Accidental Ironman (18 page)

It is hard to describe how I felt in the weeks after her death but ‘numb’ seems to be most appropriate. I remember that I didn’t cry, because as painful as this was for me, it was infinitely more so for Mum who had now endured the double loss of my sister and my lovely dad, who had passed away nine months earlier at the age of 80. Someone had to deal with the million things that had to be dealt with, and that someone was going to be me, although I spent the next few weeks very much going through the motions when it came to life in general. In truth, I didn’t want to go to Lanzarote, let alone do an Ironman there, because my mind was all over the place and I genuinely didn’t give a toss about the race, or indeed anything. It may have been tiredness that finally brought the emotions to the surface, or it may have been the inevitable low spot you suffer during an Ironman, I don’t know, but when I climbed off my bike at the top of Haria I could barely see through the tears that had suddenly welled up. I sat down on the side of the road and, I don’t mind admitting, I cried my eyes out. After a decent period snivelling, I’d like to say that images of my sister urging me to carry on came into my head, but in truth I just got cold, deciding that I might as well ride down the other side of the mountain. Whether through catharsis or just warming up a bit, when I reached the bottom I was feeling much better and so carried on, not racing though, just pedalling and trying not to have any more self-pitying breakdowns. Although I was feeling better, I still wasn’t feeling good, and cut an uninterested figure when Andy passed me and Neill rolled into transition just behind me. It took me 7 and a half hours to complete the bike course, and wearing an aero helmet for that amount of time leaves you with a headache that feels like you’ve tried to headbutt a comet.

Fortunately, the sight of my friends buzzing around me stirred my competitive soul and, on setting off on the run, it wasn’t long before I steamrollered over the top of Andy. I was about halfway back on the first lap of the run when I saw Neill chugging towards me in the other direction.

‘How far to the turn?’ he yelled, with dreams of catching me burning in his eyes.

‘Just round the corner,’ I lied, hoping to make him inject some fruitless yet debilitating pace into his running, and loped off laughing. My jollity was short lived as I turned to complete the first of the three laps to hear that winner Timo Bracht had already finished and had done so in a new course record, making me feel distinctly inadequate and also making me want to grab hold of the announcer and pull his backside out through his nose. Further up the road I spied Neill trying to extricate himself from a roadside Portaloo while battling cramp.

‘It was miles to the turn, you bastard,’ said the Welsh one, which cheered me up enormously. Soon I also spotted Tony – walking – and ran alongside him to tell him I was on my last lap, news he greeted with a heartfelt ‘Piss off.’

It’s hard to describe the monotony of a marathon so again, through the medium of word association, I will merely say ‘heat’, ‘gels’ and ‘burp’ and once again you should get the picture. Finally, I saw the finishing chute and there, waiting at the end, was Kenneth Gasque, smiling like a benevolent assassin. I crossed the line in 13 hours and 10 minutes, a new personal worst by a margin that not even a handshake from Kenneth could assuage. At the finish, all I could manage was some tepid soup made of cardboard and boiled socks before shuffling out of transition, swearing on everything I hold sacred that I would never, NEVER, come to this bloody island again. Would I do this race again? The short answer is no. The long answer is nooooooooooooooooooooo.

While I was waiting for Neill, Andy, Joe and Tony to finish (which they all did, and all behind me ha-ha-ha!) I got chatting to a fellow Brit called Dave Fenton, a fireman from Worcester, who had finished at the same time as me. As we stood and nattered about the ups and downs of our day, Dave revealed that a couple of years previously he’d had a skiing accident that nearly killed him and which left him partially paralysed. Doctors had given him fairly low odds of ever walking again – and here he was finishing his first Ironman, vowing to come back the following year to beat his time. Dave and I have subsequently become good friends, and I owe him a big one for telling me his story at that moment because it didn’t half snap me out of my self-pity and made me realise that if my sister taught me one thing in life, it’s that life is what you make it – so stop wallowing and get living. Despite a crap performance, I’d still bagged another Ironman finisher’s medal and, on arriving back in the UK, almost the first thing I did was to go and visit my mum, hang the medal on my sister’s bedroom wall, and quietly close the door behind me. Wherever you are sis, that one was for you.

