Wake up time: 4 a.m.
To avoid oversleeping or stressing ourselves out too much, my fellow Brooklyn teammates Sarah and Sharon and I planned a sleepover at my place the night before the big event. After a delicious pasta dinner (yay for carbo-loading!) sponsored by Team in Training, we headed to my apartment to write our names on our jerseys with Wite-Out and go over our packing lists one final time.
After a screening of True Confessions of a Shopaholic (I highly recommend mind-numbing chick flicks to distract from prerace anxiety), we made it to bed around 11 p.m. and slept surprisingly well. All the running around that day—dropping our bikes off at the transition area and touring the course one last time—had apparently tired us out more than we'd realized.
The alarm went off at 4 a.m., just about the same time the sky opened up and it started to pour. We were momentarily panicked: We'd prepared for almost every scenario, but no one had ever told us what would happen if it rained! But at this point there was no turning back, so we grabbed some bagels with peanut butter and bananas, hopped in a cab, stopped for some coffee, and headed uptown.
I couldn't help but be amused by all of the people we saw on the streets, trying to hail cabs after leaving the bars that had just closed minutes before. Which is crazier, we asked ourselves: what they're doing right now, or what we're about to do?
