HAWI — North Hawaii’s early risers were sitting outside the Kohala Coffee Mill on Saturday morning sipping their coffees when a moving van pulled up across the street.
The van carried inside it everything volunteers would need to turn this stretch of Highway 270 in North Kohala into the midpoint of the 112-mile bicycle leg of the 2017 Ironman World Championship, where crowds would welcome riders for a brief moment before athletes raced back to transition into the final running leg of the competition.
Volunteers got straight to work, setting up traffic cones to divide incoming and outgoing racers and a sandwich board with a single word below the turnaround symbol: “Hawi.