Nice flight

Well the time has arrived. I'm sitting in Melbourne airport waiting to board the flight to Dubai and onto Nice. On the other side of the world, Ironman awaits. No hassles with checkin - had 1.5kg to spare of the 30 that Emirates give, which was all my triathlon stuff basically - normal clothes are relegated to nice to have but not that necessary, and even with super light packing and jamming heavy stuff like adapters into my coat pockets, I was still tight on the 7kg limit (this laptop takes a good chunk of that!)
And yes - that is a pic of me writing this very post - cool - but kinda sad - in equal measures :)

My back has been playing up since the Whittlesea challenge and it's still not quite right, so we will see how it is after 14 hours to Dubai and another 7 to Nice. Seems like all the little niggles that have been keeping hiding have come out once they knew it was time to really piss me off-  in the last 3 months I've been fine, but in the last 10 days I've had the back pain, hamstring tightness (first right, then left), sore Achilles (both, on one night - magically gone the next day) and calf cramps today on an easy swim. It seems like my body doesn't like this tapering stuff.

At least I managed to stretch out a bit on the Dubai layover :)