run this amazing day

Last night at dinner, with a few of my best girlfriends, we started talking about race day.  A little, not really specifics, but about the ins and outs of the day.  And it led to a discussion of what we are afraid of, this time around.  We all had very different days at our first shot at ironman, and we all fear different things out of number two. I know what I want and I know what I am afraid of on race day.  I can guess at what a perfect day might look like, but the thing about ironman is, you rarely have a perfect day.  Because what everyone says, when they are striding about with their shaved legs and their 3% body fat postulating with wisdom to an eager audience of newbies, is actually true: anything can happen.  You can get a broken nose, you can trip running into T1, your helmet buckle can break, you can flat, you can pop a spoke, you can break a chain, you can flat some more, you can eat too much, you can eat too little, you can puke, you can chafe and sunburn and bleed and

I woke up a few days ago and felt odd.  Training for this ironman is almost over, and I'm actually a bit sad to see it go.   This go round was different than last year.  Going through it the first time was like walking through hell.  Barefoot, with someone giving me a wedgie.  I had no idea what to expect.  There were a lot of collapses, a lot of tears, a lot of sitting down on the side of the road and calling for a ride (okay, maybe that one only happened once).  The fatigue that I carried broke my brain into a million pieces and I had no idea how to deal with the fallout. This time around wasn't like that.  There were a couple of small cracks, there was a shampoo-bottle-throwing incident in the shower (that will teach that bottle not to open, oh yes, yes it will), there was running into a coworker 75 miles into 100 and BEGGING for a few miles of a pull, there were a few nutrition cracks (we will blame the salt in potato chips for that one), there have been a couple movi