Good Idea/Bad Idea Events Before 'A' Race

Lots of variables...

How "A" is your A-race?  How aggressive are your goals for that day?  

How disciplined are you?  

If you're going to do a 12-hour ride, you'll obviously need to ramp up saddle time well beyond normal HIM training.  Doing that long a ride as long as you stay out of Z3-5 and keep nutrition and hydration balanced should be relatively low impact on your race if you're properly trained.  Yes, you'll risk coming down sick at a critical time in your HIM training.  

Doing the half-mary may be a bit more challenging...while the distance is aligned with your HIM, can you go into that "race" with the discipline to treat it as a training run rather than a race?  

While it's been suggested, I'd recommend avoiding a sprint tri 2 weeks before your HIM.  They're entirely different races with different strategies and IMO, the risk exposure to a bike crash in the sprint (recognize that there may be a lot of first-time participants) that takes you out of your A-race is unacceptable.  (Now, if your "A" race is an A-minus and everything else a B-plus, this risk might be acceptable.)  

I think this comes down more the the training leading up to two weeks before the race than it does what you will be doing on that day.  A 13.1 mile run two weeks before your A race could be good race prep as long as you run it like a B race and don't over do it.  If I were doing that plan I would run the Flying Pig half at the pace that you plan to run your run leg of the 70.3 event and not at your open half pace.  That way you don't over do it and you have solid practice at hitting you race pace closes enough to the event that the muscle memory will be there on race day.   

I would skip the 12 hour bike ride.  That is twice the time of your A race to you will have to do different type of race prep for that event than for your A race which will complicate things.  You can't practice your 5-6 hour race pace when you are going 12 hours either.  If it were a 5-6 hour ride then that would be helpful because you could ride at the effort of you 5-6 hour A race (or a little less) to mental prepare to be competing for that long, but the 12 hours just doesn't seem like it would work seamlessly into a 70.3 plan.  It seems like it would require you to make a lot of deviations in training and race prep which could potential hinder your A race perforance.

I would do the Flying Pig between the options you have. 

Yeah, I like racing a lot and doing events. It usually winds up with me not really having A races.  But I tend to get injured doing these one-off things because I don't train fully for them.  So while the Flying Pig is a lot of fun, if I did it, I'd dial it back and run something closer to 2:00 than 1:35.  Like pace a friend and help them try to break 2:00 or something. But then that's $100 for a training run. But it has a cool medal. Hmmm....

I'd like to do a proper HIM, and this would be my first, so I'd like to do it right.

Oh come on. Where are all the Manatees to tell me to just do eeeet?

Not screwing up the HIM is the main point, and I don't necessarily want to drop a lot of money on a training race, but I'll have a lot of friends doing this race also.  And that's worth something.  But what can I say?  I love to (over)race.

Oh yeah, I'll certainly do some races in the build up. Some 5ks and a sprint, to be sure.