Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  It was a great weekend. I was surrounded by friends from home, and able to be myself again – high spirited and all smiles. And I’d won! I could get used to this.

  But there was no doubting that the main event of the weekend was Ironman Switzerland the next day. Up till then, that distance of triathlon was little more to me than something a few of my team-mates subjected themselves to. One of those was Rebecca Preston, and she went on to win the ironman that day. She ran the marathon in 3hr 18min, and I remember thinking: ‘How on earth has she done that?’ I was flabbergasted. It almost beggared belief that she could run that fast after nearly 115 miles in the water and on the bike.

  But the atmosphere also thrilled me – the carnival of the occasion and the camaraderie, the pain, the joy of the athletes. I cheered from the sidelines like a deliriously excited child.

  ‘Do you want to do this one day?’ Brett asked me.

  ‘Yes!’ I shouted over the noise.

  I wasn’t put off by the distance. I just didn’t know how competitive I would be at it. But the ironman had me in its grasp. I had been seduced.

  What was becoming increasingly clear, though, was that Calvin’s days were numbered. All of my recent races had featured some kind of malfunction, most often a refusal on his part to engage the small chainring. This meant I’d had to grind up hills in a big gear a few too many times. As much as it broke my heart, it was time to say farewell. He was too old, and bits were falling off that endearing frame of cheeky purple. I needed a younger model.

  Which came along courtesy of the team’s new sponsor, Cervélo, who kitted me out with a spanking new Soloist. My last race on Calvin had been the ITU Premium European Cup in Holten, Holland, where I came a disappointing fifth. My swim had been awful, and, loath though I am to point it out, Calvin’s latest (and last) refusal to entertain the small chainring hadn’t really helped. But a week later, I’d packed up the new bike in my life and taken it to France for the ITU Long Course World Championships at L’Orient. I came fifth again. The Cervélo and I hadn’t quite gelled. I could hear Calvin saying, ‘I told you so’.

  It was at my next race that the bike and I bonded. And what a rite of passage it was for us both. Brett had entered me for the Alpe d’Huez Long Course Triathlon on the first day of August, and it was the most gruelling race I had yet taken on, another step towards an ironman.

  Preparations hadn’t been helped by an injury I’d picked up three days earlier. I suppose I had it coming – Calvin’s retribution – but he had one last curveball to throw at me. I was trying to remove my bike computer, so that I could transfer it to the Cervélo, and in typical fashion I went at it with a knife and a lot of impatience. I slipped and sliced my hand open between the thumb and forefinger. The local doctor gave me four stitches in the webbing and an instruction not to get it wet.

  Brett’s response was typically unsympathetic and enlightening: ‘Chrissie, you think these things just happen to you. They don’t. It’s because of the way you behave. You’ve got to learn to take control, to think before you act. Hurry slowly.’

  At the time, I thought he might tell me not to race, but I know better now. ‘You’re racing,’ was his curt assessment.

  So the next day I was in the pool with a bright yellow rubber glove on. And the day after that I was in a hire car crossing the Alps with Brett’s teenage daughter, Holly, who was the team masseuse, and Maxine Seear, an Australian Olympian who had joined the team soon after I had and quickly become a friend. I remember driving the road that climbs to Alpe d’Huez and thinking, Oh, Lord! Even the car was struggling. Twenty-one switchbacks on a climb of more than a thousand metres. We were going to have to bike this at the end of the 115km cycle leg. I bristled with excitement.

  The three of us were sharing an apartment, and I didn’t sleep well the night before the race – you never do. On the day, I removed the stitches from my hand with some nail clippers and cycled down to the start with the others.

  The lake was freezing, and I didn’t swim well. When I got on the bike, though, something clicked and I went into the lead and hammered it up the climbs. I felt so strong, and I loved it. It was like being back in Nepal. People started telling me my lead was growing. I remember seeing The White Berlingo on the sidelines at about 60km – and then Brett. ‘Eat! Eat! Don’t forget to eat!’ he shouted.

