Saturday, September 9: 7 a.m. (24 hours to go)

Shabbos is the day of rest, and was also bike check in day at Ironman World Championships. It is always on Shabbos. (But you can’t move your bike on Shabbos.)

I made a friend at the hotel. I had to move my bike and my transition bags, on Shabbos, to “check in,” and my new friend offered to help me.

After about a minute of watching the sunlight fall through the window, I got up, got dressed and davened.

The sea air filled my lungs. It reminded me of Chanukah in North Miami Beach as a child with my grandparents and that gave me comfort. It can be really nice to have a Shabbos away with just your family, as long as nothing goes wrong. It was going to be a long Shabbos in Nice, and we were pretty much on our own.

Saturday, September 9: 10 a.m. (21 hours to go)

Like clockwork, there was a knock at my door.

(You were worried that your new friend had forgotten you?)

In the back of my mind are gears, turning.

(And what are those gears doing?)

Running “what if” scenarios in case I was going to be stuck with transporting my bike on Shabbos.

My wife Janet had been up for the better part of two hours and she had asked me, “What if your new friend from the lobby forgets you?”

The fact was I had put my faith in humanity and I was banking on what Anne Frank had said, “I still believe that people are really good at heart. “

(And if you were wrong, you were going to have a big problem.)

Thankfully, I wasn’t wrong.

I opened my door to a smiling face.

“Are you ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I replied.

My new friend, who I had just met 24 hours before, grabbed my bike and my two transition bags. Our hotel was only two blocks from the finish line.

(That’s not bad at all.)

But the bike check in was another 400 meters beyond that.

(That’s almost a quarter mile. That’s gonna suck on race day.)

Yup. I’m going to come off the bike and have to run a quarter mile before I even get on the run course…but more on that later.

We stopped at the gate to check in. The officials were wearing neon “Ironman World Championship” t-shirts. The referees were wearing vests that said “REFEREE” in bold lettering. I was reminded how many new regulations I had to scramble to accommodate before Shabbos because of these individuals, but more on them later. No one asked why my new friend was pushing two bikes, with two bags on each. The officials checked the number on my bracelet with the sticker on my bike and waved both of us in.

(How did you know this was going to work?)

My friend Ruth Carter had done this same maneuver with me at Ironman Lake Placid months before. Besides, this was one of many logistics I had cleared with the REFEREES the day before. Once everything was set up, we paused at the exit to this fenced compound of bikes and bags of race gear. The pros were checking in and we wanted to meet them. Specifically, I had wanted to meet Jan Frodano, aka “Frodo.” Frodo was considered the GOAT.

(The what?)

The Greatest Of All Time. He had won gold in triathlon at the 2008 Olympics, he had won the World Championships three times, he had the fastest finish time at under 7.5 hours…and he was retiring.

Saturday, September 9: 11 a.m. (20 hours to go)

No Frodo. I parted ways with my new friend. I wanted to sit on the beach before returning to my family for Shabbos lunch. I sat on the concrete sea wall and stared out at the aqua blue Mediterranean Sea. Triathletes dream of completing an Ironman, and Ironman triathletes dream of competing at the World Championship. It’s the baseball or football equivalent of a fan competing at the All-Star game with the pros. But the course was so tough that the challenge seemed impossible to achieve. All I could think was that in 1961, President Kennedy proposed “the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” That goal seemed impossible. This was the Triathletes version of going to the moon. I had looked at this exact course after I did Ironman UK the first time in 2022 and decided, “There’s no way; that 13-mile climb is nuts.” But now I was here…

David Roher is a USAT certified triathlon and marathon coach. He is a multi-Ironman finisher and veteran special education teacher. He is on Instagram @DavidRoher140.6. He can be reached at [email protected].