Accidental Ironman (7 page)

•   There is no inflatable finish line with crowds of adoring fans, a photographer and an energy drink. If you’re lucky you might get a chequered bit of wood and a windswept old bloke who looks like a campaign poster for neglected horses, who will sternly note down your time on a clipboard and then offer you a fondant fancy and a cup of tea so stewed it will strip the skin off your gums.

•   The entry form is more complicated than a travel permit from the Stasi and demands that you not only remember all your previous results over various distances to the exact second, but the winner’s exact results, too. This is so you can be seeded to prevent drafting behind another cyclist, which of course never, ever happens in triathlons.

•   On the plus side they only cost a couple of quid to enter and you don’t pay a fortune for a bag full of advertising crap.

•   No matter how fast you think you are, there will be several people there who will finish in times that you cannot comprehend. This has been particularly the case during the recent economic downturn because, as one wise old cyclist told me, you can always tell when there’s a recession on – the pace of races gets faster thanks to people having more time off to go training.

•   There seems to be a particular type of storm front called cumulo-timetrialus, which lurks invisible to the naked eye until the moment I reach the start line of a time trial, whereupon it races overhead and dumps the equivalent of Rutland Water on me. This has happened to me twice recently, with the most recent downpour a particularly biblical affair as I took part in the Heanor Clarion CC 25 miler at Ettwall in Derbyshire. Despite spray from passing lorries, lashing rain, standing water and slippery roundabouts I broke the hour (58.08 ithankyew) thanks to a strong desire to get away from the lorries on the A50 as fast as humanly possible. I was very pleased to be a) under the hour and b) alive, and – a quick word to any local councils reading this – these so called ‘speed-bumps’ you build are rubbish. If anything, they slow you down.

Yet further evidence that cycling dominates my life is that it now accounts for at least two holidays I take every year. Obviously there’s the holiday abroad to take part in Ironman races, so this year lucky Nicky is being treated to a break on the sun-kissed shores of southern Bavaria. However, for the past few springs, the unsightly, malodorous perverts that constitute my friends and I have also headed out to Majorca to make up for three months of dossing about by cycling 450 miles in six days. During spring Majorca is a mecca for road cyclists who swarm all over the island like the Ebola virus, in search of ice-free roads and contaminated beef. The effects of going from training-dodger to pro-cyclist overnight could easily be replicated by staying at home and smashing myself repeatedly on the quads with a rolling pin, but if I just did that I wouldn’t be able to tell my non-triathlete neighbours that I was away at a ‘training camp’, thus fooling them into believing that I’m a serious athlete with talent and prospects. This annual pilgrimage to the mountains and cake shops of Spain’s version of the Isle of Wight follows a fairly typical pattern that involves my mates and me trying to drop each other on the climbs, trying to drop each other on the flat, trying to drop groups of German cyclists that we’ve just hammered past, and committing acts of foul treachery to win sprints for village signs. My alternative training camp destination is Snowdonia on trips organised by coach Dave. I have spent many dripping weekends slogging my way round enough vertical roads and vowel-free villages in mid Wales to make even the most ardent Plaid Cymru freedom fighter want to piss off to the sunshine for a bit.

Now that I’ve been attending these Majorcan sojourns for a few years, there’s something about training camps that has always mystified me – which is that people train to go on them. I’ve always viewed them as a way of dragging myself into some sort of shape, so I’m happy to turn up with my winter belly and creaky legs and set about huffing and puffing my way to fitness. Not so everyone else, who arrives having cycled, swum and run their way into tip top form over the past few weeks and set about beating me up in every session. Not that I don’t do any preparation at all for this trip. Indeed, for the few weeks before I go, I give my own spin to the tapas and a glass of salty manzanilla on the terrace by sitting in the park with a bag of Tangy Toms and a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Olé! Also, like all committed employees, in the weeks before I head sunwards I’m busy covering my back, besmirching other colleagues and shredding the evidence of my incompetence.

