Accidental Ironman (12 page)

6.00 a.m. – I’m in transition laying out my kit, and watching as people stumble around trying to balance their kit boxes on top of their tri bars. One of my favourite parts of any triathlon is the walk into transition before a race, where I amuse myself watching people trying to balance a plastic box containing their kit on top of their bike. I’m not sure who first decided that carting all your kit around in a box was de rigueur for triathletes, but balancing a foot-square rigid cube on top of an inch-wide circular tube, while it’s moving, is a catastrophically inefficient means of transportation. I take perverse pleasure in watching people’s tempers flare as their bikes slide away from beneath their grip, cracking them meatily on the shin, or hearing the lavish swearing as the box tips over scattering their kit like a cluster bomb. These days I avoid this humiliation by keeping my kit in a contraption known as a ‘bag’, which can be slung over one’s shoulder and which also enables me to ride my bike right up to the transition entrance rather than walk, making me look experienced, manly and slightly sexy. Being experienced has its downsides though because I’m surrounded by people who are twenty years younger than me. So in my 2004 finisher’s T-shirt I feel as self-conscious as a chimp with a viola. A man wearing a GB skinsuit walks past and the lad next to me mutters ‘knob.’

6.55 a.m. – Wetsuit on.

6.55 a.m. and 10 seconds – I realise I’ve also forgotten the stuff to rub on my neck to prevent chafing. I KNEW there was something.

7.00 a.m. – The race starts.

7.00 a.m. and 10 seconds – My wetsuit starts rubbing my neck.

7.22 a.m. – I exit the water. Someone has been tapping my toes for the past five minutes; however I have been weeing down the legs of my wetsuit, so we’re even. I run in to transition and try to look like I’m not checking out how many bikes are still there.

8.00 a.m. – I’m out on the bike course. I eat an energy bar, which basically tastes like textured air. I overtake some people and some people overtake me, so I make a note of their kit so I can get them back on the run, and I kid myself this is realistic. I pass a man who’s had a puncture. ‘That’s one place higher up the leader board,’ I think to myself. Overall, my sympathy could fit into a Japanese thimble.

8.30 a.m. – I’m in T2 going through the ‘shoe, shoe, sunglasses etc’ thing for real, although the ‘shoe, shoe’ bit is harder when every leg bend threatens to give you cramp.

8.45 a.m. – I’ve done one lap of the run course. I overtake some kits I recognise from the bike course, and a man in a GB skinsuit about whom I mutter ‘knob.’

9.15 a.m. – I will finish in about 2 hours 15 minutes and some seconds. I next scan the results to work out that I have finished in the top ten (yes, that means ninth), and, realising that I haven’t, I look to see if I have finished in the top ten in my age group. Realising that I haven’t, I try to refine this some more until I work out that I’m in the top three of men over 40 from the West Midlands, which is what I’ll tell my friends. I put on my finisher’s T-shirt, and so begins its 12-month journey from flavour-of-the-month, to running top, to bottom of the drawer to bike-cleaning rag.

10.15 a.m. – I stop at the services on the drive home because I’m starving. The sandwiches all look disgusting and exactly what people who are too lazy to put their own stuff between bread deserve, so I opt for a bag of breadcrumbed abattoir scrapings. The services are full of people who are all staring at me, possibly because my breath smells like I’ve slept with a tramp’s toe in my mouth, possibly because I’m walking like I’ve been kicked very hard in the coccyx, but most likely because I’m wearing a skinsuit unzipped to the waist, compression socks and a T-shirt that says something like ‘Big Cow Racing’ on the front.

11.00 a.m. – I’m home. I haven’t won the race, but I haven’t finished near the back either. I saw some friends, I got some new tan-lines and I’ve lost another sock. The world hasn’t changed, women are not now looking at me in a different, more sultry manner and I have not acquired a group of slim, toned friends with witty facial hair who sit around in light airy rooms laughing as they Bluetooth each other.

It has taken me years of turning up and farting out deeply average results to achieve this kind of efficiency, but in rare moments of self-awareness I still sometimes wonder what my life would be like if Sally Plummridge hadn’t said those eight words, or if I hadn’t bought a
220 Triathlon
magazine, or if Paul Kingscott hadn’t been walking past and spoken to me and made me think, ‘Hmm, these triathletes seem like a friendly bunch.’ Not that I am now the perfect triathlon machine, by the way, as my current training for Challenge Roth continues to reveal. Even ten years on from my first Olympic-distance race I don’t get them completely right and I continue to have more weaknesses than the Maginot Line. Let’s be honest, every superhero has their Achilles heel. Superman has kryptonite, Achilles had his, er, heel, and Lindsay Lohan had several Ketel One vodkas. I am no different, only my Achilles heel is a bit more abundant than kryptonite – it’s rain.

