It had to be raining.

Not just a dribble or a mist, but full-on downpour, and my bike would be up on the roof rack getting pounded with rain for the entire 8-hour drive to Louisville. Not only that, I was 15 minutes late and time was tight to get up there before the 5pm check in cutoff.

I picked up my then-girlfriend and got her stuff situated in the car. She took the back seat, intending to sleep.

We then went to pick up the third member of the team, Julie, who had somehow gotten her car towed the night before and was an additional 15 minutes late. Finally, we got on the road.

For some reason, the Ironman race runners decided that they needed an extra day before the race to check everyone in, so athlete check in is on Friday before 5pm. It seems pretty extravagant to me since you already have to take Monday off to travel after the Sunday race, but I guess people consider their Ironman racing to be more important than their working commitments. Thankfully I am lucky in this regard, being self employed and having a flexible schedule.

The drive up to Louisville was fairly uneventful, and featured a stop at Chick-fil-a somewhere in Tennessee. It was near Murfreesboro, I believe. According to my then-girlfriend, I get grumpy when I am hungry and I am stubborn at all times, although I refuse to admit either. In any case, when we finally saw the Chick-fil-a sign I pulled off the interstate to go to it.

It turned out that the enterprising owner of this particular location had placed the sign at the exit where his restaurant was located as well as the next exit a few miles down the road, so actually getting to the place was a three mile red light party cruise of Murfreesboro. I was highly pissed.

It seemed a lot like a dirty trick to me, as being a long way from the interstate on a road trip gives me a sensation that must be like what vampires feel when the sun is coming up. Of course, it’s not big deal now that I have a GPS thingy that can get me unlost at any time, but old habits die hard.

I attempted to engage the girls in some hearty discourse on the character of someone who would pull such a trick on an unsuspecting traveler, but I was labeled as hungry for my efforts. No one seemed to agree that our three mile side trip was extravagant.

Chicken consumed, we continued to Louisville without incident and arrived on time. I grabbed a somewhat dodgy parking space and leapt out to make sure I was registered before the cutoff. I had about 30-45 minutes to spare but I wanted to be sure.

The car behind us turned out also to be from Atlanta and the occupants seemed to want to discuss the coincidence at length, but I didn’t train for a year for my Ironman race only to miss the check in jabbering on the sidewalk.

“Boy, that guy wanted to talk to you and you just took off,” my girl noted.

“No time!”

We made our way into the Galt House hotel which was the headquarters of the race. Ironman race runners like to pick the most expensive hotel in town as the headquarters of their races, ensuring that a night’s stay will exceed $300 per night at minimum. This is in addition to your $550 race entry, and you need to stay at least 3 nights for this particular race, since check-in is Friday, so your costs are inching up over $1500 just to get into the race and stay at the hotel closest to the race site.

Triathlons in general are a rich man’s game, and the Ironman race is the grandpappy of them all. Unfortunately, I am not a rich man, so the girls and my family and I were all booked into a Day’s Inn some miles away. It’s a pain in the ass to drive a few miles every time you need to go to the start or Transition which is 2 or 3 times over 3 days at least, but I just don’t have a spare $1000 lying around I’m sad to say.

Weaving through Ford cars parked in the hotel’s wide hallway, we finally made it to check-in. My girlfriend was asked to go away. Only athletes were allowed in. She went back to the car and I started the process.

Now, the summer leading up to my race did not at all go the way I had hoped. I was completely burned out. My fitness was at its peak back in May when I did my Half Ironman race in Florida. After that race I was completely spent. I didn’t feel like running or riding or swimming. Every pedal stroke was a chore. All the fun went out of it. I don’t know why.

I tried to combat this issue with rest and food, but it never really went away, so I was miserable and gaining weight leading up to my race. As anyone who knows me knows, those are the exact two reasons I started exercising seriously in the first place, because I wanted to be happier and healthier.

So it came to pass that I was weighed at 242lbs on the Friday before my Ironman race. Son of a bitch. Now granted, that is with all my clothes on and my annoying ball of keys in my pocket and wallet and cell phone and all that, so I’d estimate that my actual body weight was more like 235ish, but that is highly annoying considering I was around 220 in May at my half.

I was by far the fattest person in check in. Everyone else was slim and svelte.

If you go to a sprint distance triathlon, which is for the purposes of discussion around 1/8th the distance of an Ironman, you will see people of all body types. You will see people who are of a mass so great that you wonder whether they can achieve locomotion at all, let alone endurance racing.

The same goes for Olympic distance, half marathons, and marathons. There were always a lot of people a lot larger than me to make me feel like I had a shot at finishing okay.

Not so at a full Ironman race. I outweighed everyone.

I was anxious to say the least, so as I waited to pick up my race packet I put my hands in my pockets and felt the fat, finger-sized plastic tube of a packet of mayonnaise from our lunch stop earlier in the day.

“Perfect,” I thought. “Just perfect.”