  Then disaster struck – well, the first of them. I picked up a flat tyre. I was about eleven minutes ahead at that point, they told me, and I dismounted and set about replacing the tube. By the time I was back on the bike, my lead was down to four minutes.

  Cue Disaster Two. By then I was on the descent into the valley before the final climb to Alpe d’Huez began. Now, I’m a real numpty when it comes to descending. I’d sat on a road bike for the first time only three years earlier, so I was still a relative novice at cycling. The bike control and nerve required for a descent through hairpins at high speed was something I was still struggling with.

  The situation wasn’t helped when I came careering round one bend only to be confronted by some kind of jeep coming in the other direction. The roads at Alpe d’Huez are not closed for the race and I, in my numptiness, had taken this corner too wide, such that I was face to face with a vast, black four-by-four. There was no choice. Or, if there was, it was between death and heading straight for the barrier at the side of the road. And, who knows, death may yet have been waiting there as well.

  I went for the barrier. There was a drop beyond it, but it wasn’t sheer and it was forested, so I had a decent chance. I hit the barrier head on, and as I flew over the handlebars I pulled the bike over with me, and we both landed in a bush beyond. I was cut and bruised and had done something to my leg, but it wasn’t terminal. My handlebars had been bent out of line, and so, swearing, I straightened them out, remounted and headed on down the hill again, before the serious climb.

  That was when I started to overtake more of my team-mates – the males this time. I was in my element, and the kilometres were falling away. After 115 of them I arrived at the final transition, and so began the 22km run at 2,200m altitude. It was stunning. The mountains that surround you and the valley below take your breath away, which is not necessarily a good thing when you’re trying to race at altitude, but it gives you a euphoric energy. The views help to make this one of my favourite races. My leg was hurting quite badly now, but I pushed on and won the race twenty-nine minutes ahead of the next woman and in ninth place overall. If I hadn’t had a puncture or a crash . . .

  That was a turning point. I knew I had something then, and I knew it was an aptitude for these longer races. This was still a way short of a full ironman, distance-wise, but because of the difficult terrain it was getting there time-wise. And I loved it. Long-distance racing was so much more enjoyable to me than the shorter events.

  From that moment, I just couldn’t wait to take on an ironman.

  So when Brett asked me the following week if I wanted to do one, I knew the answer right away.

  ‘Am I ready?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Then yes.’

  And in three and a half weeks I was on the start line for Ironman Korea. It is staged, of all places, on Jeju, that tiny island off the south coast of South Korea where I’d had my epiphany about the civil service, under the erupting volcano. This is a seriously difficult race, mainly because of the heat and humidity. So Brett sent those of us who were racing out to our base in Thailand for some acclimatisation training. The trouble was, it was monsoon season. Water was cascading everywhere, including down the steps to the pool. Naturally, I slipped at the top of them and went bumpety-bump all the way down on my bony backside. I was in agony. I felt as if I’d shattered my coccyx.

  X-rays showed I hadn’t, but that knowledge did nothing for the pain. I sat for hours in the local Thai hospital, waiting for a diagnosis, surrounded by men and women with all kinds of horrific ailments. Not an experience I’d want to repeat. With a week to go I could barel
y walk, and I couldn’t run at all. I spent two days sitting on a hot-water bottle in my bedroom. After that I was able to swim and bike again, but I couldn’t see how I was going to complete a marathon. Just sitting down on the flight to Korea was agony.

  Brett was thousands of miles away in Leysin. I voiced my concerns to him in an email. The response was typical.

  it means we fix the back and tell no one. your mind has got to be focused on recovering and being ready for korea. plenty of big dollars await you there. not as many as were there before you went over the barrier, and now a little less after you fell down the stairs, where you have seen others go head over apex – and even coach showed you twice about how dangerous it was. oh, and that is not counting the self knife attack.

  i hope you are receiving the point i am making here. it’s time you forgot about, ‘woe is me, all these coincidences,’ and got some self-discipline in your head. the training you got a handle on, the walking around in nerd land you have not. you get over that the same way as improving an athletic weakness. BY KNOWING AND BY TRAINING IT OUT.

  life is nothing but a habit. get to work.

  cheers, sutto

  Of course, there was never any mention of my not taking part in the race. I would be on the start line whether I could run or not. I obeyed.

