Chasing Kona

by Rob Cummins

  It was grey and the water was choppy and we were told there were currents, and to be careful with our sighting in order to stay on course. The only advantage of breast-stroking the whole race was I was fairly certain to go in a straight line. I exited the water in the middle of the field, surprising not just myself but any of the supporters there who knew how bad a swimmer I was.

  I was delighted with this outcome and wasted no time getting on the bike course to start chasing people down. The course seemed to suit me, having a mountain in the middle of it, and sure enough I spent the next hour gradually moving up the field. We went over the climb and down one of the most technical descents I've ever raced and onto the next rolling section. I was feeling great, eating and drinking and still making my way up the field. Then I felt a sharp pain at the back of the knee and immediately slowed right down. I couldn't pedal at all without bad pain, but I still had a long way to go to get back. Even worse than the pain at this point was the humiliation of being re-passed by all of the people I'd gone by. I guessed they thought I just blew up and didn't know how to pace myself, but I felt stupid, angry and gutted.

  I arrived back to transition and smiled and waved to my family as I limped through, racked my bike and tried gingerly to start the run. The pain wasn't getting any worse and I thought I would just run easy, as I really badly wanted to finish.

  Within one kilometre I was alternating walking with short 300-400-metre runs. By the four- kilometre mark I was reduced to a fast walk, and the pain was getting worse all the time. The back of my knee exploded with pain every time I took a step. The run course is one of the hilliest in any race in Ireland and is famous for its difficulty. Soon I was reduced to a shuffling limping walk and had to keep stopping to let the pain subside enough to continue. I walked past the ambulance a couple of times and was offered a lift back when they saw me walking and limping so badly only a couple of kilometres into a half marathon. I refused and told them I was fine.

  I kept going and the further I went and the worse the pain got and the harder it became the more I wanted to finish. I was almost last by now and the end of the race kept getting further away instead of closer as I slowed more and more.

  I took longer to do the run than the bike race, but I eventually came around the corner to see there was still people waiting for me to finish. They were cheering and shouting at me to run the last twenty metres, which I tried,and I crossed the line to be greeted by my family and friends.

  I had tears in my eyes and a feeling inside like nothing else I'd ever experienced. I didn't want to suppress it or control it. I wanted to go on feeling this massive rush of emotion and satisfaction. I never wanted to forget this feeling.

  At that time I had done something that I didn't think was possible for me and it didn't matter that I'd come in last. I had learnt more about myself with my worst race performance in the hardest conditions than I'd learnt in all the races I'd participated in during the last five years.

  I felt stronger in a different way, not physically, but mentally and emotionally. That race was one of the pivotal points in my life, when I realised that one can stretch one’s perceived limits away further than one could believe.

  I saw a physiotherapist the next week and she told me I'd torn both the calf and hamstring at the point where they join the knee. She reckoned they happened one at a time. In other words, I had done the second injury during my walk to the finish.

  I'm not sure that I should admit it, but that made me perversely proud. I think it reinforced the realisation that I could push myself that much further than I could ever have thought.

  ❖

  Chapter 7

  Learning to swim – winter 2005

  I finished 2005 injured after the Lost Sheep Half Ironman, widely recognised as being one of the hardest races in the country. It is held in Kenmare in the south west of Ireland at the end of the season each year. I was also hugely motivated for the following season. I had orders from the physiotherapist not to run for six weeks but I was allowed to swim and in two or three weeks I could get back on the bike for short easy spins straight away.

  I decided that I would do what I could, so for the next six weeks I swam four or five mornings and two or three evenings, although ‘swim’ wasn’t quite the right word at that point.

  I'd been given a DVD with a swim system that would take me from not being able to swim to swimming in less than six weeks. The system was called Total Immersion and it broke the total stroke down into small parts that could be mastered one at a time.

  The problem with learning to swim is that there is a lot going on all at once and at the same time you have the ever-present risk of death from drowning. Your right hand is doing something different to your left, your body should be rotating, your legs kicking but not from the knee. You kick from the hip. I didn't even know there was a difference, and I certainly couldn't tell which I was doing. I just knew it wasn't working for me. All I knew for certain was that if I only kicked I didn't move. I lay there stretched out holding on to a kick board kicking up a mini tsunami behind me – but there was no movement. Add in the fact that you can only breathe when you remember to remove your face from the water and it’s a hell of a steep learning curve. My problem is that I'm not a particularly well-coordinated individual. I'm not clumsy, well not really. But what my head thinks is going on is often very different to the actual reality of my body’s movement.

