After missing Mondays sunrise I was up and sat outside at 5:45am. I do wonder what kind of holiday this is when I’m up and out of bed over an hour earlier than I do when I’m back in England on a work day! There must be something wrong with me.

First thing was to get Mondays blog finished off. We then relaxed a little, had a bite to eat and headed out of the door and drove the three miles down Ali’i Drive to Kahalu’u Bay. We went there on day 13 (seems like weeks ago!) and had arranged to meet Paul D, Richard M and Tom B for a little swim and snorkel. The beach was really really quiet (it was 8am on a weekday after all) and we had a lovely little swim in the calm waters. There was an awesome turtle swimming by the shore and some crazily friendly fish out there.

Back home for breakfast and then Sharon and I decided to pop out and see the ‘Cloud Forest’ at the top of Kaloko Drive, just a few miles away from the centre of town. The road slowly takes up the side of Hualalai, a dormant volcano. The weather conditions here are misty, cloudy and rainy for a lot of of the time.

We watched the temperature gauge in the car go from about 86 degrees when we left home down to 61 degrees at about 5,000 feet elevation. Crazy. It poured with rain at one point up there. The trees and plants were so green and completely different to what you get down nearer sea level.

Returning back down to sea level we headed into town to meet up with Andy and Emma. This evening they were heading back to England so we wandered around a bit, visited the very very impressive Hulihe’e Palace and had an almost as impressive shave ice drink from Scandi’s - a shop that has been serving shave ice for over 20 years!

Kailua-Kona seems really strange now. It’s Tuesday, the race was on Saturday and there’s no sign whatsoever that the event took place. The village is just like it was a couple of weeks ago, but with even fewer fit looking people out on their bikes. Island Lava Java cafe has returned to table service (rather than queue-up-at-the-counter service which it has been for the past week or so). So much nicer. The pier area is back to normal (well, it was pretty much back to normal on Sunday afternoon) and now that the Ironman merchandise tent has been dismantled the only sign that the race took place is…. well, the sign outside the King Kamehameha hotel with the names of all the competitors on it.

We then strolled over to Huggo’s On The Rocks to meet up with a few others for a few drinks and food. The sunset wasn’t quite as good as yesterday but I certainly wasn’t complaining. Beer, food, cocktails, sunsets, the ocean. What’s there to complain about?

My post race training hours so far total zero, unless you count about 30 minutes or so snorkelling. No… I thought as much!