So without further ado, here is his account of the trip:

“After spending last year helping with the three triathlon events that happen on the Kona side of the Big Island, I was excited to return again for Lavaman. It’s an inclusive, beginner-friendly event that also happens to serve as a testing ground for more elite athletes of the sport. The array of different cyclists and their bikes is much more vast than the later, more challenging events. Indeed, some folks were on engineering projects designed to minimize aerodynamic drag worth tens of thousands of dollars, while others rode inexpensive hybrids. 

This time I made sure to bring my Bike Friday All-Packa. Previous times, I had borrowed a gravel bike from the shop I was working at, Bikeworks Beach & Sports. They have an incredibly vast array of rentals, from e-bikes to triathlon bikes and every point in between, all in impeccable shape, so it just made sense. However, every time I went I found myself missing my own bike. It didn’t help that some of the other folks at the shop, including the manager, had gotten themselves a Bike Friday. I was further motivated by the fact that I had heard that the shop had run out of available rentals this time. Unfortunately, I heard this at the last minute so I had to stuff my All-Packa in a suitcase late the night before leaving at the crack of dawn. Thankfully it only took a few minutes.

The irony was that I was flying in about a week early primarily to unpack triathlon participants’ bikes. They were in bike boxes and custom cases in dizzying variations. Some, even the ones in the cases, were quite disassembled. As the trend in modern bikes is to make everything really streamlined, leading to cumbersome cockpit assemblies and internal routing, this was often an area that needed special attention. Folks had to pay for this assembly and ultimately had to pay for disassembly at the end of the trip. Some of them paid to have us store the case or paid for us to pick up or drop off from their hotel. All in all, these other bike travel case packs were rather time consuming and costly to manage. 

My flight was uneventful. The hardest part was waiting for my bike to appear on the luggage carousel. There were surprisingly few other bikes, but lots and lots of golf clubs. With that sorted, I got a ride to the shop. I arrived during the middle of the day and got right to work. At the end of the day, I pulled out my suitcase and popped my bike out and I was ready to ride. It was notably easier than any other bike I had unpacked. We had a short shop ride at the end of the day, enjoying roads (well, the “Queen K,” the main road around the island which is also the course for the bike portion of the triathlons, along with some roads that meander through the resorts and condos of Waikoloa Beach), a wee bit of gravel, and a lot of wind.

The next day was more of the same, but we got a bigger group together. We ended up on a road, which turned into a (lava) gravel road, which turned into… lava fields. Much hilarity ensued as we all underbiked our way through, eventually emerging through some brush on the side of the road. On my All-Packa I was riding the new Panaracer Gravel King X1 54mm tires, set up tubeless on my Velocity Cliffhanger rims, and I was just blown away at how well they performed on all of that, including keeping up with fast riding on the roads as well as taking on the various states of lava. For those unfamiliar, lava rock is incredibly sharp (it’s volcanic glass after all) so to have no problems whatsoever was rather remarkable. 

Somewhere in there, three of us went for a morning ride through Puako, a beautiful neighborhood hugging the coast, up the hill to the Queen K again and back to the shop. Our leader at the time was on a road bike, pushing hard. Being naturally geared lower, I was spinning wildly to keep up but was managing. We would go on to do that at least a couple more times in different configurations. One such time, we avoided the Queen K by finding some hidden road that we pretty much had all to ourselves and so we just sent it down all the downhills, at one point being almost taken out by an obstacle in the road we couldn’t see until the very last second. 

There were at least a couple days we were so bushed, we ended up just heading down to the beach (“A Bay,” the same place where the event swim would happen). We rode to the end of the parking lot and through a gravel maintenance road to get there rather quickly. At the end of one of those days, we played Foot Down (aka Circle of Death), a skills game borne from the world of mountain bikes. We all circled one another, eventually trackstanding, hopping, cutting folks off, and so on, in an attempt to get them to lose their balance and touch the ground. At that point, they were out. We played for way too long and had way too much fun. So much fun that we did it again on our traditional “Night Before the Night Before Ride.” The biggest group yet, including all the folks that worked on the days leading up to the event, rode on the Queen K to the Scenic Overlook above Kiholo Bay. We took over the parking lot with a massive game of Foot Down before fighting the winds on our way back.

The night before wasn’t a night for riding. We were going to provide on course support for the participants of the event on e-bikes. We would take the whole course and essentially split it in three, so we would just go back and forth across our little section until we found someone to help. So we had to get our bikes ready with spare tires and tubes, tools and other supplies. That took quite a long time, so we called it a night after that.

Next morning we woke up even before the crack of dawn and set up our tent near the transition area. We only had a few mechanical things to deal with, which was nice. Last year we not only had to nearly rebuild a bike that had been improperly put together but we had to play cobbler thanks to a busted Boa faster on someone’s shoe. 

One of us went with the initial folks on the bike. Another one took the middle group a little while after. I was to take the third group. I was just taking it all in, watching people make the transition from swim to bike, when the manager ran over, practically jumping up and down because he had spotted a Bike Friday. I was set to take off anyways, so I went after him, sure that I would find him along the way. Sadly, I never did.

There were some folks too worn down by the wind that were throwing in “ the towel” almost before they started. There were some flat tires (as expected, as the kiawe thorns are terrible), a stuck disc piston that I didn’t have the right tool for and had to call for help, and not too much else. One person was walking up the hill on the way back. I motioned to see if they needed help and they shook their head no. Surprised, I called out but they insisted they didn’t need help. I realized what the problem was: the wind was so strong that walking up the hill was easier.

Eventually, the last rider had made it to the far edge of my section and my co-workers had come in to join me. We pedaled together, even tag teaming a flat change worthy of professional race car pit times. As we crested the last hill, my battery ran out. I didn’t think this would be a big issue since we were headed downhill, but the wind was so strong I was in my lowest gear pushing as hard as I could to make it!

Lavaman is well-known for its afterparty and it was in full swing when we arrived. The volunteers, like us, had a little section where we could get some food and refreshments.  No party for us, though. After a brief respite, we returned to the shop to do the reverse of what we did before, packing bikes up to be sent back home. Everyone was largely much more relaxed now that the hard work had been accomplished. Smiles abounded and we could breathe easy. 

After one more day of packing bikes, I packed up my own, with much more ease, and returned home, probably feeling a lot like the rest of the event’s participants: exhausted and happy.”

Walter is headed back to the islands near the end of May to do it all over again for the more grueling Olympic distance Ironman 70.3. He also hopes to be back yet again for the pinnacle event of triathlon, the IRONMAN World Championship. This year will be particularly interesting, as the men and women once again unite at a single event in Kona for the first time since 2019.