Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  It was a pretty miserable start, and it set the tone for those early months. After two weeks in the Big Brother house, we all moved to new accommodation in apartments. Brett put me in with four of the boys – on purpose, he later told me. I remember when we moved – Brett drove a van while the rest of us got on our bikes to cycle the 100km in the heat of the day. Pretty soon the athletes split into two groups, and I went with the faster one. I tried valiantly to stay with them, but a lack of fitness got the better of me and I dropped off. I rode on my own for most of the way, not good enough to keep up with one lot but not wanting to drop back and join the other. God knows what either group thought of me.

  It was symbolic. I’d never felt more alone than during that first spell in Thailand. I derived huge enjoyment from pushing my body as far as it would go in training sessions, that masochistic thrill of taking the pain just a little bit further each time. And doing it in the company of masters of their art, obsessive perfectionists all of them, was a great privilege.

  But that was where the enjoyment ended. The typical day? Well, typical doesn’t do it justice. Identical. They were all identical. And they went something like this: get up, eat, train, eat, train, rest, train, eat, sleep. Seven days a week.

  Things weren’t going well with my team-mates, either. They all knew each other, and most of them had been triathletes for years. I know they were just putting me through my paces, testing me like any new kid is tested anywhere, but there was a clique and I wasn’t in it. Which is one thing when you’re at the local school, but another when you’re alone in a sweltering climate, thousands of miles from your friends and family, and all the while pushing your body to new limits. Snide comments came at me from all angles. The boys would goad me by flinging their filthy training kit around the kitchen, then watching as I picked it up, which they knew I would. They would steal my food. They – and I mean everyone – would go out for dinner and not invite me. I would be left alone with my laptop, trying to communicate with my friends scattered across the globe. I’d gone from being in the centre of a large, lively circle of friends to this.

  I was desperately lonely, but I was angry too. I channelled the frustration, spurred on by emails from my friends urging me to stick to what I was out there for. But I was caught between the desire to smash everyone at training and the feeling that I ought to observe their petty conventions.

  ‘Chrissie,’ said one of the guys who we were on a ride with, ‘do you know what half-wheeling is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re doing it now.’

  I was ever so slightly ahead of him as we cycled along, so that my wheel was half in front of his. This was how it was. You had to maintain perfect synchronisation with your training partner’s bike wheels. You had to fall in line, literally. It made me realise how my lapping the two girls on our hill repeats in Leysin must have gone down. No wonder they all hated me.

  I don’t think they were too impressed with my bike, either. They all had top-of-the-range models and I had my beloved Calvin, who didn’t cut much ice with anyone who knew anything about triathlon. Which was yet another problem. I knew nothing about my adopted sport, the history of it, or the personalities, even the rules. Yet triathlon seemed to be the only subject the others ever talked about. There was just no way I could have contributed to any of their conversations, even if they’d let me.

  Meanwhile, Brett was in the background, stirring it up. I know he’d told them to make things hard for me. Every now and then one of the boys would break rank to apologise for the way I was being treated – one came in when I was crying in my room one evening; another sent me an email.

  The irony was that Brett was the rock I clung to. While this sick trial of his devising was being played out, he seemed the closest thing I had to an ally. I could tell he was watching me; how I trained, how I coped, how I responded to the others. I knew he had a plan for me, although I didn’t know what it was.

  We had a common bond, as well, in our passion for international development and our desire to help other people. If I had grown disillusioned with the civil service over the impotence of our work and the hypocrisy of so much of what we had been doing, this self-indulgent, individualist pursuit I had now launched myself into was hardly an improvement.

  I voiced my concerns to Brett a few times in the early months. I didn’t know if I could carry on leading such a self-absorbed existence, I told him. I was missing a job whose purpose, in theory at least, was to try to improve the world and effect change.

  He said to me once: ‘Don’t worry, Chrissie. You’ll soon have a platform from which you can effect more change than you’d ever realised.’

  He used to throw me mysterious one-liners like that every so often. I didn’t know what he meant, but they helped to fuel my desire to succeed.

