Friday!

First of all, thank you to everyone for your nice comments on my last post.  It is MUCH appreciated!

Today's another non-crochet entry, but I'm working on getting some pics of my latest project and doing some updates.  Hopefully that will be within the next few days.

I thought today I'd share a few pictures of the events of last weekend since it was such a great weekend for my family and me.  My uncle participated in his first IronMan competition and 22 of us (maybe more?) went to the event to support him and cheer him on throughout the entire race.  For those of you who are familiar with the competition, you know what a grueling challenge this is for any athlete.  If you're not familiar, it is an extreme triathlon that consists of a 2.4 miles swim, a 112 mile cycle race, and then a full marathon which is 26.2 miles, for a grand total of 140.6 miles traveled without much stopping since it is a race. 

I am so unbelievably proud of my uncle for completing the IronMan.  It was much more difficult than he anticipated and even almost a year of dedicated training couldn't prepare him for the challenge.  Congrats to him for this huge achievement.

Here are some pictures that I took throughout the race.

The first leg of the race consisted of 2500 people trying to swim 2 laps totaling 2.4 miles in a lake.  We referred to this as the "washing machine" and I imagine there are a lot of black eyes and bruised bodies when they finish!

This was around mile 58 of the bike leg, which would be around mile 60 of the entire race.  He's in the bright green jersey.

Here he is at mile 2 of the marathon.  It was a 2 lap circuit through the city.  He's looking pretty good considering he's traveled 116 miles!

This is the 6.8 mile turn around...he's in the red jersey.  Going strong!

And here he is getting ready to cross the finish line!  14 hours, 42 minutes later, he is an IronMan.

What a fantastic event.  Inspiring, to say the least...