Accidental Ironman (16 page)

Mercifully I arrived back into transition unstung and set about tackling the run course, which took us to Nottingham City centre and back past Nottingham Forest’s football ground. ‘How times have changed,’ I mused as I recalled the last time I ran along here was in the eighties and I was being chased by that load of Forest fans after Coventry had nicked an ill-deserved win there. The only other notable aspect of the run was that the last water and food station was manned by a load of girls from the nearby Hooters restaurant. It was perfect timing to have a load of stunning women turn up to serve my every whim just as I was caked in dead flies and my own snot. Let the records show that I did the bike in 5 hours 45 minutes and the run in 3 hours 35 and I did NOT try to touch up the Hooters girls your Honour.

Despite feeling buoyed by my return to form and my determination to avenge my lost Florida Ironman experience, things did not go well in the build-up to the second Florida trip. I had lost my carefully assembled Outlaw form almost immediately after the race. In my obligatory warm-up marathon, this time in Leicester, I was all set for another sub-three-hour finish until the twenty-first mile when the wheels came off in a massive way and I looked so pigeon-chested that people started chucking bread at me when I finally heaved myself home in 3.05. All in all not an ideal ego boost for what was supposed to be my next step towards the world stage of Ironmans with my first Hawaii qualification. And so it was that the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and the mouse ended up making a considerably better fist of things than I did.

Despite a final few weeks of training like I’d eaten a freezer full of Alberto Contador’s contaminated beef, I ended up finishing over an hour slower than I managed at The Outlaw, which just goes to show that when you earnestly believe you can compensate for a lack of talent by doubling your efforts, there’s no end to what you can’t achieve. I couldn’t blame the venue; I stayed in the same apartment I had stayed in the previous year (and I noticed they had changed the bathroom wallpaper). As ever the US crowd were fantastic – I find it hard to reconcile the charming, supportive and athletic people who race in and support Ironmans with a country where more than half the population are so fat they could clap out the theme tune to
Bonanza
on their man-boobs. No, my American cousins were not to blame for my failure, with the possible exception of one airport security guard at Panama City Beach who seemed to think that having a bike box and not being American qualified me for membership of the Taliban.

The weather was a tad cooler than it had been the previous year thanks to a nearby hurricane, thankfully downgraded to a mere tropical storm by race day. The choppiness of the waves didn’t bother me at all as we struck out into the oily waters of BP’s offshore drilling field and I was clinging to my PB hopes when I emerged back on to the beach exactly 59 minutes later. T1 was the usual melee of gels and smells and heading off on the bike I settled down for some long, flat roads. Unfortunately, you can add the word ‘windy’ to that list of descriptors and I soon found myself working harder than was strictly good for me. My growing tiredness and the fact that I never learn may account for why I then made a massive schoolboy error on the bike leg, which was to accept an energy drink from an outstretched arm at an aid station that I had never tried before. Energy drinks can be funny things and while one brand can turn you into a caped crusader, another can ensure you have a vomit-tastic time until you are purged of the poison. The rest of the bike leg was uneventful and I rolled into T2 with a bike time of just over five hours and 30 minutes, so still well on course to break the magic ten hour barrier. This wasn’t how I was feeling though. I was conscious of feeling very tired, extremely light headed, and somewhat odd as I hunted through my bags for my socks and some kind of courage. After the obligatory first mile of shuffling I was soon into my stiff-legged stride and lasted until about mile ten of the marathon when I took a gel – and was lavishly sick all over the feet of the man who had handed it to me.

What followed was about the worst three hours of my life as I staggered along, doubled up with pain, throwing up about every twenty paces. It got so bad at one point that if I had died they’d have had to bury me in a bucket, and I was doing cartwheels trying to guess which end it was going to come out next. I never did get to the bottom of it, and whether it was the energy drink that made me sick or whether I had just overdone it on the bike, we shall never know. All I know is that having decided I’d rather suffer death before a ‘DNF’ (did not finish) I kept my legs and my bowels moving, milked the crowd for as much sympathy as I could get, and crossed the line with a bad stomach, bad headache and bad temper in a woeful 11 hours 48 minutes, just one minute faster than my debut Ironman in Canada and with a skid mark on my tri-suit that you couldn’t remove with a fire. So a Hawaiian dream that began on such a high ended on a puke-strewn low and the prospect of a conversation with my coach Dave for which it was going to be advisable to wear brown trousers and a shirt the colour of blood. If I learned anything from this whole sorry episode it is:

1.   Do NOT try ANYTHING new on race day.

2.   Not all pain is gain.

3.   I need more bottle cages on my bike, although I draw the line at those ones that fit behind the saddle like a couple of rear rocket launchers.