  So back to this swimming lark. Total Immersion had the stroke broken down into a couple of dozen drills and that suited me because I only needed to concern myself with two things at a time to begin – the drill itself and not breathing in while face down in the water.

  Good plan, sounds simple? Not quite so!

  I drank a lot of pool water for the first couple of weeks. Chlorine might be great for pool hygiene but it is not as tasty as you might think.

  I'd show up with fins or a pull buoy or whatever was needed for each particular drill and spent an hour every day just learning one tiny part of the stroke at a time. As in most busy pools that time of the morning was busy with swim squads, masters’ groups, triathletes and people in for their pre-work swim. The pool was set out in lanes and each lane was either reserved for a club or group or had a speed allocation, fast, medium or slow.

  Every morning I went straight for the slowest lane. Doing drills means moving slower than if you're actually swimming. Doing the most basic, learning how to build a stroke drill meant I was moving really slowly, even slower than the slowest breast-stroking 75-year-old – not to mention the fact that you look like a complete toolbox.

  Each day I'd get up early enough to watch the day’s drill before going to the pool, often watching it several times before going, so I knew it by heart. I would then go to the pool and spend the whole hour doing just that drill.

  I felt incredibly stupid. I was in a pool full of good swimmers. People at the pool that early tend to be real swimmers and here I was doing this drill where I lay on my side one arm out in front and one down by my side kicking up and down the pool turning my head up to breathe every few seconds.

  Let me paint you a picture. Imagine Superman flying along looking strong and cool and fast. Now take away the strong and cool and fast and the cape and the cool blue suit but leave the red speedos then take away all the muscles and you’re getting the picture. What’s left is a skinny triathlete in his speedos who can’t swim and swallows a lot of the pool water.

  No one else was doing anything else like it and I felt like a complete clown. I imagined the lifeguards and staff were all wondering what the nut job was up to in the slow lane, but I stuck with it.

  I think I did the first drill for three days solid, before moving on to the second one. The instructions were not to attempt the next step until you had the first one perfect. It looked like I was going to be a slow learner. Luckily I had started about six months before my first race.

  When I finally mastered the Superman-looking drill I repeated the process with
the second one. I watched and learned the day’s drill before leaving and driving to the pool in the dark. I headed straight to the slowest lane and did nothing only this one tiny part of the stroke over and over again. The second part of the stroke took maybe two days to learn. The staff all knew me at this stage. They all greeted me and smiled at me like I was a special case, too far gone to help and only to be smiled at and pitied. ‘There goes the toolbox again,’ they seemed to say.

  By the time I was on the third or fourth drill I was managing to master a new one almost daily. As I started to understand the system and how the drills worked they started to “click” faster and I finally felt like I was making progress.

  Then one day I woke up, made some coffee and went in to watch the day’s lesson. They decided at this stage I was at the end of Section 1 and it was time to add all five bits together at the same time. I nearly choked on my coffee and decided to go back to bed, or into work early or maybe the house needed to be vacuumed? You remember my problem with coordination?

  I kicked myself in the backside and watched it over and over until I had it memorised. Then I went to the pool and said hello to the usual suspects and endured the usual pitying looks.

  ‘Poor lad, not much hope for him’, they seemed to imply.

  I took up my usual place in the slow lane and rehearsed the moves in my head for a minute, then pushed off. The brain knew what to do but none of it happened at all like it was going on in my head. So I had another go but something else was going wrong, distant alarm bells ringing, but I was busy having another try and still having no luck. By now the alarm bells have turned into a full-on red alert and my mind is screaming at me that I need to stop trying to do the stupid move and breathe. Oh yeah.

  I stood and gasped and after my breathing had returned to sort of normal, I stopped seeing stars and ascertained that no one saw my ineptness, I have another go.

  But it’s the same sad result.

  Three days of struggle and gallons of heavily chlorinated water later . . . it finally clicks. I can’t believe it, but I have succeeded!

  Don’t get so excited Robbo, I think to myself. That’s only part one of six, and each part has a bunch of smaller parts. So I drill up and down, mostly getting it right, and the next day I come back to do it again.

  Let’s take a quick break from the pool while I tell you a little more about myself. I think at it's both one of my biggest strengths and weaknesses – at the same time. A little like Superman and Kryptonite, one is good for him and one steals all his powers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing myself to Superman. He can shoot lasers out of his eyes and can fly. I obviously can't do either of those things. Apart from that, the comparison should be obvious.

  Anyway what I was going to tell you about is what I call my ‘blinkers.’ As in what you make a horse wear so that it doesn’t become distracted. Well I sort of wear a pair of blinkers. First I'll tell you how my mind works, and then I'll get on to the blinkers.