Our rides around the island usually take us from Port de Pollenca along the coast to Zita corner, across the Bullrush Road, up the Col de Steps, down the Col de Walls, over the Schnell Bridge, past Smithy’s Hole and down the Rue de Two Dogs Shagging. Studying maps will reveal none of these place names (apart from Port de Pollenca), because they are coded references to incidents that have occurred over the years. The Schnell Bridge for example is so named because as we approached it once we bore down on a group of German cyclists in front. As we reeled them in over the bridge the rider at the back was heard to shout up to the front ‘Schnell! Schnell! Das Englanders!’, which almost caused our group leader Richard ‘Todger’ Todd to fall off laughing. Smithy’s Hole is named simply after a pothole hit at full pelt by Dave Smith, one of our number. While soaring airborne over his handlebars he looked like the most majestically graceful turkey you can imagine before he hit the deck with an audible splat.

Aerial dogfight re-enactments aside, it’s a great place to go and get some warm weather training done and while Egypt and Syria offer cheaper deals, it’s less noisy in Majorca and the natives seem friendlier. That said, I’ve never been there in summer when the vandal hordes of British tourists arrive. Let’s hope they never start rioting because it would be useless firing tear gas at someone who smokes sixty Lambert and Butler a day.

Training abroad also means you have the added satisfaction of knowing that everyone at home will be freezing their tits off and hates your guts every time you text them to tell them the local temperature and your daily mileage. I’ve always had to tread somewhat carefully with the lads I go to Majorca with like Todger and Andrew ‘Peachy’ Waters-Peach, a massively powerful time-triallist and huffing swimmer, because they are hardened cyclists and in this company I have always been viewed as something of a novelty. Being a triathlete means I am the only one to get back to the hotel after a day’s hard cycling, leap (slump) off my bike, don my trainers and head straight off for a bandy-legged two-hour shuffle. Mostly I was eyed with contempt by the cyclists, although they warmed to me after the occasion when my foot slipped out of the pedal as I dismounted and my bike’s top tube smacked me straight in the clinkers, leaving me to spend the rest of the day talking like Joe Pasquale. I am delighted to say, though, that I am now no longer alone, and the number of compression socks on cyclists, coupled with the number of wetsuits hanging on hotel balconies and the number of skinsuits and sun-visors seen plodding along beachfront roads in the midday sun, all indicate that the triathlete population is gradually taking over, forcing the cyclists out to the fringes. This may be thanks to Ironman Mallorca, which launched a few years ago. Whenever I go these days there are more people than ever out riding the racecourse and dicing with death by hurtling down Selva Gorge on their tri-bars. Happily the triathletes seem to have assimilated with the cyclists by observing the golden rules of training camps:

1.   Always turn up at training camp saying you haven’t trained. Then try to duff everyone else up in the first session.

2.   Always carefully select which race T-shirt to wear at breakfast so you can pose in front of your fellow continental buffet diners showing what you have achieved.

3.   When bearing down on German cyclists, never ‘sit in’ behind them but instead attack and overtake at the first opportunity while maintaining a facial expression that suggests you are not trying.

4.   The only Spanish phrase you should speak all week is ‘café con leche por favor.’

5.   Always undo six days of Trappist monk-like living and avoiding anything deep fried at the buffet by getting out of your face on bargain lager on the final night and quickly resuming a potato-based lifestyle.

6.   Have absolutely nothing to do with any nonathletic holidaymakers who are there at the same time, who look like a bunch of Wookies dressed by Primark, and often possess a backside so big you could crucify someone on it.

Cycling in the sunshine on quiet Majorcan roads is one thing, but if you want to be any good at it then inevitably you’ll have to do some of it in the winter in the UK as well, which is, of course, all-year-round fun – and I use the word ‘fun’ quite wrongly. Training in the winter is a necessary evil. By that I mean it is vaguely necessary but definitely evil. Being a triathlete in winter is hard enough anyway because one side of your brain says that as well as the season to be jolly, ’tis also the season of rest, recovery, cakes and long-postponed nights in the pub. You’ve trained hard, raced hard, eaten healthily, shunned alcohol and you bloody well deserve a rest. Except the other part of your brain nags you with thoughts that every pint, biscuit, Belgian chocolate and individual mince pie is weighing you down, making you slow and rubbish. You’ll be overweight in a week, next season everyone will beat you and your results will plummet faster than a fat kid off a 10-metre diving board. So we keep training.