  Brett was never more comfortable than when it came to tearing strips off you – and I was on the receiving end as much as anyone. One occasion sticks in my mind. It was in the pool in early May.

  Swimming in this pool was disconcerting enough as it was. The local Thais can’t have cared much about water quality. It was green and seemed to be radioactive. It made our teeth hurt, as if acid were munching away at the enamel. Like swimming in a puddle of Coke. We would come out buzzing.

  This particular incident came at the height of my loneliness. At this stage I was still training to be an Olympic-distance triathlete, with the aim of making the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Brett had me doing a standard training set: two sets of a hundred metres at 1 min 35 sec each; then four at 1min 30sec, six at 1min 25sec and eight at 1min 20sec. Normally I would have to work hard to hit the 1min 20sec, but on this particular day I was so tired that I was struggling to make the 1min 25sec. The added issue was that Liz Blatchford was doing the same session with me. Liz trained on and off with Brett and was a high-class Olympic-distance triathlete, so she was one of my competitors. She is also a much better swimmer than I am. When we got to the 1min 20sec I was missing them all and falling well behind. Brett hauled me out of the pool and gave me both barrels in front of everyone. In his opinion, I had given up.

  ‘You’re fucking weak!’ he yelled at me. ‘Don’t you realise you’re giving something to Liz? You’re giving something to one of your competitors! You never give a competitor anything! Never show them your weaknesses! Your heart’s gone, Chrissie! You’ve gotta fight!’

  There was no point arguing. I got back into the pool. My goggles filled with tears, but my heart was burning with anger, just as much as my teeth were burning with acid. ‘You’re wrong, Brett,’ I thought. ‘I haven’t given up. I just cannot make those times today.’

  I was exhausted. Brett always used to say that some sessions are stars and some sessions are stones, but in the end they are all rocks and we build upon them. That session was a stone, but it was one of the most important in my career. The fire that was ignited in my belly by that dressing-down I can still feel today.

  I spent a lot of my time exhausted. I’m not sure I’ve ever quite mastered the art of switching off mentally, which Brett was so adamant I needed to do, but the art of switching off physically turned out to be pretty easy. You have no choice. When you’re not training, you’re not much good for anything other than lying around and resting. But even if I was exhausted so much of the time, I also felt stronger than I ever had. It was a strange sensation to feel my body changing shape and coursing with so much power, and yet to be so beset by fatigue.

  By then I had already taken part in a couple of races, these gruelling events that nevertheless stood out in my mental landscape as the beacons to light the way. It was the races we were doing it all for, and you never stop loving them.

  That said, another low in the early months was the moment I stood above the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok for the first time. This was the scene for the swim leg of the Bangkok Triathlon that Brett insisted a few of us took part in. The day before, I looked down into the water. The toxicity of it, the shit, the dead animals,
a huge chemical factory on the other bank – these were the first things that struck me. Reinaldo Colucci, Benji Sanson, Harry Wiltshire, Lizzy and I were the ones Brett had entered in the race. We were taking part for promotional reasons, which I didn’t like anyway – and Brett knew I wouldn’t like it. This was a test to see if we would take orders.

  Lizzy and I took photos instead and sent them to him. We’re not swimming in that. Yes you are. Lizzy flat refused, which Brett seemed to accept, but he wouldn’t let me back out. The race had been scheduled for April Fool’s Day, and that was my only hope now. Maybe he would leap out just before the off to say it had all been a joke. But no, I stared down into the grey, sludgy water at the start, picking a path between the dead birds and industrial boats. There was to be no last-minute reprieve.

  It was my first win as a professional. I collected £1,000 in cash, which brought its own kind of cleansing. Money at last. It was the first validation of what I was doing. I was particularly pleased with my bike split – 40km in an hour, and it wasn’t just because I was trying to blow-dry the river slime from my body. Reinaldo won the men’s race, followed by Harry and Benji. I was less than a minute behind Benji, in fourth place overall. I phoned Brett and he sounded pleased, although probably just as much with himself as with me. I hadn’t died – I hadn’t even caught anything – and I had my maiden win. He’d been right again.

