We went down to the start of the Ironman yesterday morning. It’s a great spectacle: 1800 athletes all of whom intend to do something that I couldn’t possibly accomplish. The race begins at 7:00 and the cut-off for finish is midnight, so you have 17 hours in which to: swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run a full marathon. Along a course that runs through a vast lava field, so not only do you have in-the-shade temperatures in the 80s, but incredible black-body radiation (I mean, imagine biking 112 miles through a parking lot).

 An 80-year-old did it with about :45 minutes to spare. Which I thought was impressive until I saw that he had been beaten by a 76-year-old nun. Other especially impressive athletes include Sarah Reinertsen, a full-leg amputee and Johnny Blais, who has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Not that anyone who does it deserves anything but total respect.

 Then, to get out of town, we went up to the summit of Mauna Kea (13,796 feet) to get a tour of the telescopes. Serious geekery.

 The hour or so before sunset on Mauna Kea is incredibly beautiful. The strong inversion layer which gives the mountain such exceptional seeing means that you’re looking down on a sea of clouds and, as the sun lowers, you see an incredible effect where the mountain’s shadow becomes visible, projected into the sky and clouds to the East.

The sunset itself has deep colors but at least last night was not really better than what we get every night from our lanai.

As soon as the colors started to fade we scampered out of the freezing air (it was probably high 30s) down to the visitor’s center at 9,000 feet where there was a Hula Kahiko performance (“ancient” hula: very different and to me vastly better than modern hula and nothing like the skirt-shaking stuff you get at a resort luau). What a rocking day, although by the time we got home we were all dog-tired.