Brazilian Ironman

Brazil is an impressive country.

This past weekend I traveled to Brazil with Geordon, my Canadian friend, who lives and works here in BA with his family (who I did the Villa La Angostura marathon with). I went as his "crew" as he participated and COMPLETED the 2008 Brazil Ironman race. That's right. 3.8 km swim. 180 km bike. 42 km run. In miles, that's 2.4 miles, 112 miles, and 26.2 miles. There are 22 feeder Ironmans for the big Kahuna Hawaii Ironman, which is where the best of the best compete.

I was very impressed by the athletes who were competing (and I met some from Austin, TX, go figure). Training for an Ironman takes dedication, and finishing the race is no walk in the park. These are the top 1/2% of the world's fittest people I figure, and they showed it. Geordon finished in about 13 hours

Brazil in a lot of ways reminded me of Texas. Big open spaces, friendly people...an inherent beauty in the landscape. Camilla and Priscilla, our hostesses were awesome and helped us out so much. It was funny though, I played language tribond the whole weekend. To Camilla, I spoke English and received English, to Priscilla I spoke Spanish and received English and Spanish back, and then myself could catch every 7th word of Portuguese. It all worked out.

Here are some photos from the weekend and the race:
(click on the picture to get to the album)

Brazil Ironman

Geordon kept telling me throughout the entire weekend that I really need to do one of these. No thanks. I'll stick to marathons and trail races. It's mainly because of my frugal nature. Ironman is an expensive sport with lots of gear involved. A new $80 or $90 pair of good running shoes is tough enough!