I realise that this book may contain the odd factual error because of clones, evil counterparts from other dimensions, shape-shifting demons and the illusions of villainous magicians. Trust me, however, when I say that I despise racing in the rain as much as Jeremy Kyle presumably despises himself. The reason for this loathing is, of course, fear. As a result of several wet-race bike crashes over the years I now regard every rainy road as being covered in ice-encrusted glass and thus the most dangerous strip of tarmac outside of a
Mad Max
film. Never was this more evident than in my first race of this season, which was an Olympic-distance race in the Midlands. I entered it as an early leg-stretcher for what awaits me in Roth. I realised I might be in for a trying day when I woke at 6.00 a.m. to the sound of hail drumming on my campervan roof. I attempted to make breakfast but got tired of a pre-race meal consisting mainly of rainwater, so gave up and went to a local café to join the truckers for their early-morning fry up. It’s always a joy to share a table with a man who has sinus issues, a T-shirt with a
Star Wars
joke on it and an astounding conception of what constitutes personal hygiene.

By the time it came to drive to the race and start racking my bike in transition and faffing about with my kit, the weather had mercifully dried up but the presence of black clouds overhead was making me more edgy than a broken pisspot. The last thing I needed was a chatty transition neighbour with views about the weather – so right on cue my neighbour cast his gaze skywards and said, ‘Looks like rain,’ which made me want to belt him so hard across the shins with a track pump that he started dry-heaving. In the event I said, ‘Go away before I climb over this rack and slay you.’ He seemed surprised but continued to talk about puddles on the course, which provoked my response, ‘Go and arrange for someone to bury you cheaply, and I’ll pay half the expense.’ Oh, how I yearn for the good old days when you could tell people what you thought about them with a hatchet or a bow and arrows.

My race started promisingly with a new personal best of 21.20 for the 1500m swim – good news you might think, but it only served to accentuate what followed. The roads were still dry so I scampered along the first six miles of the course like a drugged up Power Ranger until we reached a sign that said ‘Welcome to Wales.’ I’m aware that until the seventies Wales was an undersea kingdom and it is making a concerted effort to return to its naturally submerged state, so sure enough, no sooner had we passed the ‘Croeso’ sign than the heavens opened. It didn’t just rain, it chucked it down, and my fear and loathing instantly kicked in until I became about as comfortable on my bike as an early Christian martyr tied against a stake. My speed dropped to the point where I was worried about being overtaken by the fucking Karaoke Runner again and, to add an extra kick in the teeth, half the field overtook me.

This miserable experience lasted until we reached the ‘Welcome to England’ sign two miles from the end, whereupon it instantly dried up and I immediately turned into Chris Hoy and blasted into T2 like a curry-powered fart. My overall bike time was a weaselly 1:12.30, a full ten minutes slower than I normally do for this distance, with the added humiliation of being exposed as a cringing weakling. Stung by my cowardice and nicely rested after my gentle ride, I tore round the run as fast as anyone can when they basically look like an unbaked gingerbread man. My run time on a lumpy 10k was 37.30 despite running so hard that I had to hold my mouth shut to prevent myself from throwing up a warm glop of energy gels down my front.

So my training for Roth had started the way these things always start, with me questioning how in the name of our Lord Brownlee I was ever going to manage to cover 140.6 miles when I had just made such a hash of covering 30. And how the hell am I going to manage if it rains? Oh, and thank you Sally Plummridge, wherever you are, for starting all this by setting off a chain reaction that those scientists at Cern who are trying to make a black hole would be proud of. And I believe we said that the wager for me completing the London Triathlon was a tenner, which I have still not received even after a decade of waiting. Bloody bankers.