  The races broke the monotony. And, just as important for me in the early days, they took me away from camp. My first pro race was the week before Bangkok – the Mekong River Triathlon. I came second in that one, but it introduced me to the joys of the post-race party, none of which ever failed to disappoint. I remember dancing the funky chicken with the Filipino triathlon team and a group of Thai ladyboys at that one. My dancing must have impressed the Filipinos, because they invited me to compete in the Subic Bay Triathlon, which, like the Mekong River Triathlon, was an ITU (International Triathlon Union) points race. You raced in these to pick up points to qualify for the ITU World Cups and thence, if you were really lucky, the Olympics.

  I leaped at the chance to visit the Philippines, and managed to persuade Brett that I should go out there for a week before the race. I stayed with my new friends, Analiza, Jefferson and August, three youngsters from poor backgrounds who had been discovered at local sporting events. I felt free of the politics and constant judgement of life in Team TBB. It was also a chance to travel again.

  Come the race, I was recharged. It was the beginning of May, and the start time was 6.40 a.m., so that we avoided the midday heat. But by 8 a.m. the temperature had risen to around 35ºC, so it was very much damage limitation. Nevertheless, I felt strong and won my first points race. Cue more dancing of the funky chicken!

  It was a comedown to head back to camp in Thailand. I may have had a couple of wins behind me, but there was no thawing of relations with my team-mates, and my swim was going downhill. That was the week Brett hauled me out of the pool. I was constantly questioning whether the life of a professional triathlete was for me, and Brett was losing patience with my doubting. He was also concerned about my upper-body strength, so he had me doing fifty press-ups a day on my knuckles. I don’t know if they did anything for my strength, but they certainly made my knuckles bleed.

  At the end of May I left Thailand, and was grateful for a change of scene. I was heading back to the UK for the Blenheim Triathlon (another win and more money!), before we moved to Leysin for the team’s summer camp. At last I was able to move into an apartment of my own. It was a stunning location. I had no TV, so I spent hours on my balcony overlooking the Alps. The cows ambled in the valley below, which echoed with the sound of the bells round their necks. I listened to the World Service on my pocket radio, I read books, I even dabbled with some writing of my own – more haiku, like Suzy had taught me to write in Nepal.

  Not that I was in much of a transcendental state. I was suffering from stomach upsets and losing weight. We were based 1,000m up in the mountains, but the running track and flatter roads where we did much of our training were down in Aigle, at the bottom of the valley. Cycling back to Leysin was a feat of endurance in itself, an hour’s slog up the side of the mountain after whatever hell we’d been put through in training. I loved that climb and was always chipping away at my personal best, but it took its toll. Brett thought I’d lost too much weight and turned up at my apartment one day with a block of Gruyère cheese and a slab of milk chocolate. ‘I want this gone in three days,’ he said.

  Brett wasn’t one for textbooks. Anything that came with the smack of ‘expertise’ he was immediately disdainful of. He believed he knew his athletes and he knew his sport, and anyone else’s input was just going to corrupt his work. We were allowed massages, for example, but he didn’t like any of us going to see physios because he didn’t believe they understood the nature of triathlon. He hated science, he hated sponsors, he hated the various federations, he hated most of the other coaches and any mickey-mouse certificates they might have picked up. He was a law unto himself.

  An insight into his mindset can be gleaned from the emails he wrote. Judging by those, he dislikes the norms of the written word as much as anything else. And yet there’s a kind of poetry to them – difficult, unique and of searing insight.

  A fortnight after the Blenheim Triathlon, I was back in the UK again. Brett had entered me for the UK Ironman 70.3. As a half-ironman, this was a sudden step up in length, nothing to do with qualifying for the Olympics, which had become the current focus of my obsessive nature. It was as if Brett’s thinking was changing. Was he losing faith in my ability to make the Olympics? The thought made me panic. He even suggested at one point, apparently in all seriousness, that I change nationality to improve my chances. His suggestions were The Philippines, Nepal or Singapore. As much as I love those countries, it was not a ringing endorsement of my progress.