Still with me? Well done you, you have the kind of tolerance for tedium that will make you the perfect Ironman. Although I write regularly in
220 Triathlon
magazine, it’s always a genuine surprise to me that people read anything I have written because while Pushkin could write a classic like
The Captain’s Daughter
in his second language, I can’t even write a shopping list without putting a stray apostrophe in the word ‘eggs’.

Before we plunge into the world of training for Ironmans and, more specifically, the looming black cloud of Challenge Roth, which is drifting inexorably towards us (me) like a bank of fog, we must talk about my international stardom.

‘Must we?’ you are no doubt thinking.

Yes, I’m afraid we must, because this may well be the only book I ever write and this is, therefore, my only chance to tell the world that I have represented Great Britain not once but FIVE times thanks to taking up triathlons. I have graced such events as the European Championships and World Finals a hatful of times – always assuming it is wee Jimmy Krankie’s hat we’re talking about. Be honest, if this were you writing this book and you had a chance to tell a somewhat captive audience about how you took on the world’s finest athletes standing erect, swathed in a union flag and with ceremonial sword in hand shouting, ‘Come and taste some British steel, foreign Johnnies,’ then you’d probably try to find a way to shoehorn it in, too. Not that it is entirely irrelevant to the world of Ironmans because, as we shall see, the races I have taken part in are all ‘Long Distance’ championships and thus the experience between me bumbling along Iron-distance courses in my spotty Cov Tri skinsuit, and bumbling along them in my GB skinsuit, is a shared one. There are some differences between ‘Long Course’ and Ironman distances but I sense your boredom threshold is already being challenged and trying to point out the differences would be like a drunk priest trying to explain the immaculate conception on a broken Etch-a-Sketch.

Triathlon is one of those sports that gives you the opportunity to spend more time on foreign soil than Julian Assange, with plenty of chances to don the red-white-and-blue if you can meet the qualifying standard and have the same attitude towards accumulating massive debts as Fred Goodwin. They are not the cheapest affairs in the world, and once you’ve paid your race entry fee, booked your flights, sorted out your bike transportation, arranged your accommodation and purchased your kit (yes, purchased your own GB kit!) then you’ll have just about enough left to buy a couple of flapjacks, or a semidetached house in Nuneaton. I first became aware of racing for GB back in 2006 when, fresh from my new star-status as Ironman finisher, I went to the Belgian town of Brasschaat to take part in a middle-distance race known as the Superman Triathlon Vlaanderen – or ‘zooperman’ as the locals seemed to call it. Having thoroughly enjoyed it, a bunch of us, including the Steves, Tigger, Mark, Keith the Wookie, Joe (accompanied by an unspecified number of daughters), Tony No-Nutts and an Ali-Bongo style magician called Martin Burder, vowed to return the following year. We then learned that it was going to be used as the venue for the ETU European Championships, so if we wanted to race we’d have to qualify through our respective national bodies. This was England for most of us, the planet Tattooine for Keith and the Magic Circle for Martin. Fortunately the process for qualifying was fairly slipshod and involved us all submitting times for previous races over that distance. Every single one of us got in, although some of the results-fiddling made Robert Mugabe look like a rank amateur.

So it was that in 2007 I lined up in a GB skinsuit for the first time, sharing the moment with a bunch of good mates. It was a memorable debut and we all performed well, having been collectively warned by the team manager the night before that she’d ‘heard about you Cov lot’ and expressly forbidden from going out boozing, a lecture that would have carried more weight had it not been delivered in a bar she had just found us in. I remember my introduction to international racing being one of slight disbelief that here I was, last pick at school football and deemed
shit at sports
by old big-nosed Williams, representing my country and lining up against a bunch of overseas athletes be-decked in their national jerseys. The standard was much higher than I was used to from previous races but I gave a good account of myself, particularly on the run where I even overtook some elites (aka professionals), although in fairness they were about three laps ahead of me by the time I joined them on the run circuit. I have absolutely no idea who won the race but in the far more crucial Battle of the Friends, Steve Howes inevitably finished first, Mark was second, I was third, Magic Martin fourth, Tigger fifth and after that who gives a shit, although Nutty was definitely last.

