Accidental Ironman (19 page)

The elites had already finished long before us but the winner, a certain Chrissie Wellington, decided to wait at the finish line to personally congratulate every single GB finisher. Despite smelling like a fox’s fart I got a kiss on the cheek while I bent low to kiss her hand, passing on my hereditary gingivitis. I just managed to burble something about my admiration for her achievements before having to go and lie down under a tree, where I stayed still for so long that I thought someone would come and draw a chalk outline around me. After a decent period of groaning, I went to the food area where Mark was attempting to eat his own weight (two and a half stone) in muffins and we discussed the likelihood of Joe’s survival, before having a small wager on what part of the course we were likely to find his body on. The next person we saw was Keith, although sadly already in his civvies having been forced to pull out of the race due to feeling exhausted, possibly as a result of sleep deprivation. Joyously, the next person we saw was Joe, striding manfully over the finish line having defied the waves, the boredom, the heat, his ill-fitting teeth and having his daughters leered at by half the field. If anything, he looked quite baby-faced when he finished, by which I mean he was bald and angry looking.

Only Nutty was still somewhere out on the course, so we settled down to wait for the great man’s arrival. Time ticked by and we were getting increasingly restless because the cut-off time was approaching, and Tone was cutting it ever more fine. With very few minutes left on the clock, the tannoy announcer informed the crowds there was one man still out there heading towards the finish and we should all give him a huge cheer when he arrived. We knew full well who this would be, so stood at the barriers and waited – and waited and waited. Eventually, Nutty hove into view over the horizon and it was all set up to be like a scene from a
Rocky
film with the bloodied but unbowed fighter stumbling forward to glory driven on by his sheer force of will. The music pounded, the crowds cheered and – with 500 metres to go – the cut-off time ticked over, they put a barrier across the finishing chute and told Tony to get his fat, dawdling arse off the course because they wanted to pack the barriers away. Yes, he’d gone and cocked it up by taking too long to complete his run, they’d applied the letter of the law and closed the course – no medal, no T-shirt and no Chrissy Kissy. Looking back it was very harsh to boot him off the course with just 500 metres to go. Very, very funny, but also harsh. For the rest of the stay in Almere, any time Tony did ANYTHING, such as peel a banana or put on his shoes, he had to endure us saying, ‘Can you finish that, or do you need some more time?’ He soon perked up by slinking off to Genk with Mark to stock up on Grimbergen. The only highlight on my journey home was trying to persuade the customs officers at Dover to search Joe’s daughters for hash cake – which was the first time they shut up all bloody trip. More may have happened, but I don’t know. I was asleep.

Because I am not a giant fruit machine that poops solid gold, I had a break from doing ITU races for Great Britain for a couple of years, allowing my bank statement to return to being printed in black ink, although Lloyds may just have run out of red. By 2011, my debt memories had faded and I decided I’d have another stab at international stardom by doing the European Long Distance Championships in Finland. During my absence from the world stage, British Triathlon had tightened up their qualifying procedures, no longer willing to take any chump with a pulse in order to make up the numbers but setting a qualifying standard designed to win actual medals. With my previous qualification method gone, I was fortunate to have one good result under my belt in the last 12 months – if I lied about the date on which the Outlaw Iron-race took place. Fortunately, my skulduggery paid off and it was a proud moment in the Brunt household when I received news of my selection with an e-mail from British Triathlon that effectively said, ‘Give us £75 for your new skinsuit.’

Seriously, I had always wanted to travel to Finland and taste Moomin, and to finally do something of note in triathon; racing for my country having actually been
selected
to do so, the first time I’d been picked for anything outside a police lineup. This was my first trip to Scandinavia and, even though the car park at Helsinki airport looked like it doubled as the outdoor set for Mordor, I really liked it. The race was in a lovely town called Tampere, home of the internationally renowned Spy Museum, which I can confirm is the best museum in the world, because I couldn’t find it. Tampere was hosting the biggest championships in European Triathlon but the whole event was nicely low key, making a pleasant change after all the bellowing and Euro-disco you get with Ironmans. In fact, all I got for doing this race was a running cap and a helmet sticker that proved harder to get rid of than a treadmill fart.