4.   Drinking lemon scented bleach does not count towards your five portions of fruit a day.

5.   The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your failure.

I also learned that it is never, ever a good idea to go back to somewhere to race again, a lesson I have ruthlessly applied to every race I’ve ever done since. Except one …

Lost: one mojo. If found, please return to Martyn Brunt, under a duvet, Coventry. ‘Lost mojo’ is triathlon code for ‘can’t be bothered to train’, which is something all triathletes go through from time to time. I suspect even she-who-is-Chrissie-Wellington has bouts of enthusiasm lower than the collective IQ rating of the average
Big Brother
house, and I had a right dose of it at the start of this season. My lost mojo could have been caused by any number of things:

1.   It could have been be the arctic weather we experienced until March that kept my bike wheels in the clutches of my evil turbo trainer rather than sliding along the icy lanes like a penguin in a velvet wetsuit. I kept being invited by friends to go mountain biking in the snow but to me this kind of stupid thinking suggests they must be badly dehydrated.

2.   It could have been contemplation of my advancing age. This is the year that I shuffled into the 45–49 age group, my back hurts, and the latest
Now That’s What I Call Music
CD contains not one song I recognise. And it isn’t even a CD. Welcome to middle age.

3.   It could be that I’m tired from doing too much cross-country running on courses that couldn’t be harder if you had to do the water jumps while being kettled by the Egyptian riot police.

Generally I am a nightmare to be around when I’m in this sort of mood. I have all the personality of a VAT return, and gloomily pad around like a Dignitas tour guide. Consequently, I didn’t see any of my friends for a while, let alone do any training with them, although it doesn’t matter because the voices in my head keep me company. Plus, it’s occasionally nice to have a break from them because it’s very hard to keep up good after-dinner form while attending to dreary serfs who think
savoir faire
is a theme park near Warwick. When I’m in this frame of mind, the only time I ever cheer up is when I swim at 5.30 a.m. with my local swimming club. From 5.30 a.m. until 7.00 a.m. we have the pool to ourselves for carefree training, but at 7.00 a.m. this happy triathletes-only time comes to an end and the seething mass of sagging flesh otherwise known as ‘the general public’ is allowed in to stand pointedly at the end of the lanes willing us to get out so they can flop into the pool. I find there’s nothing that puts a smile on my face like being chirpy with the sullen public at the precise moment they are at their most furious.

There are a number of solutions to hand whenever I am feeling like this:

1.   I can visit certain tax-cautious coffee shops for a massive jolt of caffeine, given that these days coffee is just a liquid fag equivalent.

2.   I can try to get my hands on some performance-enhancing drugs by sending a round-robin email to all the crack addicts in a 30-mile radius.

3.   I can try ending my annual ‘no booze’ New Year’s resolution and start drinking again, although not to the point where I’m back to running through parks chasing ducks, shouting incoherent obscenities at passers-by and urinating freely through my trousers.

4.   I can try eating less. As I’ve got older I’ve noticed I have acquired a craving for fish and chips, although even a small portion of chips from my local chippy is so large that if I ate them all I would die in the night. So on the basis that I don’t have three stomachs like a cow, I have to make sure I eat no more than I can fit down my tri-shorts.

5.   I can try varying my diet. In the past I have tried switching my diet away from pasta and jam sandwiches to more exciting foods, including one occasion when I switched to spicy chilli con carnes. My fiery breath lit up like an oil rig gas flare, melting my dentures, and it took three buckets of sand and the garden hose to put me out. I also once changed my usual breakfast of choice of strawberry jam sandwiches to my mate Phil’s recipe for whisky porridge, which was a bit like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

6.   I can focus on preparing my bike for forthcoming races by taking it apart and cleaning it and screwing the bits together like a rubbish version of the hitman in
Day of the Jackal
.

7.   I can go abroad. After all, I live in Coventry, and a quick glance out of the window confirms that any mentally capable person with access to transport wouldn’t want to stick around.

If you’re ever struggling with a lost mojo, never forget that ‘impossible’ is just a word – whereas ‘fuck this for a game of soldiers’ is a far more expressive seven words. It was for this reason I decided that, as part of my tortuous build-up to Challenge Roth, I would get outta this place and go on training camp to Lanzarote in a bid to freshen up my mood and my BO.

