Accidental Ironman (10 page)

With 200 yards to go not even a bunch of rampaging Forest fans would have stopped me and I crossed the line in a happy and somewhat surprised frame of mind. So far, so good and no sign of any of the trouble I’ve promised to tell you about. My distracted elation may account for what I did next, which may even yet see me end up on some sort of register. In the morning before the race I’d left my car in the designated parking area, which happened to be right next to a children’s playground. On returning to my car I began the usual ritual of getting my sweaty kit off and getting my compression tights and dry clothes on. This was complicated by performing this feat inside the car so as to avoid public nudity, and also involved me picking congealed jelly babies from my shorts pocket and lobbing them out the window. In a moment of awful clarity it suddenly occurred to me that I was sitting in a car, naked from the waist down, throwing sweets out of my window at a children’s play area … I quickly fought a pitched battle with my Skins to get them on my legs as fast as possible, which made the car rock violently from one side to the other, which made things look even worse. I then screeched out of the car park like a getaway driver, all the while muttering ‘It’s not what it looks like, officer’ and wondering whether I should stop and rip the registration plates off the car in a bid to avoid having to stand before m’learned colleagues in Melton Mowbray again.

Years ago, when my dad got sent to jail, he didn’t take it well at all. He refused all offers of food and drink, spat and swore at anyone who came near him and smeared his ‘business’ all over the walls. That was the last time we ever played Monopoly. Joking aside, there has always been a competitive streak in the Brunts and despite my early sporting failures at school I’ve clearly inherited this gene, although the outlet for my competitiveness is, bizarrely, cross-country running, the running discipline at which I am least talented. For those of you unfamiliar with this pastime, it involves men and women congregating in a wet field, donning vests with the word ‘Harriers’ on the back and then running over a series of hills and bogs before crossing a finish line made of two canes and a bit of tape where an old bloke gives you a metal disc and a withering look. Some of the more sadistic courses include a stream to jump across where the vicious crowds gather to watch some poor sod go headfirst into the murky bilge. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before you have to complete some kind of obstacle while under fire from a machine-gunner. The races are divided between a bunch of stick-thin burger-dodgers at the front who float over the ground and complete circuits faster than the Large Hadron Collider, and a bunch of carthorses at the back who plough through the ground like human tractors. Unsurprisingly I belong to the latter category but, like a growing number of triathletes, I’ve latched on to cross-country as a great way to build strength and to distract yourself from the soul-sucking darkness between January and March as well as all the sunny-side-up halfwits claiming spring is almost here.

I also enjoy the cut-throat competitiveness of these races, which seem to give more scope for team tactics and individual treachery than any of the other sports I do. Points are awarded to your club based on your finishing position but, although these are team events, it tends to be your clubmates that you try hardest to beat, and if you show any kind of comradeship you’ll probably be handed a copy of
Das Kapital
and given 48 hours to leave the country. I frequently get into trouble at cross-country races because there’s something about being barged out of the way that makes me see red. One year I did the Midland Masters (OAPs) Cross Country championships amid the wasteland scavengers of Wolverhampton and was toiling near the back only to be shoved out of the way by another runner as he cut inside me on a corner. I’m not exactly sure what happened next because everything went blurry and shouty, making the world look like an Al Qaeda video, and the next thing I knew I was sprinting over the line in fifteenth place, collecting a gold medal as part of the winning team. I virtually crippled myself in the process and left myself with a pulled Achilles, which still hurts to this day. Additionally, although I hammered the guy who shoved me, I had to endure all his post-race excuses for why he lost, using rich and vibrant language that enabled him to sound knowledgeable despite being what we linguists call ‘a knob’ – and thanks to my throbbing legs I couldn’t get away!