Although I had donned the red-white-and-blue before, this was the first time I featured in a team of people chosen to do well, so I was distinctly nervous about being exposed as a talentless chancer among the country’s top triathletes. It didn’t help that I shared a transfer from the airport with Tom Sturdy, Britain’s only elite in the race, but luckily he turned out to be a really nice person, as did almost everyone on the GB team. They all combined being serious about their racing with an avid interest in alcohol, particularly the comfortably talented Dave Hutchins who found the best bar in Tampere within an hour of our arrival. Preparations for the race were hampered slightly by sharing a hotel with a goth band and their entourage but with a couple of days in hand to walk around Tampere before the race, I promptly fell in love with the place. I’m not sure all the members of the GB team shared my view and some seemingly didn’t emerge from the hotel except to race and shout at goths, but I was totally sold on the place to the extent that I was trying to swap my £75 skinsuit for a Finland kit – not that this stopped me from trying to beat all the athletes from a country better known for its rally drivers and herrings, mind you.

It was, perhaps, my sense of well-being that led to me having the best race of my life. Buoyed by feelings of tranquillity and goodwill to all Finns, I hurtled round the 4 kilometre swim course in a few seconds over 1 hour before seeking out my bike in the middle of the giant Ratina Athletics Stadium, an open-air transition that was basically a free pass for perverts to watch you getting changed. I breezed through T1 on a cloud of confidence and danced my way up the hill on my bike. Now, something I have learned over the years is that technology doesn’t always make your life better. I first discovered this when I used one of those electrically controlled toilets on a train and, having pressed the button marked ‘close’, discovered that if you don’t press the button marked ‘lock’ someone outside can push the button marked ‘open’, at which point the entire toilet wall slides away unveiling you to the rest of the carriage like a prize on a quiz show. Another example is my wireless bike computer, which has the sensor hidden in the wheel skewer – so well hidden, in fact, that the computer can never find the bloody signal. I’ve spent hours fiddling with the spoke magnet and fruitlessly spinning the front wheel while the speedometer stubbornly registers 0.0mph and my temper becomes more and more frayed.

On the bike leg in Tampere, my computer packed in 0.18 miles into the bike leg, leaving me to ride 75 miles on ‘feel’. Asking a triathlete to judge how they’re performing without the use of a gadget is a scenario about as likely as seeing George Michael and Vladimir Putin together on a tandem. Most annoying of all was that I’d wasted some of my weight allowance on the flight to Finland on the redundant computer, and as anyone who’s ever taken a bike on a plane knows, milligrams count. One ounce over your limit and it’s,
‘That’ll be an extra £150 and your soul for our lord Satan please sir.’

Please forgive me a brief digression while we’re on the subject of airlines because it’s worth warning all you budding internationals out there that airlines are not noted for the warm welcome they give to people with bikes, and I reckon we’re about nine months away from being forced to fly nude on a see-through plane. Then there’s the food. Like most triathletes, I am mildly obsessive about food and dislike having my pre-race carbo-loading strategy disrupted by being served dinners that don’t change even slightly from kitchen to toilet. I also dislike being charged £5 for a model of Ayers Rock masquerading as a steak and kidney pudding, thus having no money left to spend on daringly overpriced crisps. But don’t dare to disrupt the stewardess’ task of transferring hydrogenated fat into people’s heads by asking for a healthy option, or they treat you like a shoe-bomber. Why this is such a big deal is beyond me. Say what you like but even the most fervent vegetarian nutter can’t really do that much damage on a plane armed with a bushel of sage and a mystic aubergine. I won’t name and shame the airline but it wasn’t Finn Air, which I avoided because people keep disappearing into it.

