I visited New Orleans this past weekend to watch part of the Ochsner Ironman New Orleans 70.3 that I had signed up for, but decided not to run. My plan was to go to the finish line and watch all of the pros – something I had not seen live before. When I arrived at the finish line at 10:30, they were still setting up, so I decided to walk to Esplanade drive/street/ave to find a nice shady spot. Finally around 10:50 a.m., the leader, a Candadian man came through. It’s so weird to see someone running a roughly 6 minute mile because it didn’t look like he was going that fast. A couple of minutes later, I saw Chris McCormack come through. Slowly but surely more and more athletes ran by. Surprisingly, most New Orleans residents had no clue what was going on. Most asked if there was a parade. And there weren’t very many spectators. I could only count myself and maybe four others for the first hour. I finally had to pack it in as I was getting sunburned and hungry. Given that I hadn’t done any workouts that day, I felt guilty just thinking about going to get shelter and food 🙂
Arriving home on Monday, I looked up the results of the race. I have to say I was quite surprised to find that many participants finished well over 8 hours. I thought there was a cutoff? I could have finished in 10 hours!
Race results for the race are posted at www.onlineraceersults.com. This is the first time that I have seen this site. Usually results are at results.active.com. It would be nice to have a single repository of race results, not to mention the ability to see more than just chip/clock times.
I am now thinking about doing the Ironman 70.3 in Augusta at the end of September. This would give me nearly five more months of training time and it’s within 7 hours driving. I expect it would be quite hot and humid, just like Orlando, but it’s worth a shot.