  First I look at all the options, whether it’s a business decision, training or anything else, including for instance, learning how to swim. I'll examine said options, weigh them all up and then make a decision based on all the information I've got at hand. Once the decision is made the blinkers go on. At that point I've got all the benefits, but at the same time also the dangers of wearing blinkers.

  When the blinkers are on they allow me to ignore all other distractions and go after something relentlessly. This can be a huge strength because I put all of my energy only into looking and constantly heading in the direction of my target. I stop worrying about risks or what could go wrong. When I decide this is the right course of action I know the risks and accept them. So I think, why worry about them now that I'm committed ? It only uses energy needlessly.

  The downside is that I can become a little blinded to any other way of reaching my goal, possibly ending up doing things the hardest way. I possibly don’t always realise this as quickly if I made the wrong choice to start with. It’s a case of head down, plough on. Every so, I'll often look up to make sure I'm still on course, not realising for a while that I'm heading in the wrong direction. But the end result is that I pretty much always get things done.

  Ok, so let’s get back to my progress in the pool.

  I went back doing the drills and the blinkers were on, indeed had been on for weeks now. I worked my way through all of the individual and combined lessons until one day I reached the end of the DVD and the man said: ‘Ok, now you are ready to swim.’

  I wasn't so sure, but I thought I’d give it a go. If I had achieved nothing else, at least I'd become absolutely excellent at his drills over the past six weeks.

  I got into the pool and swam one length, turned and swam back and I could hardly breathe. I was on my limit just to do two lengths after six weeks of looking like a toolbox doing all of his stupid drills. If he didn't live somewhere on the opposite side of the planet I swore I'd find him and make him eat his damn DVD

  I tried again, swimming two more lengths. It was the same result and I had to stop and recover and catch my breath.

  I spent a whole hour doing one or two lengths at a time, before having to stop and rest.

  I was so angry and disappointed. I was no better than what I had been six weeks ago . . . if anything I was worse off. I was six weeks closer to my race and back where I started, unable to string more than one or two lengths at a time. Admittedly I was actually swimming and probably faster, but that wasn't going to be much use in the sea where there wasn't a wall to hang onto every twenty-five metres, so I could catch my breath.

  I went in to work, feeling dejected and gutted. My whole day was spent examining what I could do differently or what I was doing wrong. In the afternoon if it was quiet in the shop and I had all my work done I would often research triathlon equipment, read about races or learn about the new bikes on the market. (You might call it surfing the web, but as I own a triathlon shop, I was justified in calling it research).

  That particular day I was consumed with the swim and what had gone wrong. Why hadn't the magic system worked, I kept thinking. To make things worse I stumbled across an article on the internet talking about how important it is to save your legs for the bike and run, so for triathlon you don’t really need to kick well, only a little for balance. Besides, the article said, triathlon wetsuits are designed with very buoyant legs, so you don’t have to kick to stop your legs sinking, they just float along behind you all on their own.

  There's also this little piece of swim equipment called a pull buoy. It’s a float that you place between your legs, which stops them from sinking when you don’t kick. It’s really intended as a way to increase the load on your arms by stopping you from kicking. All the propulsion has to come from your arms, and pull buoys are often used with paddles to make it even harder. Paddles slip on over your hands like little shovels, making it more difficult to pull yourself through the water.

  I could see a side street – a way from A to C without going through B. I had come to the conclusion that if I could stop kicking I would reduce how hard I was working and be able to concentrate on just the stroke, which was the most important part.

  I couldn’t wait to try out this concept. I went to the pool the next morning, headed straight to the equipment room and grabbed a pull buoy. I got into the slow lane and swam six lengths without stopping. I nearly burst with excitement and spent the next hour ploughing up and down in sets of six, eight and ten lengths at a time.

  It turned out that my swimming performance was a lot for a beginner. The next day I couldn't lift my arms high enough to scratch my head, but I spent the day grinning like a fool.

  I had it. . . I'd finally cracked it. I wasn't quite a swimmer yet and the pull buoy that allowed me to get started sort of turned into a bit of a crutch that took about another two years to wean myself off, but for now it worked.

  ❖

  Chapter 8

  A mountain bike race

  Motiv
ation was high and I was making progress in the pool. I was still using the pull buoy like a crutch. I read more about training and in a very haphazard way started adding in some of the recommendations from magazines, websites and books. It was very much a case of too much information and over-complicating things. But even if it wasn't all exactly the right type of session, I was training fairly regularly and, partly by fluke, getting some of it right.

  One of the things that I discovered that year was the difference that ‘volume’ makes. I was to rediscover this again a couple of years later.