As many of you will already know, my race number was 414 and I live in Hong Kong. In Chinese, 414 means "death, certain death". It felt a lot like impending doom as I drove down to the race start. Very dark, light rain and lightning in the distance. As I got closer to the start, the rain started to come down harder. I thought to myself, "Oh Boy, this is going to be an interesting day." Fortunately, I saw that it was clearing over to the west and was a high level westerly breeze.

Spent ten minutes in the car just chilling and listening to Seal. At 5AM I headed over to sign-in, got numbered and dropped off my special needs bags. I walked the transition area, checked my tires, filled my jetstream and headed back to the car. Back at the car, I relaxed and listened to some more Seal. I felt the presence of my dead buddy, Stu, and had a little chat with him. He would have understood my need for Ironman but certainly would not have joined me in the madness. Understanding, something that we all crave.

By about 6AM it was clear that the storm was going to blow over. However, I had the dilemma of which colour lens to use in my Oakleys. I made the call to go with Red Iridium but brought the Persimmon with me to the transition area. I probably spent five minutes carefully considering which lens to use. I have a tendency to obsess on detail.

At 6:10 AM I started my warm-up. At 6:30 I suited up and entered the water for a swim warm-up. I felt good and had a strong stroke. They wanted all of us behind the line by 6:50 and I was back a bit earlier than that. One more Oh Canada and we were nearly off. I asked the guys around me for their anticipated swim times and made sure that I was behind everyone that was faster than me. I did notice that there were a huge number of people who were way back up the beach and behind me. I wonder why they are so far back?

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...BOOM!

We were off. I set out and was pushing quite hard. The start was quite claustrophobic with people everywhere but everybody was being fairly kind. I was getting pushed left and right but it wasn't too bad. However, I soon realised that I had gone out WAY too hard and I was very quickly blown and deeply anaerobic. My first thought was, "Oh Shit, here we go again." My second thought was, "You can forget about a 10:15 today." My third thought was, "Holy crap! Am I going to be able to even finish this thing." By now I was totally screwed, gasping for air, moving slowly and freaking out as people were all around me. Bad time to panic, dude.

This called for a radical change of plan. Quick goal shift, just get some clear water and chill out. People were everywhere and I was reduced to a mix of breast and backstroke, trying to catch my breath. Very embarrassing and I was wondering if the helicopters were zooming in on the guy in the expensive wetsuit who was dying in the middle of the pack. Backstroke is normally pretty good for recovering but it wasn't possible because there were so many people around me. At this stage, I remembered something that my swim coach told me before I left Hong Kong. "Just remember that as long as you are moving you are making progress." This saved me. I decided to get back in the game and just swim the rest of the way slowly. I hadn't come all this way to get pulled out of the swim!

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