In the UK, training in the winter isn’t that different from training in the summer except the days are shorter and you have to clean more crap off your bike, but there’s only so much rain a cyclist can take before their feet become webbed so there comes a point when we are driven indoors. Fiendish minds have been at work and have devised a glittering array of fun-packed ways to ensure you stay at it no matter what the weather.

Firstly there are turbo trainers, which began life as an instrument of torture with the first recorded use being during the Spanish Inquisition, when confessions were extracted from heretics by attempting to sweat them to death. Now adapted as a training ‘aid’, they sap your legs and your soul by clamping your back wheel into a static metal frame, pushing a magnetic roller against your tyre and allowing you to pedal while sitting still, giving you all the effort of cycling outside but without some of the pleasanter aspects such as air to breathe, a view to see, and blood to circulate around your groin. My turbo trainer sits in the garage staring malevolently at me as the nights draw in. I am convinced it is evil because I once cut myself on a tyre lever and my blood seemed to flow towards it. Soon it will have my rear wheel in its vice-like grip, and it knows it. Hour upon hour of crotch-numbing pedalling awaits.

Turbo trainers are not the only means of indoor cycling torture. Oh no, there are spinning classes, which are the fitness equivalent of Chris Evans in that they shout fun but they feel shit. They typically involve thunderous pedalling to pumping music which is so bad that if it came on the radio while I was in my car, I couldn’t kick the knob off the stereo fast enough. The music does at least have the blessing of drowning out the excited whoops of the spinning instructor exhorting us to ‘feel the burn’ while I am wishing they could feel the lash of a bicycle chain. The other downside to spinning classes is that they tend to be attended by non-cyclists who are just there to keep fit (or get fit judging by the look of some of them). While training for Ironman Canada I did a deal with the Esporta gym opposite where I worked at that time, that I could go in and join their spinning classes while training for the race. I duly turned up and plonked myself on a bike in the middle of the studio and started warming up. Around me were several people, mostly women of a certain age and wealth, wearing pristine Nike kit with attendant accessories such as headbands, drinks bottles and make-up. Most were pedalling slowly and chatting away while the excitable female instructor started cranking up the music and hormones. I did as I was bid, and started powering away, sweating like a piece of cheese under Anthony Worrall Thompson’s jacket and spraying perspiration around like a garden hose. After a few minutes of this I glanced up to see that I was now surrounded by a ring of empty bikes, the cast of
Loose Women
having moved to the fringes of the studio to avoid that awful man whose skin appeared to be leaking.

It is worth mentioning at this point that you can also train indoors for other parts of triathlon. In running you can try a treadmill, which is a bit like a turbo trainer except that it has the extra comedy potential that you might see someone trip over and get fired out the back like they’ve been shot from a catapult. Then there’s circuit training, which involves running round a room doing press-ups, squat thrusts, box-jumps, burpees, reverse dips, pull-ups, sit-ups and ‘Oh, God my stomach hurts and my arms are going to drop off and I think I’m going to diiiiieeeeee!’ If you are really committed you could also try weight training, which involves hanging around in strange rooms where scantily clad people spend a lot of time looking at themselves in mirrors and making the kind of loud straining noises you only otherwise hear in the toilets at motorway services. Being able to lift enormous weights is less important than being world class at posing around while inadequately clad, and I don’t find going to the gym a comfortable experience. To be honest I’m a bit clueless about it all. For example, the push-up bra I bought recently is hopeless. Even when I’m wearing it I can still only do about ten of them.

So far we’ve discussed how cycling dominates my free time in the winter and summer, but it dominates my working life, too. Partly this is because these days I don’t own a car, just a campervan that is capable of passing everything on the road except a petrol station, so consequently I cycle everywhere as my main mode of transport. It is also partly because I now have a job in cycling, which came about as a direct result of me taking up triathlons. Let me explain …