It is written in
The Triathletes’ Bible
that: ‘Thou shalt not enter running races unless thou cycleth to them, nor shalt thou do a swimming event unless thou runneth during the interval, and after any cycling time-trial thou shalt jump off thy bike and go for a hard run – otherwise thy races do not count and thou cannot braggeth on Facebook.’ As a result of this unspoken code, I found myself planning to race in a swimming gala on the Isle of Wight followed swiftly by an entirely separate ten-mile run near Poole. No cycling sadly, although had there been a pedalo for hire at Cowes I’d have had a go at using it to reach Portsmouth. I had a good reason for wanting to migrate southwards because an upshot of my medal-winning run mentioned a moment ago was that, having seen what I’m capable of when not dossing about, my running club tried to rope me into doing the national championships in the buzzing metropolis of Sunderland. The prospect of eight hours of driving to run 12k in a mudpit – in the rain, in Sunderland – sounded as much fun as listening to One Direction playing banjos. Instead, I skeddadled off to the Isle of Wight, which is as far away from Sunderland as it possible to be while remaining earth-bound.

I was joined in my island adventures by my mate Keith Burdett, previously introduced to you as a bleached Wookie but who, on reflection, looks more like Father Ted’s stunt double. We travelled down and stayed over in my campervan, which is always a risk because spending time with your mates on holiday dramatically increases the risk of finding out what they are really like. Keith is a mild-mannered man until you add water, at which points he becomes an instant headcase who views all his competitors with the same hostility as a cornered badger, to the point where anyone attempting to swim in the same lane as him is likely to get their teeth knocked down their throat. It is also written in
The Triathletes’ Bible
that: ‘Thou shalt try to beat thy mates above all others’ so, despite the presence of lots of other competitors, the fiercest rivalry was the Brunt vs Burdett celebrity death-match.

The first part of the DIY-Tri challenge involved doing seven swimming races in a day and first blood went to Keith who trounced me in the 800m freestyle. Revenge was mine in the 100m medley, and after that we set about thrashing each other until even our hair hurt. Honours ended reasonably even before we legged it for the last evening ferry crossing, which we made by the skin of Keith’s dentures. It was thus late and cold when we arrived at our Dorset campsite on Saturday night, and the atmosphere was also frosty when I jokingly implied to the stuffy campsite owners that Keith and I were a couple, a comment that went down like a horse in a burger. Fortunately, I concealed the subsequent awkward silence by saying, ‘Well, this is awkward,’ and, even though I later explained that we were in the area because of swimming and running races, we spent the rest of our stay being studiously ignored by the campsite owners and all the stuck-up gits who would only know what a triathlete was if one ran their quirky local cheesemongers.

Part
deux
of the DIY-Tri was the ten-miler, a hilly run around country lanes near Poole that was also doubling as the National Masters ten-mile championship (‘Masters’ sounds so much nicer than ‘decrepit old farts’). There were plenty of very handy runners there but, of course, the only race that mattered was Brunt vs Burdett as the world’s most competitive middle-aged men lined up against each other. It ended in narrow victory for Brunt – otherwise I wouldn’t have written about it – but Keith got some measure of revenge by farting in the campervan on the way home and almost rendering me unconscious. The trouble came when I was halfway back to Coventry and my mobile phone rang. It was one of the race organisers calling.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Halfway home,’ I said.

‘Any chance you could come back, only you’ve won gold in the 40–45 age group and we want to present it to you.’

The reason I had left so promptly was that I was under strict orders to get back home in order to attend a Nuremberg Rally (visit to my mum’s house) so I was now presented with a dilemma – turn back to accept the gold medal and crowd adulation that comes with being a national champion but condemn myself to a week of living in a house with the atmosphere of a tomb for being late agaaaaain, or carry on home and risk upsetting the organising body of a sport not noted for its warmth and flexibility of rule application. In the end I opted to head home, mostly because the fuel costs of heading back would have bankrupted me. I asked for the medal to be posted to me – which took
six months
to sort out, by which time no one I’d told believed I’d ever won a medal let alone become a national champion. And, as we all know, it doesn’t count if no one believes you.

