Mac Crutchfield

Today is the one year anniversary of Mac Crutchfield’s death. Mac was a 12 year old boy who died on August 23,2008 in a tragic accident. I am racing Ironman Florida (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run) in memory of Mac while raising money money for the Mac Crutchfield Foundation. We are 75 days out from Ironman Florida – November 7, 2009. I have three great training partners – Karen, Michelle, and Robin. We are an incredible group of friends with a strong bond. We are moms, wives, and athletes. We balance our lives so that we still have quality family time while spending many hours together training. AND most of all…we have fun. I mean we really have fun. There is no other way to do it. You can’t spend hours and hours on the bike, hours running, and hours in the pool without having fun. Karen is the crazy one, she keeps us laughing ALWAYS. She has no filter, just says what she is thinking (and sometimes she shouldn’t). We laugh a lot which keeps us going in our training. Barbara is also one of our training partners although she is not doing Ironman this year. I mean she has only done like 9 Ironman races, not sure why she couldn’t do one more. She still runs with us.

This will be the third Ironman for Robin and me and the first Ironman for Karen and Michelle. I will be posting our daily training hours and many funny stories that come out of our training. And oh, we take pictures. Many pictures. Yes you can seriously train, have fun, and take pictures. We are not competitive with one another and only encourage each other. In every race we all hope we ALL do our best no matter who is the fastest or slowest. Robin, Karen, Michelle, Barbara and I have a unique friendship. We race for soulful reasons, not to win or be fast. We all have lots of great conversations with God on those six and seven hour training rides on our bike. We appreciate life.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a child. Maggie and Charlie are Mac’s parents and Savannah is his sister. My heart aches for them. I wear a Mac temporary tattoo everyday of my training. Just so I know Mac is right there throughout those endless hours of training. But I don’t need the tattoo to know he is there, I can feel his presence. We always start our training before the sun rises and when I see the sunrise over the horizon, I know Mac is saying "good morning." We rode the Ironman bike course (112 miles) on Saturday while many, many people gathered at the Crutchfield home to celebrate Mac’s life. I know Mac was with us on that ride. We were strong, super strong and we have never been that fast. Thanks Mac!:)