Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  It was the sort of thing that could go to a girl’s head. I knew my challenge now was to make sure it didn’t.

  10

  A Triathlete’s Life

  Of all the body parts we train for this unforgiving pursuit of ours, none is more important than the head. There is a culture in triathlon for logbooks and data, obsessing about how far and how fast we have gone in our latest session. People think that if their logbook is in order, then so must their preparation be. Then they hit kilometre thirty in the marathon, their bodies racked with pain and fatigue, and they despair that there are another twelve to go. That’s when they are in danger of breaking down, and certainly of slowing down. That’s when they most need a mind that is as honed and as powerful as their butt cheeks.

  The best coaches will tell you this. It is more or less the first thing Brett said to me when I turned up to be assessed by him, even if his observation that he would need to cut my head off was a somewhat unconventional way of letting me know I had work to do. I was fretful and obsessive when I first turned pro, running at everything like a bull in a china shop.

  ‘The training you got a handle on,’ as Brett had told me in one of those emails. ‘The walking around in nerd land you have not. You get over that the same way as you improve an athletic weakness – by knowing and training it out. Life is nothing but a habit. Get to work.’

  At the start it seemed daunting. ‘But I can’t relax,’ I wanted to say. ‘I can’t slow down. I can’t not be a muppet. It’s the way I am.’ These protestations, though, were no different from saying: ‘But I can’t lift that weight, I can’t run that fast, I can’t complete an ironman.’ You may not be able to right now, but, with a positive frame of mind and a willingness to work, anything is possible.

  Remaining positive really is one of the most precious faculties for any athlete. That, and an ability to stay focused and disciplined. Develop a mind bank of positive images and thoughts – family, friends, previous successes, favourite places, a big plate of chips. You need to build it up as you would any collection, but soon you will have a range of thoughts to flick through when next your body and soul are screaming out for relief.

  There is a lot of repetitive activity in an athlete’s life, particularly in ironman, and you need to learn to handle it. The best way of improving your capacity to endure boredom is to endure boredom. Spend time training on your own and challenge your mind to stay focused. We had a room in Leysin that we called the dungeon, where the treadmill was. It was airless with no windows, and if you stretched your arms out you could touch either wall. It smelled of the sweat and tears of previous workouts. The radio was broken. Brett used to send athletes down there for sessions. He made some, such as Hillary Biscay and Bella Comerford, run entire marathons down there. Hillary once forgot to charge her iPod and had to do the whole thing with no stimulation at all. Now, I’m not necessarily recommending you try that at home, folks. Brett knew what he was doing when he picked and chose certain sessions for certain athletes. But it gives you an insight into the sort of techniques with which you can train your mind as well as your body.

  You should maintain the same level of concentration in training as you would when racing. It’s no use imagining you will miraculously develop that focus on race day. It won’t happen, and you will have neglected a fundamental part of your programme. You wouldn’t go into a race without any physical training, so why would you go in without any mental?

  The mind constantly wanders when you are engaged in repetitive activity for a prolonged period. Many’s the time I have been thinking of other things, only to snap out of it and say, ‘Wake up! You’re in a race here!’ This is natural, but you have to be aware of it and to learn to stay in the moment. If your mind wanders, so does your body. You should constantly be asking yourself questions. Are my arms relaxed? Is my face? Am I working as hard as I can? Am I breathing into my belly, or am I stopping in my throat? On the swim, it should be: is my hand entering correctly, am I finishing the stroke properly, am I on feet? There should be a regular check/feedback mechanism, whether you’re in training or in a race. If you lose that continual self-assessment, before you know it your face and shoulders have tensed up, you’re clenching your fists and you’re holding your breath or gasping when you don’t need to. It all adds up to a waste of valuable energy and loss of form.

  But it’s not just out on the road, in the water or in the dungeon that you can train your mind. I find I do some of my most valuable work on the sofa. Visualisation is a hugely important tool, one that requires little more than some peace and quiet. Close your eyes, relax, then go through each stage of the race in your mind. Picture yourself performing at your peak. Then imagine all the things that could go wrong, and picture yourself dealing with them. What will I do if my goggles are knocked off? What will I do if I suffer a puncture, or cramps? Visualise each situation and rehearse your response, so that, if problems do arise, you are able to react decisively and calmly, despite the chaos and adrenaline of race day.

  Things will go wrong – of that you can be assured. Not only will it help to have visualised your reaction, but in the heat of battle it is also essential to carry your own mantras and motivational material. Soon after I joined his camp in Thailand, Brett introduced me to one of my most valuable sources of inspiration. ‘There is a poem I want you to read,’ he said one day. ‘You might not like it because of its patriarchal wording, but it captures the qualities you need to be a successful athlete and a good person.’

  The poem was ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. Brett gave me a photocopy of it, and I remember the shiver of excitement I felt as I read the opening words: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.’