  But even without the injury, it was a big gamble to throw me into an ironman only six months after I’d turned pro. Everything I’d done so far had been geared towards Olympic-distance triathlon. Ironman athletes usually followed a different training programme altogether. I had no conventional grounding in the discipline. Most rival coaches would have called Brtett mad if they’d known. But I was a nobody, and so none of them did.

  Maybe, in a strange way, the injury alleviated the pressure. I wasn’t nervous at all beforehand. And from the moment I got in the water, I never felt the coccyx again, even after the race. The body does weird and wonderful things.

  Unfortunately, the same can’t always be said of the bike. I’d had a really good swim and I left the water as the first-placed woman, which was unusual. It was in the ocean, which I love, but I’m not supposed to be leading come the end of any swim. I couldn’t believe how well things were going.

  But then I got to my bike. The front tyre was as flat as a pancake. Aarrrgghh. Stay calm, Brett would say, stay calm. I’ve been here before.

  Seven minutes later we were back in the game but in sixth place. Vij the Velo (as I had named my steed) and I were motoring through the ranks. We’d moved into second place within twenty miles, and after sixty-five we hit the front, going past Rebecca. It was tough – the course was far hillier than I’d expected, the temperature was 37ºC, humidity 95 per cent – it was a veritable sauna. After nearly an hour in the water and 5hr 17min on the bike, I peeled myself off the saddle. Only a marathon still to go.

  Forget the sauna: the run was conducted in what felt like an oven. The starting gun had fired at 7 a.m, but it was now early afternoon. The run was three laps up and down a newly laid highway. It undulated all the way, and the heat radiated off the asphalt as it would off a frying pan. There was no shade anywhere. No trees, no nothing. It was hellish, a war of attrition. People were dropping like flies, staggering around like drunkards, trying so desperately to finish a race that had miles still to run.

  And yet I felt all right. I faded a little around the seventeen-mile mark, but by mile twenty-two I had my second wind. (Or was it my fourth or fifth?) Cruel though it may be to say it, there was also something strangely encouraging about the sight of athletes, some of them pros, falling by the wayside. They were really struggling. And I wasn’t. Sure, it hurt. My feet were like a war zone when I finished, and you don’t want to know about the chafing. But I never doubted that I would finish, and finish strongly.

  I crossed the line in a time of 9hr 54min, and I’d won. I couldn’t believe it. Well, I would never have believed it if you’d told me beforehand, but, in truth, nothing happens suddenly in an ironman, and I’d known for a good while before the finish that, as long as I didn’t break down, I was going to win. The girl in second place came in more than fifty minutes behind me. I was seventh overall, including the men.

  The prize was a cool $20,000 and a place, if I wanted it, at the World Ironman Championships in Kona, Hawaii, the daddy of all ironman races. It was seven weeks away, in October. I phoned Brett on the finish line and told him I’d won.

  ‘Good job, kid.’

  ‘They’ve offered me a place at Kona. Should I take it?’

  ‘Why not? At least we’ll have it if we want it.’

  ‘It costs $500.’

  ‘Take it.’

  The next day the customary post-race party took place in the Lotte Hotel on Jeju – yes, Hotel Erupting Volcano. It was kind of cathartic to be back, this time not wearing a suit and carrying UK Government policy documents, but competing in an ironman and sleeping on the floor of a cheap-as-chips apartment with two other team-mates. I was happier with things this way.

