Ironman 70.3 Panama

Wayne and I will be traveling to central america next week for the Panama 70.3. It’s a half ironman distance race with a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike and 13.1 mile run. It’s the first race of the season for us and the first race for Wayne since he broke his ankle in New Zealand last March. It’s been a long road to recovery and he’s fit and ready to race.

The week before a race is always an exciting time. Wayne was in the pool today making sure his new TYR speedsuit fit properly. He was complaining a bit about it, but he’ll be wearing it for sure. I purchased mine last year for Ironman Louisville so I’m fairly confident it will still fit perfectly. This weekend we’ll be purchasing new goggles (always nice to have new goggles for a race), making sure our bikes are cleaned and working properly, and preparing the rest of our gear for the trip.

We depart out of FLL on Wednesday night at 11:30pm. We’re flying with Spirit Airlines for $370 roundtrip (both of us) so we didn’t bark at the flight times. We’ll be landing in Panama City at 2:30 in the morning…not sure what the taxis will be like that time of the morning…scary! Thursday we plan to take in the sights around Panama City. We’ll be heading to the locks at the canal. I hear the visitor museum is fantastic and we’ll want to check that out and have lunch overlooking the locks. There are also a few parks and a rainforest very close to the city. We won’t have a car so everything we do will be close to downtown.

The race is Sunday morning at 7am EST. I’m in the first wave that takes off at 7:02. From what we can tell this is going to be a really small race as in the number of participants. Normally, waves would be going off until 8:30 or so. In Panama, all the waves will be done by 7:30. Wayne takes off at 7:14. I’ll have a 12 minute head start on him and we’ll see how long it takes him to catch me on the bike 🙂 I’m sure by mile 10 he’ll come flying by me.

We’re very excited to be heading out next week!