  That photocopy is now dog eared and torn, but I carry it with me everywhere. ‘If’ has become my favourite poem. I write its words on all of my water bottles. I have drawn reassurance from the poem’s teaching of fortitude and level-headedness, and tried to apply it to all areas of my life. In addition, I write my own mantra on my race wristband: ‘Never ever give up – and smile’.

  It might not be the same for everyone, but smiling, for me, is crucial. First of all, it relaxes my face and gives me a lift. Second, it shows how much I love the sport and the occasion. We need to take triathlon seriously, but ultimately it is something to be enjoyed. Through my smile I like to convey that joy and passion for what I am doing. And, third, I hope it affects the mindset of my competitors. If they see me smiling, they might think I’m finding it easy. Sometimes a smile is useful to mask the pain.

  In an endurance athlete’s life, pain is never far away. As pain is little more than a conversation between your body and your brain, this is another reason why a fit mind is so important. The brain is the master computer of the body. Even when we are working on the efficiency of the peripheral components – the legs, the arms, the butt cheeks – we can recruit the seat of all power to enhance the effectiveness of our work. It’s a question of testing limits.

  For a start, there’s the importance of keeping an open mind. The brain is programmed to protect us, and that can mean imposing limits on what it thinks we can or should do. Constantly push at those limits, because the brain can be way too cautious. Not so long ago I would have laughed at you if you had suggested I do an ironman. Imagine if I had allowed that attitude to persist. It is up to each and every one of us to change ‘I can’t’ into ‘I can’.

  I am motivated above all by that little voice inside that urges me on to fulfil my potential. Everyone has that same voice in them somewhere, but many are too scared to listen to it, too scared to try, too scared of failure. That fear is immobilising, but it is also our own personal construct and therefore doesn’t exist in reality. Never imagine anything is impossible, and never stop trying out new things. My life has taken me to so many wonderful places and has truly enriched me. None of it would have been possible if I’d let timidity overcome the impulse to explore.

  If we think
about our training for sport, the same principles apply. The brain is constantly trying to impose limits on what it thinks we can achieve. We should constantly question it, fight it. That means enduring pain. Successful ironman athletes relish their relationship with pain. Not the mechanical kind, necessarily, which warns us that something has broken down – although even there I have found time and time again that it is possible to overcome certain ‘injuries’ by making myself train and/or race through them. What the good triathlete should relish is the pain that is our brain’s way of telling us that it doesn’t like how hard we are working. I have completed training sessions I would never have thought possible, usually on the orders of a coach who would not be disobeyed but also through my own thirst for pushing back the limits. The key is not to be afraid of failing.

  This is not gratuitous masochism. There is a very real process of refinement going on. You are not just working your muscles and lungs, you are working your brain to learn to accept each new level of exertion as something that can be endured safely. The brain – at least, the safety-first part of the brain – will try to dig its heels in. Eventually it will prevail, because, of course, there are limits. We can’t launch into an ironman as if it were a sprint, so a sense of what really is too much is always crucial. The key is to push that point back as far as possible. The interface between the conservative and ambitious impulses in the brain should be a front of continual struggle. And remembering the pain of previous sessions or races we have successfully endured gives us the confidence to go through it again, and the evidence to present to the brain that we are capable of handling it. That way, the next time we hit kilometre thirty of the marathon and want to stop, we know that a) we have been here before, and b) our discomfort can be overcome.

  I would stress to any athlete the importance of this intuitive approach, based more on perception than on data. There is a temptation for many athletes to surround themselves with all the latest gadgets, and to base their routines on what their heart monitor or their stopwatch is telling them. The danger then is that you start to judge your limits by these devices rather than by the one that matters – the one inside you.

  There would be little point here in trying to lay out a comprehensive guide to triathlon training. Every athlete is different, and besides, experienced coaches with a long track record in triathlon – in other words, people far more qualified than I am – have written entire books on the subject. I am just an athlete, albeit a successful one. This doesn’t mean I understand why coaches set the sessions they do, nor does it put me in a position to prescribe programmes.

  If I had to stress one thing, though, it would be to keep it simple. It’s not rocket science. I think a lot of athletes make things more compli cated than they need to. My training is pretty much the same from week to week, in terms of the disciplines I tackle on a given day. We do need to be flexible and to adapt, tweaking here and there, but consistency is key.

  In keeping with the simple approach is this emphasis on feel over gadgetry. I do use quantifiable indicators in my training, such as speed on a treadmill or time on a track, but not as much as you might think, and certainly not as much as many others. Tangible results in training are important, especially if you are being coached by someone from a distance, but they are not as valuable an indicator as perceived effort. You might end up training within yourself one day for fear of exceeding a predetermined level on your heart-rate monitor; on another you might train too hard when you’re not feeling 100 per cent in order to reach that predetermined level. In both cases, you would be better served listening to yourself.

  The other problem with obsessing over numbers, I think, is that it takes some of the enjoyment out of what we do. We should never lose the ability to read our bodies, but we should never, ever lose the joy of the wind in our hair, the joy of sport for sport’s sake.

