation to where the logical places on the water — in this case the Savannah River — are relative to one another. On the way walking back up I measured the distance. It was 1.7 miles.

In between was where the swim will actually start, so The Yankee had to double back on her walk. When she finished her practice swim, she pronounced it nice and fast, I drove down to get her. So we’ve done more walking than we wanted and not enough eating today. Great way to prepare for a race!

On my walk back up from dropping off my bike in transition I noticed this:

That’s the back of the Augusta Chronicle, which is a fine paper. There was a large man loading his old, beat up car with some sort of publication. It was about 2 p.m., (I know because I was frustrated that I still hadn’t had lunch) so it was too late for the Saturday paper and too early for the Sunday issue.

Back behind him, and seen in that picture, there were two guys sitting on the equipment in the paper’s loading bay. Those aren’t seats, but they’ve probably been used that way for generations, the job done, the rest won, the pressure off the feet. Behind them is that billboard for the Chronicle’s tablet app.

Make of all of that what you will.

We parked near this mural. This is a part of a four picture arrangement, a quadtych, if you will. It is old and in disrepair and it wouldn’t have looked any better if it was still brand new:

We had that late lunch, followed by an early dinner with lots of carbs. Tonight we’ll try to go to sleep early. Tomorrow, we wake up early.

Oh, I walked by this sign, too:

Indeed.