  I was happier, full stop. I had shared the apartment in Jeju with Luke Dragstra and Vinnie Santana. Luke, in particular, was a hardened pro, and I think he expected me to be worried and nervous before my first ironman, asking endless questions and generally being a royal pain in the arse. But I wasn’t any of those. He and I started to get on a lot better on that trip. I later heard from Brett that I had surprised Luke with how calm, confident and well prepared I’d been. That made me happy. It was a breakthrough in my relations with the team. And that weekend, among the ironman brethren, I felt as if I belonged at last.

  Brett was happy too. He sent me an email the following week. Here it is:

  i am so proud of you, and a little for me this time. because you know the pressure i feel when i make these sutto-type decisions. all the people are happy to tell me i am nuts and hurting your career, but they never ring back and say, ‘well, you old bastard, you were right again. How do you know they can stay all day?’ no! they just lay in the darkness waiting for something to go wrong and then have a smart-arse crack at me.

  you shut them up good and proper.

  It suddenly dawned on me how much pressure he’d been under, sending me to Korea. It could have gone horribly wrong. He was taking a punt, almost as much as I was. No ironman training, I didn’t even have the basic equipment – I was racing on a road bike with drop handlebars and training wheels. I’d borrowed kit off my team-mates and worn an old black vest – not great in the heat – onto which I’d ironed the team logo. And then there was the coccyx injury he’d told me to ignore. He was going on little more than a hunch that I could ‘stay all day’. It was all wild, anti-textbook stuff.

  As was his next trick – to insist that I went the very next weekend to Singapore to compete in a half-ironman. This was ripping up the textbook and pissing on it. No other coach would have endorsed the programme I was on. I’d done two long-course triathlons, Alpe d’Huez, an ironman and now a half-ironman in the space of a few weeks – and six weeks later I was meant to be doing Hawaii. In anyone else’s book, that’s over-racing; it’s too much travel and not enough rest.

  In the case of Singapore, they might have been right. There was pressure to race, because this was a big promotion for the team in one of the world’s largest financial centres. During that race I came the closest I ever have to bonking, as we say, which others might describe as hitting the wall. I ran like a tin woman – it was really painful. Belinda Granger, another team-mate, won that day, and I came third.

  But it was out of the way, and I returned to camp in Thailand with six weeks to prepare for the biggest race of my life.

  They rewarded me with a proper time-trial bike after Singapore, complete with race wheels! Brett had taught me not to care about having the latest equipment. He felt that far too many people spent too much time worrying about expensive, aerodynamic gear and not enough about the engine that drives it. All the same, now that I was going to Hawaii he agreed that a time-trial bike was a prerequisite. I spe
nt much of the following six weeks learning to ride it. A time-trial bike requires a totally new cycling position.

  As the big day approached, the other team members who had qualified in Hawaii left for Kona. But Brett told me to stay behind in Thailand for a few more days. He didn’t want me to get caught up in the hype out there – Hawaii-itis, he called it. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was quite happy to stay behind. Although relations were thawing between me and the boys on the team, I still felt very much like a high-school geek shunned by the prom queens when it came to some of the girls. Now that I had a few races under my belt, I’d thought I might become more accepted, but jealousy seemed to be the latest issue for us to get past. I just couldn’t win – or, rather, I could, but it wasn’t helping matters.

  Before they’d left, Brett had made the others do a mini-race simulation, and two days before I was due to fly out it was my turn. The session was a 3km swim, a two-hour bike ride and twelve 800m on the track. It was pissing down, monsoon-style. I remember running round the track with the rain coming down, splashing through the puddles, with only Brett and a couple of rabid dogs looking on at me. I nailed that session. Brett didn’t say anything, other than his customary, ‘Good job, kid’, before he walked off. But I knew how the others had done in their test sets, and I know that the times I did in that session got back to the girls in Hawaii.

  When Brett saw me off in early October, nine days before the race, he gave me a scrap of paper torn from his notebook (still got it) on which he had written, almost illegibly, his final words of wisdom. He told me to keep my head down and stay well away from the hype. This was just another event. And, most importantly, he told me not to defer to anyone.