No Suit For You

Freaking out a bit here...

One of my big stress points was figuring out what to wear for the swim. The water is too warm for a wetsuit, and Ironman recently changed their rules so there is only a very specific type of "speedsuit" you can wear during the swim. It was very confusing to me. Eventually I decided that I would just swim in my full tri-outfit. It seemed like an odd thing to do, but I tried out some swims with my tri top on and it didn't seem too unusual (I was worried that it might billow out and act like a parachute in the water.)

A couple weeks ago, a rep from one of the big wetsuit companies sent our tri-team an invitation to pre-order one of their brand-new Kona-legal speedsuit. Team Captain Robert passed it along to me and for some reason it got me all excited about getting a speedsuit. I wasn't entirely convinced that I needed a speedsuit in the first place, so I emailed British Stuart (IMoo brother). He has done Kona before and will be there again this year. Basically I wanted to know what everyone else will be wearing. I figure I'll be drawing enough attention to myself with the way my arms are flailing around in the water, and I didn't want to stand out on shore being the only person wearing a tri-top. Basically, Stuart said that pretty much everyone will be wearing the speedsuits so now I knew I needed to get one too.

Now there was no reason I had to get THIS specific speedsuit, and Steve suggested I get a cheaper one, but I think I got caught up in the "hurry now! limited time exclusive special!" hype. I placed my order. It's important to note that on the order form it said "Your speedsuit will be shipped to arrive on or before September 30th." That's important. That's a week-and-a-half before the race which is not a lot of time to try out a new suit, but I could get at LEAST 5-6 swims in before the race.

Well today I got a message from them saying "um, yeah, we're not sure we can get the suit to you before the 30th. Can you just pick it up Wednesday in Kona, 3 days before the race?" And I'm like, "um, no... I'm supposed to be relaxing 3 days before the race, not worrying about how a brand new suit is going to fit in the water." I'm also a little annoyed because it is a pretty expensive suit and had I known they weren't going to honor the delivery guarantee, I could have ordered a much cheaper one and probably have it already.

I KNOW I am going to hate wearing the speedsuit. If I had 2 weeks, I could at least get somewhat used to it. But as it stands now, I'll probably just get one or two test swims with it before race day. What could possibly go wrong?