  I struggled in the half-ironman, coming in fifth. A malfunction with Calvin’s gears – the beginning of the end for the old boy – hadn’t helped. Back in Leysin, the following week I had a terrible swim session (weight loss is not good for your swimming), and I sent an email to Tim Weeks despairing at my deterioration in the pool. I could see my goal of making the Olympics the following year slipping through my fingers with the water.

  ‘I don’t know what is happening,’ I wrote. ‘I feel like I have no power in the water. I am beginning to wonder whether to carry on with this. If I can’t get my head and body around the swimming then it’s a lost cause. I don’t know what to do.’

  Tim felt he could do nothing from the UK, so he forwarded my email to Brett. He responded in classic fashion with a long email to Tim, with me copied in, some highlights of which I reproduce here:

  i am not being rude, but chrissie is a doozy. fuck, what a handful. and she ain’t even got good yet. she has the ability. i start thinking ironman, i start thinking podiums, i see hawaii. i am that impressed.

  but we have fucking hissy fits over nothing, and we both know that type of personality don’t cut the mustard when the pain and blood are flowing. if i am wrong, let me know, but she smells tough to me under the cosh, but bloody pathetic, fragile, in normal, no-problem shit.

  i am at a loss for such rubbish. some people keep looking for the answers they want to hear, and some people confront themselves and dig in. such weakness displayed makes me question whether i am wasting my time.

  chrissie, i have this little saying that i think helps me be successful, more than anything else i do. and that is, i think, then i pick, and then i stick! and nothing shifts me from my view. no bad races, no bad sessions, no bad moods.

  tim, whatever decision she makes will be fine with me. but it’s 100% my way or the highway. otherwise it’s going to be a jibbering mess. the pressure will eat her inside out. so the best scenario is, either do her thing or learn to take orders like a good private. then she don’t have to think of nothing, ensuring the over-enquiring and over-inquisitive mind don’t destroy her physical attr
ibutes that are many.

  cheers, sutto

  In the same email he questioned the wisdom of my pushing for the Olympics the following year. He wasn’t sure I would qualify, and, even if I did, that would be two years gone from my career. The earliest I could hope to be competitive at Hawaii would then be 2010, by which time who knows what might have happened. If I were twenty-one, then maybe, but I was thirty, so we had to decide now where my talents lay. He was thinking my future lay in the half-ironman distance and beyond. ‘Should we play the cards right,’ he said to Tim, ‘she’s already going to the worlds now for 70.3 [half-ironman]. Then a crack at Hawaii in 2008.’ At that stage, I had no more than the vaguest idea of what he meant by Hawaii.

  What was abundantly clear was that I was pissing Brett off. I was fussing and flapping over the slightest imperfection in my training, let alone my race performance. Not for the first time I was put in my place. In my reply to the email, I thanked the two of them for ‘the kick up the arse that I needed’, and vowed to stop the soul-searching and ‘hissy fits’.

  I gave myself over to Brett at that point. Fighting it was just too much of a waste of energy, and I needed all my energy for what lay ahead. I still wasn’t sure what that was exactly, but he seemed to have a clear plan. It was time to trust in his judgement and go wherever that trust took me.

  9

  Face to Face with the Ironman

  My first experience of an ironman triathlon was spent safely behind the barriers, the very next weekend. It was in Zurich, late June 2007. The day before, I’d won the Zurich Triathlon, an Olympic-distance race. A group of friends had come over from the BRAT club to compete in the ironman taking place the following day, and their support spurred me on, as did the presence of Brett on the sidelines. I felt really strong – even the swim went well – and despite Calvin’s refusal to shift into the low gears (again!) during the first climb up Heartbreak Hill, I managed to hit the front early on the bike. I held the lead to the end for my fourth pro win.