This had definitely given me a taste for international athleticism so the following year I tried to pull the same stroke of buffing up my results and entering the ITU World Championships, which were being held at Almere in the Netherlands. And it was a proper world champs, too, unlike sports like snooker, which might as well be called the ‘Britain and one bloke from China’ championships. There were athletes there from Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, America and an absolute mob of Dutch, lining up against a GB team featuring such luminaries as me, Mark, Keith, Joe and Nutty. Being just a short hop across the Channel we decided to drive there – and when I say ‘we’ I mean that me and Keith shared a car. He drove while I slept, waking only to say, ‘Let me know when we reach Calais and I’ll take over’ when we’d just passed a sign saying ‘Wilkommen het Nederlands’. Joe had kindly agreed to let me sleep in one of the compartments in his big top family tent that was unoccupied by various of his daughters, so on arriving I spent a pleasant hour dozing and idly watching Keith trying gamely to stay awake while he pitched his tent in the dark, his sunken, bloodshot eyes lighting up the evening sky. Not that I had it completely free and easy chez Joe, though, because wherever I went in Billy Smart’s big top I was forever being confronted with noisy daughters cackling or plotting a visit to a hash cake café behind their dad’s back, or by Joe himself without his dentures. Joe’s teeth are like stars – they come out at night.

If I thought the European Championships was a step up from what I was used to then the World Finals were the whole bloody staircase. These people were serious and had travelled halfway round the world to do this race, while I had snored there from Dover. So, despite having an ego the size of a planet, I was beginning to feel somewhat intimidated. Fortunately, things got off to a good start (for me) because the 4-kilometre swim was conducted in the roughest water I have ever been in. The swim was held in a massive inland lake and somewhere across the other side, far out of sight, a special someone had opened the sluice gates that regulate the lake’s water levels. This led to the kind of waves racing across the lake that were last seen scaring Gene Hackman witless in
The Poseidon Adventure
. Hapless triathletes were being tempest tossed, unable to sight properly and getting extremely knackered battling the giant, deadly, killer waves. I, though, absolutely loved it. In my mind’s eye, I cast a square-jawed, determined figure striking forth through the seething tide (although to the safety canoeists I probably looked like a flailing twat who kept going off course) and I was happy to emerge on to the wooden steps in one piece and waaaay ahead of some of the serious people.

The bike course was flat. Really flat. Flatter than most of the jokes in this book. It involved cycling along a flat, straight road for 15 miles, turning left at a windmill, cycling another 15 miles, tuning left at another windmill, cycling another 15 miles, turning left at a big pile of Delft and some other stereotypical Dutch items (actually it was another windmill) and then returning to the start to repeat the whole loop again. Nothing happened during the ride, precisely nothing. Some people overtook me, and I overtook some people. My crotch went numb from staying in the TT position for so long, and I longed for my back muscles to join it as they started to ache with the relentless pedalling. The trouble with flat courses is that there are no ups, and no downs, so no chance to get out of the saddle, vary your pace, freewheel or indeed do anything of note no matter how small. Had I known I would one day be writing about this in a book I’d have done something much more interesting, like drafted behind the race referee’s bike or played a trombone with my backside. However, it was just a flat, monotonous ride that tested my patience, and now probably yours. On returning to transition, one of Joe’s many daughters, Naomi, was doing her best to cause an international pile-up by leaning over the barrier wearing nought but a bikini with her assets on full show to the returning cyclists. The fact that she shouted my name as I went by made me a popular chap in T2 with the men of all nations who arrived at the same time as me, and who demanded to know her name and any advice I could provide on how they could ingratiate themselves with her.

On the subject of Joe, I was distinctly worried about him. Keith is as strong a swimmer as me so would have had no trouble with the waves. Nutty has also swum the Channel in a relay in the past, and although Mark isn’t the strongest in the water he’s not a man to let a moderate case of drowning slow him down. Joe, on the other hand, is an aquatic plodder not used to the kind of buffeting we had received. I’d kept a sharp lookout for signs of him on the bike course, or being paddled ashore while slumped across the front of a canoe. Now I was off on the run course and no sign of him. The mention of Naomi’s bikini should indicate to you that it was now very, very hot and runners were flaking out all over the place. I kept plodding on and, despite a massive miscalculation of the distance I was supposed to run (namely that I thought it was two laps and not three so ran a second lap at a pace that mystified most of the people I was running with), I lumbered home in exactly eight hours, just ahead of two Americans, an Australian and the best athlete from the whole of Burkina Faso.