Ironman Lake Placid 2012 Trip Report-Registration Day

Another night of tossing and turning. I lay in bed waiting for the alarm to go off as I ponder the thought of the commitment I was about to make that morning. The morning after Ironman Lake Placid, registration for the next years event opens for all the current year volunteers. It seems to be a bit of a tradition to work the race and then get up early and stand in the line the next day. The volunteer registration is usually from 9AM to 11AM and any others can then register after that. If there are any left after that. Any others remaining after that go on sale online at 12PM. I have heard they had sold out before going online in the past, but I have not verified that. I had talked to a several people about this process and it seemed like getting in line around 6am is sufficient. They claim they had never turned away any volunteers before, but I didn’t want to be the first. I also didn’t want to sleep there all night either.

My wife dropped me off near the T1 bike exit on the side of the Lake Placid High School gym around 5:45AM. As I walked behind the building, I saw the line was formed by registrants strewn about in sleeping bags and lawn chairs. It seemed as though these people spent the night here. Seems to be a bit extreme since they still don’t get in until 9AM, but whatever. I followed the line around the building, up the hill and down the sidewalk between the entrance to the newer ice rinks and the speed skating oval. It seemed long, but one girl behind me counted the people and she said she was around 350. Not too bad. The people really started coming after me and the line went down to Main Street. I was between a couple nice guys, one 60-ish year old from Kingston, Ontario and another 40-something from South Jersey. The guy from Jersey was doing IMLP for the first time too and the older fellow had done it 3 times before. Pretty impressive! We chatted away about triathlon all morning and next thing we knew the line started moving. It was only around 7:30AM too. Next thing I knew we were almost at the back of the gymnasium. Apparently they decided to open registration early which was excellent.

As we approached the door, the guy from Jersey and I started to realize that we were about to make the big commitment and we became quiet with some last minute reflection. I thought about how in a couple minutes I would plop down several hundred dollars to officially begin that journey that I had been working towards for the last 3 years. This is where “the rubber meets the road” and I had no thought of turning back now. I was more eager than ever now after what I had witnessed the day before. Now we were at the doorway into the gym and the volunteers assigned us to our registration lines. We shook hands and went to our assigned line. I never got either guys names and never saw them again after. The registration area was a long table with maybe around 15 people with laptops doing the registration.

I was sent to a line in the middle which was shorter than all the others. There was one girl registering and another waiting in front of me that was sitting on the floor. She eventually got up and said that we were in the slowest line and that the elderly gentleman doing the registration was very slow. Great! The girl registering finished and the girl in front of me went pretty quickly. Show time! The registrar was nice and he asked for my info. He had me read my credit card info too him which was strange and he must have mistyped it the first time as it did not take. Uhhh….come on don’t torture me here! I had him try again and this time it went through. He followed up with a “You’re In!” Whew! Show time. I still had to go online later in the week to complete the registration, but I got my entry.

I called my wife and we decided to meet up in town for breakfast at Pan Dolce. We headed back to the house after breakfast to pack up our stuff, since we only rented the place until that Monday morning. We originally thought we would go home on Monday, even though we had off on Tuesday. What the heck were we thinking? My wife had spotted a sweet little campsite up at the Wilmington Flume trails, so we decided she would go up there later and setup the tent to claim our site while I did my run. She was able to get the site. I got a nice run in on River Road which was a bonus as it was not in my plan since we thought we would be driving home. We packed up the CR-V, said goodbye to our rental hosts and headed back to town for lunch. We planned on hitting the Cowboy but they were not serving food at 2PM, so back to Pan Dolce we went. We were hoping for a new bunch of staff since we were just there for breakfast but no such luck. Embarrassed at first, but we quickly got over it. It started raining after lunch so we we just sat in the parking lot and took a nap.

We stopped over at Placid Planet Bike Shop so my wife could do some bike seat shopping. The guys at this shop are great and so helpful. They set her up on a trainer so she could check out a couple seats. Meanwhile I did some window shopping. I ended up getting a new tri-tank top which was 20% off. I had been looking for one that was white or light-colored and finally that search was over. My wife ended up getting two seats so she could test them out longer and then would send whichever one she didn’t like back.

We had initially thought we could not make the IMLP Volunteer dinner since we planned on going home on Monday, but now we were able to attend. We headed over to the Horse Grounds and into the big tent for some free food. I got in line to eat but only had a salad with a little pasta. We sat and listened to the speakers and in between they raffled off lots of cool prizes. Of course we didn’t win any. Andy Potts was there and he spoke as well. The only bad part was the head of the volunteers speaking. She was a bit off. She incorrectly announced several volunteer awards and then she never announced the best Aid Station theme of which I thought we would win. They also played a nice video about this years race. I thought for sure our Aid Station would have been in it. We barely got in it and it was just one guy from our station. What??!! You have got to be kidding me? To top it off, we got an email later in the week from the Head Volunteer lady stating how she forgot to announce the Best Theme award and we had won it too. Errrr!!!

We headed over to the Cowboy for our real dinner. Service was a little off that night, but they food was good. After dinner we headed up to our campsite and settled in for the night. It hadn’t rained in Lake Placid for several weeks but of course the night we camp out we have heavy downpours and thunder and lightning!