At the end of the last chapter I tried to inject a bit of mystery into proceedings by saying that I’ve successfully avoided returning to any scene of triumph or disaster with the exception of one place – and that place is Lanzarote, despite the fact that each time I go I swear that I will never, ever go back again. I’ve now been to the volcanic equivalent of Margate five times, twice of which were to do the infamous Ironman Lanzarote, which, as well as being billed as ‘The Toughest Ironman in the World’ remains the only Iron race I have ever done more than once – and bitterly, bitterly regretted it. The last time was just a couple of years ago and I crossed the line swearing (profusely) that not only was I never going to do that race again, but I was never going to set foot on that glorified pumice-stone of an island again in my life. It was the second time I’d finished there with a brand new personal-worst time and I was vehement that there was more chance of seeing Ryan Giggs on
Family Fortunes
than of seeing me in Lanzarote ever, ever again.

By now you may have reached the conclusion that I’m so full of crap I’m basically just a bowel with a haircut. So, true to my word as always, I returned to Lanzarote agaaaaiiinnn a few weeks before Roth to spend some happy hours labouring up hills into howling headwinds with a face like a buffalo straining to shit into a lake. In fairness to my worthless word-of-honour, at least I wasn’t doing the Ironman there, having vowed never to return and having already parted with my not particularly hard-earned cash to do Roth. Instead, I was doing the Volcano Triathlon, an Olympic-distance race that follows part of the Ironman course – inevitably a hilly and windy part. The race takes place at a resort called Club La Santa, a sort of Stalag for athletes where the very fit gather to train, drink smoothies and compare physiques, a game I don’t really indulge in thanks to having a body that looks like the last surviving semi-deflated balloon from a children’s party. I’m only able to look like I have stomach muscles by shoving the plastic bit from the bottom of a Milk Tray box down my shirt. La Santa is a haven for all sorts of athletes, and those who just want to get fit in the sunshine by doing daily Body Kombat classes, which I popped in to, mainly to point out their tiresome misspelling of Combat, but also to find out what weapons were involved. I was very disappointed to learn that it’s bare hands only, and the only body being ‘kombatted’ was my own, although I did have to agree with them that there is no room for guns in any public place, except perhaps the auditions for
The Apprentice
.

The Volcano is one of the main events of the year in Lanzarote, so me and three friends decided we’d give it a go and stay at La Santa for the whole week rather than try to mix it with the holidaymakers at Puerto del Carmen, who all looked about as healthy as the contents of an ashtray. Joining me on this trip were:

Neill Morgan – my good chum and a balding, Welsh primate who looks like a cross between Mitt Romney and a sexually ambiguous robot, and who glories in the nickname of ‘Wetwipe’ on account of his obsession with personal hygiene.

Andy Golden – a man whose sharp legal mind and athletic toughness is undermined by being ginger and having a voice like a bored carpet salesman. Andy runs his own firm of solicitors and spends most of his time staying in touch with how his clients are faring on his iPad, making the world beyond his screen just a dull blur.

Rich Palmer – a highly intelligent scientist and extremely strong cyclist whose constant urging for us to cycle faster when he rides with us is so delusional we have almost zapped him with lithium.

After a winter that made it feel like we’d spent six months on the ice planet Hoth, we arrived at Arricife and staggered off the plane into the Canarian sunshine with the giddy wonderment of newly freed battery hens, suitably refreshed after visiting the airport terminal bar (which is the only place you can drink at 6.00 a.m. without being judged). This feeling of well-being continued when we realised our apartment overlooked the venue for the outdoor aerobics classes, making our veranda a popular meeting point for middle-aged men pretending to be looking at the sunset. However, as anyone who’s ever shared an apartment with three friends will know, it took about five minutes for the room to resemble a baboon prison, with kit and half-eaten grub all over the place and a toilet that made everyone who walked into it turn noisily blasphemous as they tried to warn others about the stink. In fact, my most vivid memory of the whole week is sitting on the veranda chair, which was positioned just outside the bathroom window, and weeping with laughter at the sound of Neill walking into the loo just after Andy had walked out, and subsequently retching like a fox with a pube stuck in its throat. Within five minutes of arriving the only things not strewn around the room were our valuables, which were secreted around the place depending on each owner’s attitude to security. Andy hid his money in his pile of worn pants, while Neill kept his in his purse – or ‘Essentials Case’ as he insisted on calling it whenever anyone asked him, ‘Why have you got a purse?’