At least a dozen volunteers, each assigned to a numbered section that contained 200 bags. The captain was in the doorway with a megaphone. I'm pretty sure someone was relaying numbers to her (but I couldn't see how) because she was shouting them to us with enough lead time to locate the bags and have them ready to hand off to the athletes.
It was really fast-paced and organized and I loved it - it very much felt like I was part of the race, unlike when I was working the bike course. Patrolling the bike course I felt like a bystander, and an unwanted one at that - I'm the guest nobody wants at the party, the sober guy you hitch a ride from when everything goes terribly wrong. But in T2 the athletes are happy to see you and are generous with their thanks.
This is definitely another job where you've got to have a lot on the ball. While there are lulls (and by lulls I mean the athletes come one at a time instead of five at a time), especially late in the day, the numbers often come fast and furious and you have to be quick on your feet. The older gentleman in the section just in front of mine was struggling - he couldn't hear the numbers announced (it was tough, you had to concentrate), and he didn't seem clear on which numbers were in his section. Those of us right next to him did our best to tell him which ones were his area, and more often than not we had to pick it up for him. I tried to give them to him so he could hand them off, I felt like I was being rude to him doing his handoffs, but he truly couldn't keep up and I also didn't want to keep the athletes waiting. After a while his knees were bothering him too much and he sat out the rest of the shift; the captain had noticed how I'd been covering him, so after checking with me that I didn't mind she just had me take over his section. He was really sweet - a proud dad with a son racing - and I thought it was admirable he signed up to work considering it was hard on him physically. I hope next time he signs up for a job that's better suited for him; he just didn't seem like he was having any fun.
Around 4:00 I caught a few seconds between numbers and scoped out Iron Wil's and TriSaraTops' bags. Things had really thinned out by then so it was easy to find them.
Around 4:30 I started checking my watch a lot.
Around 4:45 I called my husband and asked him to check IronmanLive for me. He told me her swim time and that it didn't yet show her back from the bike.
Around 5:00 I started checking my watch obsessively. I'd look at it, do a few bags, think that it had to have been 20 minutes, check it again, and find that it had been 17 seconds. I was also checking bags 2283 and 2198 regularly.
A short while after 5:00 I noticed Sara's bag was gone. She'd managed to slip by, not 15 feet away. I don't know how since I was listening for all the numbers - I must have been in the middle of helping another athlete. I was sorry to have missed her but relieved she'd made it through.
This was also about the time the traffic had slowed enough the highly organized captain started gradually pulling volunteers from this station and moving them to the next gear bag task. Each time she sent people to the next assignment I declined, asking to remain to see my friend through. She was really nice about it and let me stay - I think she also appreciated that by then I was managing to cover six sections by myself.
By 5:20 the athletes were few and far between and I was genuinely concerned about Iron Wil. Not for her race - at that point whether or not she finished wasn't even on my radar. I had seen so many racers come through dripping wet, shivering, blue-lipped, collapsing. I'd heard so many medics called for and seen so many people pulling off their own jackets and sweatshirts and even t-shirts to wrap around athletes huddled in corners under silver foil blankets. I'd removed helmets and gloves from athletes who seemed ashamed to have to ask, but whose frozen fingers literally couldn't do it. I was afraid that Wil had become one of the casualties of the weather, huddled on the side of the road waiting for someone to bring her in out of the cold.
It was also around 5:20 that the captain told us to start pulling up the carpets and dismantling T2. As a back of the packer, as someone who knows what it feels like to come in when people have given up on you and gone home, this tore me apart. I felt like I was betraying my fellow triathletes by taking apart T2 before their time was up, so I found other things to do while I checked my watch every 4 seconds, wondering where Wil was.
At 5:30, the volunteers were ready to be done, but both the captain and I pointed out that the racers still had some time. They had to cross the timing mat by 5:30, and it usually took them a few minutes to reach us.
When it was 5:32 by my watch I had this crazy hope that she'd already been through, that I had her number wrong, that she was already on the run and everything was fine. As I was turning from the door to get my phone, thinking I'd call my husband one more time to check her status on IronmanLive...
I heard a sound and turned back just in time to see Iron Wil falling to her knees.
1 comment:
Great writing...I feel like I was there with you. How gut-wrenching this must have been for you to be worrying about all of those cold athletes for that long. Great job!
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