This is perhaps the biggest one of all because it involves someone uttering eight words to me that completely changed my life. It’s ridiculous to think that eight simple words, spoken by someone you barely know, can lead to a total change in your world that affects who you are, what you are, what you look like, where you go, who your friends are, how much money you have and what you do with all your time. The year was 2003 and the place was back at good old Barclays Bank. It was the day after I had completed the London Marathon and I was walking into the office like my legs had been placed in callipers. Despite being in agony I was proudly holding aloft my finisher’s medal and accepting the plaudits of my colleagues (who didn’t realise how genuinely poor my performance had been) when a woman called Sally Plummridge said something that unleashed a catastrophic chain of events that would lead you – yes you – to be reading these somewhat overpriced words at this very moment. She said … ‘I bet you couldn’t do the London Triathlon’ …

I imagine you’ve reached this point in the book wondering when I’m going to start talking about triathlons, given that’s what this book is meant to be about. Well, I’ve always believed that if you’re doing the dance of the seven veils, it’s best to slowly remove the veils one at a time, not just rip them all off at once and whip your tackle out. So you’ll be pleased (!) to know that it’s tackle-out time now as we begin to talk all things tri. Although this book is all about my quest for Ironman greatness, it took me some years of farting about before I summed up the courage to do one. In fact, my first ever memory of Ironman came long before I took up any kind of athletics. I was watching the telly in the early-nineties when Ironman Hawaii was briefly covered on the news with those ‘kerrrrazzy’ athletes viewed with the same apparent respect as a novelty news item about a dog that could say ‘sausages’. I remember being agog at the distances involved and thinking ‘I’d never be able to do that.’ Then the video for ‘Summertime Love’ by Sabrina came on and I forgot all about it.

My route to triathlon came via running with an episode we covered in the last chapter and which I won’t repeat lest you feel short-changed enough to ask for a refund. It does strike me as ridiculous, though, how your whole life can basically turn round as the result of eight words – ‘I bet you couldn’t do the London Triathlon.’ When the lovely Sally uttered those words I didn’t even know what a triathlon was, but from the dim recollection I have, I signed up for the race online on the spot. There were two to choose from, a sprint distance (750 metre swim, 20 kilometre cycle, 5 kilometre run) or an Olympic distance (1500 metre swim, 40 kilometre cycle, 10 kilometre run), and I think you now know me well enough to make an educated guess which one of those I entered. Drawbacks to entering the race included the facts that:

1.   I didn’t own a wetsuit, had no idea how to get one, and had never swum in anything but a swimming pool in my life. The swim leg of this race would take place in London’s Royal Victoria Dock where, as well as other swimmers, I would face an array of floating turds and perhaps the occasional body of a gangland hit victim.

2.   I didn’t own a bike and had not ridden one since I left school, when I abandoned cycling in order to borrow my mum’s car and impress girls as much as one can while leaning out of the window of a brown Datsun Cherry. A bloke I knew at work called Tom was an occasional weekend cyclist who owned a road bike, which I asked to borrow and which he refused to lend, something I stored in my grudge bank for years. Then I bumped into him while out cycle training, whereupon I rode with him and put him through the pain-wringer so badly that he stopped, got off his bike and sagged into a ditch with a face that looked like he’d been ducking for apples in a chip pan.

3.   As we have seen I was, at this time, extremely poor at running.

Never mind, though. I wasn’t about to let any of this stand in the way of a bet and nipped any negative thoughts in the knackers by hiring a bike and a wetsuit from a shop, digging out the same crappy trainers I’d done the London Marathon in, and training myself to become a triathlete. At first this largely involved replacing my usual breakfast of a thrice fried bap with muesli and bananas, and shaving off the long hairs on my legs that made my knees look like an elderly Rastafarian. I can still see Nicky’s bewildered look as she tried to work out why the bathwater was taking so long to drain away.

My career as a cyclist started inauspiciously when my new bike was delivered to my parents’ house and I grew concerned that Dad had gone off to the pub on it. As unlikely as this sounds, he had form for this sort of thing. I once had a box of twelve bottles of wine delivered to his house for me, and when I opened it at home it only contained eleven, which my dad claimed was an alarming rate of evaporation that showed global warming is a dangerous reality. When I eventually unpacked my new bike and rode up the lane, I genuinely didn’t have the faintest idea how the gears worked, and was trying hard to master the toe clips – yes toe clips – without ending up in a hedge.