Family Alive

We saw him twice on the run, right outside our condo, as he finished his first 13 miles, turned around about a half mile down the road and headed out again.  No photos of that.   I’m a SERIOUS cheer-er… Brian knows not to expect pictures from me because I am too busy cheering. After we saw him head out onto his second half of the marathon, we headed to the finish line around 5:30, expecting him before 6pm. It was dark and cold and my little ones were tired. It took him a bit longer to come through than we expected, and I started to get worried. He told me that he ran most of the first half of the marathon, but had to walk about 10 miles of the 2nd half. He was walking at mile 25 and another guy who was just finishing his first lap started walking with him. Brian had lost track of time, and because it was dark, he thought it was pretty late, like 8:30, or getting close to 14 hours. But when this guy found out Brian was almost finished, he told him he was pretty close to breaking 12 hours. Brian ran the last mile, and finished just before 7pm. Yeah! So here are our only finish pictures – Brian and Ben after Ben’s finish at 10:52pm.

After Brian had showered and gotten some food, we headed back to the finish line to cheer on Ben. We ended up staying until midnight, the 17 hour cut-off time. That’s a fun place to be – the music’s blaring, the announcer is keeping everyone riled up, they’re giving away hats and t-shirts, and the "everyday" ironmen are coming through. It was fun to see them achieving such a monumentous task. The last picture is of Brian and I cheering on the last finishers.

Here are his finish stats:

2.4 mile Swim: 1:28:10 (1647th place of 2109 finishers)
Swim-to-Bike transition: 14:39
112 mile Bike: 5:05:08 (346th place in the race overall after this segment, 81st place in bike times!)
Bike-to-Run transition: 4:32
26.2 mile run: 5:02:11 (1291st in run times)
Total: 11:54:40 (762 overall, 114th of 261 in men’s 30-34 age category)

That’s my wrap-up of the Ironman Adventure. If you have questions for Brian, post them here, and he’ll answer them in a first-hand from-the-mouth-of-the-Ironman blog sometime this week.