My Husband the Ironman!

I think you would be hard pressed to find a woman more proud of her husband than this woman is. I am bursting with pride for Jason! On Father's Day, June 21, 2009, Jason finished his Ironman in 11 hours 22 minutes, which is 8 minutes faster than his goal of 11h 30 m! (For those who don't know what an Ironman is, it is the ultimate triathlon. A 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, followed by a full marathon.) The race was in beautiful Coeur D'Alene, Idaho-what a neat town!

Here are Jack and I while I was trying to pack.

My mom should like this one. This is Jack in the airport in Spokane on the pay phone.

There was a playground in the park where the race started. We went there a few times over the weekend.

This is a picture of the finish line the night before the race started. The weather was beautiful that night, but wasn't so great for race day.




This picture was taken at about 6:55 am on race day. These are all of the competitors-about 2500-lined up on the beach waiting for the cannon to sound the start of the swim. Air temperature was colder than water temperature. It was only about 45 degrees at the start of the race. The water was about 60 degrees.

This was taken once the race started. Under the line of boats in the picture are all of the competitors in a mass of white water. Jason's swim took him 70 minutes.

Reo and Jack during the race. The course took the competitors on the bike through town 4 times and on the run trough town three times, so we were able to see Jason quite a bit during the race.

I don't have any pictures of Jason on the bike. Reo got some video of it, but he was going by me so fast on the bike that when I tried to take a still picture, I just got a shot of the crowd. His bike time was 5 hrs 56 mts.

Here he is about 2 miles into his run. Looking strong!

This is about half way though the run. Still looking strong, but getting worn out!

And finally the finish. Jason is in the center of the frame in these pics with his arms up. VICTORY! His run took 4 hrs 5 mts (which was faster than his stand-alone marathon time in January in Houston).

And a video of his finish (at about 1:15 into the video):



Our family after the finish. It was cold and rainy, but we were SO happy!

Jason and Reo after the finish.

This picture is unreal. To give you an idea of the number of people doing this race, these are the bags of clothes and gear of all of the competitors.