  Although my programme is specific to me and has changed very little over the years, any athlete’s programme should consist of four basic types of session. Steady-state sessions, which are aerobic and do not raise the heart rate too high; strength sessions, which involve drills such as hill repeats on the bike or run, or swimming with paddles in the water; race-pace sessions, where you are training as fast as you would race, using drills such as time trials; and faster-than-race-pace sessions, incorporating interval work, short, sharp bursts where you go beyond your limits, sessions that really hurt and are supposed to.

  If an age-group athlete could find time for one of each of those session types for each discipline across a week, or even two weeks, then they would have the basis of a sound programme. I would particularly urge them to make time for the faster sessions, especially as the season develops. Long, slow and steady plays a crucial part in our training, but if that is all you do then you will race long, slow and steady. As the season gets into swing, it is important to incorporate those harder, faster intervals.

  Another key component to my training these days is strength and conditioning. For many triathletes, lifting weights is synonymous with body-building and, as such, is avoided. Brett is in this camp, although he did set me that programme of knuckle press-ups to strengthen my upper body. He feels that the majority of strength and conditioning comes from the swim, bike and run sessions and that additional gym work, as well as being unnecessary, could cause injury. Later, when I started to train under Dave Scott, I was introduced to a new philosophy. Dave is a huge proponent of a targeted and structured strength-and-conditioning programme. Such training is about much more than lifting weights and Mr Universe competitions. If applied carefully and specifically to you and your strengths and weaknesses, it promotes physical development and resistance to fatigue and injury. I wouldn’t be without it.

  If I was to give you an idea of my typical week’s training, insofar as there is such a thing, it would look something like this:

  Before you start any training, though, it is essential to plan and set goals, both long term and intermediate. Patience is key. We should never be in such a rush to achieve our goals that we are not willing to take the small steps needed to reach them. Trying to make giant leaps can result in injury and overload. The long-term goals for a triathlete will usually be their A (main) races. The intermediate goals will be little milestones along the way – either in training or B races – to be celebrated whenever they are reached. The journey between these must be planned in advance. Begin by establishing where it is you want to get to by the season’s end, then establish where you are now, and then set about drawing up the journey in between, working backwards from the end. It is no use knowing where you are now and assuming you will get to your goal somehow, nor will it help knowing where your goal is and ignoring your current state. Start the season with a time trial in each of the three disciplines, so you have a benchmark, say, for a 1,500m swim, a 20km bike and a 5km run. As you embark on your plan, measure your progress against your times. An important technique is to write everything down – your goals, your plan, your progress.

  It may not surprise you to hear that I am a great believer in quality over quantity. I would urge all athletes at least to bear this policy in mind, but, as discussed, it might not suit everyone. Brett knew this as well as anyone, so in Team TBB we all had different programmes. I was more racehorse, he kept telling me, fast, yet liable to break under high-volume training, while other girls, like Belinda, Bella and Hillary, were more shire horse, strong with big engines. That’s why he sent them off on those marathon (literally) sessions in the dungeon, or on crazy 60km runs.

  There was a competitiveness between us all. You know what girls are like! Sometimes Brett would actually split us up. I was often told to train with the boys. It played on my mind that the other girls were so often given longer sessions than I was. Early on, in Thailand, Brett set me a two-hour run for my long run session of the week. I knew the others were doing three hours, and I wanted to show him I could do three hours just as well. So I did. He came down on me like a ton of bricks. Same with the cycl
ing – at the end of each day’s training in Switzerland, we had the 16km climb up from Aigle to Leysin to negotiate. He would tell me to take it slowly; I would disobey, constantly trying to chip away at my personal best. But Brett was often watching from his white Berlingo without our knowledge. One day he sat me down to tell me that I was undermining everything else by pushing up that hill when I should be taking it easy.

  Then again, sometimes he allowed that kind of thing. The following year, while training in the Philippines, I was suffering, as usual, from diarrhoea one day. Three of us had been set a session on the track – ten one miles on six minutes with a 200m jog for recovery after each. I had to rush off to the bushes after each mile and then catch up with the others. I was so frustrated at having to stop the whole time that I stayed on to do another set of ten 800m, even though Brett hadn’t told me to. He stood there watching with a smile on his face. For some reason he let me smash myself that time.

  We always had a long ride on Saturdays. Some were truly epic. Once the whole team cycled the 200km around Lake Geneva – followed by the climb to Leysin, obviously. Another time, the girls went on a five-hour bike ride in the pouring rain. It was freezing, but we forced our way through it. Donna Phelan fell on the tramlines. We didn’t know it, but she had actually broken her elbow. She finished the ride without so much as a complaint. There was something about Brett’s training – there was something about Brett – that made you suck up pain. In so doing, it raised your threshold for it. He loathed the idea of any of us going soft, physically or emotionally. A pity party, he called it, when people sat around and felt sorry for themselves. Needless to say, we weren’t allowed any.