It is a piece of received triathlon wisdom that doing a few races as part of your build-up to an Ironman is a good idea, which is how I came to be racing in the rain in the Welsh-border badlands. Partly this is so you can get a sense of your form before your main event of the year, partly because they are good training sessions under race conditions, and partly because after a winter of knocking about with swimmers, cross country runners and other forms of aquatic life, you need to remind yourself how to do a triathlon at all. More specifically you need to relearn how to perform a transition between swimming and cycling, and then cycling and running, without scampering around the transition area looking for your bike amid the many hundreds of identical overpriced carbon shapes. Many is the time I have seen early-season triathletes looking vainly for their bike, helmet, shoes, trainers, gels and competence before trying desperately to find the way out of transition amid the maze of bike racks and kitbags. I remember seeing one guy running three times round a particularly complicated transition in Belgium looking for the run exit shouting, ‘Ariadne, the thread, the thread!’ Being grammar-school educated meant I got this joke but from the po-faced reaction it got from others I guess that triathlon is not awash with classical scholars.

Finding the right balance between training to achieve peak fitness at just the right time (i.e. 6.59 a.m. on the morning of Challenge Roth), and knackering yourself out by doing too many warm-up races, is a fine balance to get right and one which my coach, Dave, plans to perfection for me, if only I did as he said. This year Dave and I decided I would do two Half Ironman races as a warm up, as well as a week of overseas cycling on training camp in Lanzarote to ensure I took to the start line with some top quality tan lines halfway up my arms and legs, the cultivation of several cycling and running tan lines of different lengths until you look like a walking barcode being an important way of marking you out as a triathlete. My plan to do just the two races didn’t take account of two unforeseen factors though:

1.   A brand new race had been organised right on my doorstep, organised by a friend of mine.

2.   My friends were planning to do different races to me, and I am pathologically incapable of saying no when they suggest I should come and do their races with them.

So it was that on top of my planned races of the ‘Kernowman’ Half Ironman in Cornwall and the Cotswold 113 Half Ironman in the, er, Cotswolds, I now added two further races, namely the excitingly titled ‘Swashbuckler’ and ‘Avenger’ – both of which were also Half Ironmans. This made a total of four middle distance races in my pre-Iron/Challenge/packet-of-fags build-up, exactly double the number that I needed. Ho hum as they say, and yet more evidence of the accidental nature of my approach to Ironmans. I like Half Ironmans, though, because with a 1900-metre swim, 56-mile cycle and 13-mile run they are usually over and done with inside a morning, you can usually fart them out without the training taking over your life for months on end, and they still have the word ‘Ironman’ in the title to make you sound impressive to the wider public who know no better. It’s my favourite distance, so I’ve genuinely lost count of how many I have done over the years and I have travelled to such exotic locations as Monaco, Belgium, Weymouth, Milton Keynes and the dark side of the moon (Leicestershire) to do them, although this does not mean I have become wise in their ways.

For example, back in 2007 I was about to start a Half Ironman in the USA when I stubbed my foot on a rock and took the skin off the end of my big toe. This mishap was soon forgotten as I addressed the more pressing problem of trying to stop 2000 swimmers from booting my goggles off as we sprinted for the first buoy, or boooeeeey as Americans inexplicably call them. In fact, all thoughts of my skinless toe vanished until halfway round the bike course when I needed the loo and decided to save time by peeing while cycling. I hoiked up my shorts and began the freewheel of shame as I did the disgusting deed, at which point I was sharply reminded of my earlier foot-stubbery as some wee leaked into my shoe and hit my toe with the ferocity of a snapping turtle. As the stinging hit warp-factor 10 on my personal pain threshold, a shocked group of spectators were treated to the sight of a man streaking past them with his knob out and the haggard look of someone who fought at the Battle of Stalingrad.

I do not tell this story in support of personal hygiene, but to underline the point that this is how I learn my lessons – by making catastrophic mistakes. This makes me a dangerous person to seek advice from, as some novices tried to do at a Half Ironman last year when I was exposed as the most experienced triathlete at the race briefing. The race in question was the Ely Monsterman, a middle-distance dash around the flatlands of Cambridgeshire and in the pre-race pep talk people were asked to hold up their hands to indicate how many Half Ironmans they had done. When he reached six races, I was the only person in the room with arm still aloft and there were audible gasps when we worked out I’d done some unspecified number of middle distance races above 20. As soon as the briefing was over I was pounced on by first-timers asking questions; they seemed to revere me as some sort of triathlon Terminator with origins as a nude man who materialised in a transition area and whose first words were, ‘I need your Oakleys, your Carnacs and your Cervelo P3.’