To say the least, I'm way overwhelmed by everything right now. We're moving this weekend. I start my new job a week from Tuesday. And...duh, duh, DUH...we're 13 days from Rev3 Cedar Point.

We just got the athlete packet the other day. Even the packet itself is long and a little overwhelming. As if I wasn't already super nervous about the race.

To add insult to injury, we couldn't do our last long 100 mile bike ride this weekend (Thanks, Irene). To be honest, the bike part of the race is what is making me the most nervous. The longest I have ever ridden at once is 80 miles.

The swim is easy. I'm one of those people who can swim slow and steady for forever. And to prove it, we did the Wild Fish 2 Mile swim a couple of weekends ago and I did really well.

The run is my forte. I have been doing distance running since joining my high school's cross country team my sophomore year (9 years ago...OMG!). I have ran two half marathons (not including my 2 HIM's) and two full marathons, with my slowest being 4:59 which included a good bit of walking the second half. People have said that you can expect to run/walk a marathon in an Ironman about a half hour slower than your stand alone marathon time. Others have said they PR on the Ironman marathon because they are warmed up from the swim and bike. Either way, even if I just barely make the bike cutoff, I will have 6 hours and 30 minutes to do the marathon. Seriously, I could walk that fast, so its not going to be a problem.

I'm just not sure I can bike 112 miles, let alone fast enough to make the cutoff. I have at least 8 hours and 30 minutes to do the distance, and that's if I have a painfully slow swim and T1. That means I need to average a little over 13mph. We've been averaging a higher speed than that during our training rides, but our training rides include stops and starts and hills and dodging pedestrians and all that jazz. Without all those things, I should be able to do well over 13mph for the majority of the ride.

I've been trying to give myself some pep talk. Like I did my HIM bikes in 3:48 and 3:55. If I double that, it would give me a full distance time of 7:36 to 7:50. That gives me 40 to 54 minutes of "fatigue" time if you will, or "worst case scenario" time. Plus, the two HIM's that we did had more climbing in 56 miles than in the entire 112 miles of the Rev3 Cedar Point course. That should make it easy peasy to maintain a 13mph average.

And in talking to other people, and what I did for Timberman and seemed to work, was to break the race down in to smaller, more manageable pieces. The swim will be two 1.2 mile swims. The bike is eight 14 mile bikes (14 miles is sooo easy on the bike). The run is four 6.5 mile runs/walks (again, so short and easy).

And after thinking about it further, and listening to my stomach, I decided to weight until after the race to worry about how much I am eating. I want to eat as healthy and clean as I can leading up to the race, but with all the training I am doing, I have been so hungry while trying to limit my caloric intake. I decided for my own sake and for the sake of the race, I'll listen to my stomach now and to my increasingly disappearing abs later.