Back in the race, I brushed off the absence of any ability to judge my pace with sang-froid or whatever its Finnish equivalent is, and just rode. In truth it wasn’t the most scenic of bike courses, but riding on a closed motorway was certainly a novelty, if nothing else. And who needs scenery anyway? The race could have gone past Chichen Itza for all I know. All I saw was the tarmac three yards in front of my nose. Once again the standard of the field was high but my coach, Dave, had prepared me well and I rode in my usual steady way, albeit a slightly faster kind of steady than usual. Consequently I arrived back in T2 much sooner than I’d expected, and certainly much sooner than Nicky expected; I heard her mutter an audible ‘Bloody hell!’ when I came skipping lightly out on to the track for the start of the run. At this stage in any race I do, my unreasonably high expectations, coupled with a below par work ethic, usually result in an endless chain of crushing disappointments. But not this day, dear reader, for this day I floated on feet made of feathers, steadily picking my way through the field and making myself look less rubbish with every stride. This may be because of good, old-fashioned pride, and there’s no doubt pulling on the international skinsuit makes you walk a little taller, if only because they make them a bit tight around your tackle. It may be because I was in Finland, land of the gods as far as I was concerned. Or it may be because I’d done what Dave said in his training plan for once. Either way, here I was starting a three-lap run through lovely Finnish parkland with my pants unsoiled and knees going in the direction I wanted them to. Once again, Nicky was heard to utter ‘Bloody hell!’ as I strode past, although this might have been in response to the price of the beer. She said it again when I crossed the line in a new PB of 7:11.17. I didn’t trouble the leaders, or even the chasers, but I lopped 50 minutes off my time at Almere and, in some very impressive company, I didn’t look quite as crap as I could have. In fact, the only downer on the whole trip was after the flight home, trying to reclaim my bike from the carousel just as the flight from Benidorm landed, requiring me to lug my box through a bunch of people who looked like aggressive oven-ready turkeys and argue with some fish-faced old witch who tried to steal my trolley.

Buoyed by my new status as international man of mystery (as far as my non-tri friends who didn’t know any better were concerned anyway) I then did something very, very stupid – I put my name forward for the ITU World Championships in Nevada later that year. This was stupid because:

1.   It was in America where I always race badly.

2.   I couldn’t afford it.

3.   It was the world championships and thus the standard would be even higher.

And

4.   It was near Las Vegas where Nicky was keen to visit, stroll into a casino and take on the house at blackjack.

What could possibly go wrong? My main motivation for entering was that I wanted to get more than one race out of my GB skinsuit and make it feel a bit less like the most expensive piece of tri kit on earth, but there was another, unforeseen problem that made doing the race a stupid idea and rendered my skinsuit selection policy somewhat pointless …

Think of Nevada, and what comes to mind? Baking sun, soaring temperatures and long, flat desert roads? Playing craps in Las Vegas while topless waitresses roller-skate through casinos serving you Cuba libre? Okay, that last one might be just me. I imagine you’d be surprised, then, if I told you that on my trip to Las Vegas for the ITU World Long Distance Championships, Nevada consisted of a cancelled swim, pouring rain, freezing temperatures, endlessly hilly roads, a streaming head-cold and crap of an entirely different kind. My preparations for the biggest triathlon of my life didn’t get off to the best of starts when a week before the race I caught the only cold I’d had all year. I had to put up with seven days of snotty suffering, which allowed me to produce an impressive array of ‘gold watches’. Things initially improved when I arrived at the Team GB hotel and a stirring Churchillian pre-race talk from team manager Tim Whitmarsh about the importance of beating Australians had me champing at the bit. However, torrential rain and the overnight temperature dropping to six degrees caused the ITU to declare it too cold for riding into the hills armed only with a wet skinsuit. On the morning of the race they cancelled the swim and ran the event as a bike/run. The concept of a swim being ‘too cold’ caused sharp words between teams from temperate and tropical countries, with the Canadians blaming the Americans, the New Zealanders blaming the Australians and, purely out of habit, the British blaming the French.

With the swim and mass-start punch-up gone, so were my chances of a good result and instead the race started as a time-trial with nationalities going off in groups. Alphabetically I was first man off in the GB 40–44 section and for two blissful minutes I was at the head of a phalanx of GB athletes storming up the road in Red Arrows formation. Then, teammate Dave Johnston worked out that I was going very, very slowly, at which point everybody buggered off up the road leaving me to ride alone, hacking up my innards like I was being exorcised. In many ways, the bike course was reminiscent of Ironman Lanzarote in that it was: