Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  By the end of the meeting I had decided I wanted him to be my manager, which I think Alex realised. We had another meeting in London a couple of days later, where the deal was confirmed and its details thrashed out. I would continue to be a part of the team, wearing their logo and, of course, most importantly of all, being coached by Brett. I would also be free, with only a few restrictions, to have Ben negotiate sponsorship deals for me, independent of those negotiated for the team. I don’t deny it was the best of both worlds. I was happy, for the time being at least.

  My next assignment was to fly out to the team camp in Thailand to prepare for the Laguna Phuket Triathlon.

  I knew Brett was extremely upset with me. He seemed to feel I had defied instructions in speaking to Ben, which was absolutely not the case. The atmosphere had changed. I was heavy-hearted about that, because Brett was the one – more than anyone – I wanted to celebrate my win with, and I felt I couldn’t. Sure enough, when I arrived in Thailand, he was distant and just went about his business. No congratulations, no nothing.

  He did make one devastating gesture, however, which knocked me for six. He had a stash of cigars, which he had always said he would smoke when he had coached an ironman world champion. Now that he had, I’d given him a few more when we’d met in Singapore after Kona. Almost as soon as I arrived in Thailand, he wordlessly handed them back to me. To have made so angry the man I had always been so eager to please hit me very hard.

  But I know now that Brett struggles in the aftermath of a win like the one in Kona. He gets very depressed. I understand, because I feel it too, to a degree. You go through this euphoria, then all of a sudden you feel quite empty when it subsides and the long road ahead is revealed again. I can empathise with that, but I found this breakdown in our relationship incredibly difficult. I craved Brett’s approval. I had just won the biggest race in the world, and was so sincerely grateful to him for getting me there, yet I was unable to share it with him. He didn’t want to acknowledge any of it.

  Another part of my pain was that I could see where he was coming from. All he had ever wanted to do through the team was to find athletes, make them successful, manage them and with their help, bring on more. I was undermining that, he felt, or at least, the last part of it. He’d made me a star very quickly, and now, in his view, I was chasing the money.

  This notion touched a nerve, which I’m sure Brett realised. He knows how important the question of development is to me. Helping those less fortunate had been my career before I became a triathlete; it had been my reason for going to Nepal. It has been my life. I spent hours every week helping mentor the other athletes in the team, particularly the Filipinos who had come to train with us. In the season to come I spent many more hours working with Alex and Brett to formulate a coherent development strategy. I hated the idea of my commitment to those projects being questioned. But I also had my own security to think about. I didn’t see why the two had to be incompatible.

  I hated, too, this icy relationship with Brett. I appreciated everything he had done for me. I wanted so much to continue to work together. I needed him. I didn’t feel I was capable of succeeding without him.

  Things got worse before they got better. I raced averagely at Phuket, which was a unique race, length-wise – basically, Olympic distance but with a longer bike – and came fourth. From there, it was back home for Christmas.

  Trouble was brewing, though, on a number of fronts. First, the team had yet to decide on the bike sponsor for next season, who were also the main sponsor. One of the conditions of my staying on the team was that I had to take the same bike sponsor. Cervélo were up for renewing, but now, not only did we have Alex negotiating with them on the team’s behalf, we had Ben negotiating on mine. Second, I still had to be paid my prize money for Hawaii, which meant I still had to pay Brett his win bonus. Third, while we were in Thailand, Brett had been electrocuted in the shower. He was thrown across the bathroom, and now he was suffering short-term memory loss and occasional seizures. Fiona, his wife, was ‘scared shitless’, as he put it. I’m not sure he’s fully recovered even now.

  It made for an explosive cocktail. Brett was already bothered by all the advice I was suddenly getting from people on ‘Team Chrissie’, another of his phrases. This was not how he worked. He liked me to take orders from him and him alone, but now I had other people offering me their tuppence-worth on all kinds of matters, from sponsorship to training to physio. Brett was getting riled. He was also worried about the bike deal going through. He wanted it finalised as soon as possible, so that the team’s future might be secured for the year ahead. We agreed a package in the end, but there was a delay with the contracts. This meant a delay in the deal being signed. Brett, naturally, blamed this on Ben and me.

  He was also getting jumpy about the fact that I hadn’t paid him that commission on Hawaii. There was an agreement Brett had with all of his athletes, whereby they would pay him 20 per cent of their winnings from their top three races. This meant I owed him more than $20,000 from Kona. I couldn’t pay him until the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC) had paid me, and that still hadn’t happened. He was worried, though, in view of the money monster he so obviously thought I had become, that I was not going to pay him at all.

  Early in the new year, we exchanged a few emails. He seemed calm and philosophical, but there was the undercurrent of an uneasiness building in his words, and strong hints of melancholy. He was in Switzerland with his family, still recovering from his electrocution; I was in Norfolk with mine.

  ‘I am the lone ranger, kid,’ he wrote in one email. ‘That’s why I have grave doubts it will work. Now I am thinking I can no longer make you the best you can be. However, you are already world champion, so not a big problem.’

  He said that all these advisors would be coming at me, armed with qualifications and letters after their name, and that their advice would always conflict with what Brett the maverick had to say. He said the academic in me would instinctively lean towards them, or at least make me nervous about following the advice of the boy who left school at fourteen, or at the very least make me angry if I took his advice and then something went wrong. He remembered how I’d told him I would be the one to break the pattern of his successful athletes leaving him. He also said that we humans can live with absolute misery, but it’s hope that destroys us. He was clearly dejected.

  About a week further on, though, and still with no money from my win in Hawaii, he was getting angry:

  you want to be alternative, but you also crave the normality. it sounds great to you to have all these advisors, as it is to go train in places where you got people you like, and the atmosphere is lovey-dovey and relaxed. but you are a product of the atmosphere you’re in. you, girl, work best athletically when you’re a demon, a fucking omen, and you might not like it, but we both know you have it. i just exploited it, while using a whip and a chair to keep it under control.

  now, you want normal. sorry, you’re not, and your old boss is not. we rail against the system. the difference is, you also crave to be accepted by societies.

  i don’t.

  To my surprise, it was only when I had been paid the prize money for Kona and had the $20,000 ready to transfer into his bank account that things started to improve between us. I say surprise, because it suggested he really had thought that I was not going to pay him. Surely he knew me better than that, even if he felt I had been corrupted by financial considerations.

  He offered me an olive branch – just after he’d sent me his bank details. He outlined his vision for how we could move on:

  you pay the money. you tell me team chrissie is:

  coach, b sutton

  strength and conditioning, b sutton

  sports scientist, b sutton

  exercise physiologist, b sutton

  shrink, b sutton

  the reason: i went thru it very carefully, and they are the best in their field in each speciality in triathlon. if these appointments are acceptable t
hen i will see my way clear to deal honestly with ben, as long as he sticks to his job.

  With Alex mediating, we settled our differences by email and on the phone. I was staying on the team.

  It had been a horrible, horrible stand-off, one that had rattled me to the core. To my mind, I still needed Brett, so to feel that he was turning me away was to feel completely exposed. But I knew, as well, that he was not in the best of states, emotionally or physically. He’d gone back for downtime in Switzerland, suffering from the repercussions of his electrocution. For him then to turn over and over in his head the impression that I was about to do what he claims so many of his other successful athletes had done – leave him after he had coached them to success – would have done nothing for his mood. I under stood all that, so it wasn’t long before I was able to view his barbs in context. I was glad to be staying with him.

  And I wanted to stay on the team. I had paid my dues and since Kona I had felt much more accepted. Maybe Brett was right about my need to belong, or my desire to, anyway. I’ve always had friends in my life. It had taken me a while to crack my triathlon team-mates, but now that I had, I wanted to enjoy their friendship for a bit longer.

  So it was with relief that I was able to join up with them all at our new training base in Subic Bay, an old US naval base in the Philippines. Relief, mixed with sadness, because my dear old grandad, Harry, passed away peacefully in his sleep just before I left, aged 101. One of the first things I did when I was interviewed after my win in Kona was to pay tribute to him, an inspiration whose long life put into perspective any feats of endurance I might have been attempting. Now he was gone. It felt like a new season, all right. Kona already seemed a long time ago.

  Things were fine between Brett and me once we got to Subic Bay. It wasn’t as if nothing had happened, but we were both keen to make it work. Alex may not have been my manager any more, but Brett was my coach, and I had no problems falling in with the usual routines – in other words, surrendering any notion of free will. I followed his every order, as I always had done, and that helped our relationship enormously, as it always had done. I think he respected me for it. He knew then that Hawaii hadn’t gone to my head.

  It was a head that now wore the crown, as he kept telling me. He lectured me a lot on the wearing of that crown, and in doing so he was back to his best; the usual, strident Brett.

  ‘Train right, and let the cards fall where they may,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve seen too many world champions not adjust for the pressure. They fret about their performances. They train and they race with the crown on their head. It’s too fucking heavy. Take my tip. Take it off, put it in a box and place it in the cupboard. It’ll be there when you’re finished. Don’t let it kill you or stop you from putting a few more in there to go with it. Don’t debate this. I’m so right, it’s not funny.’

  There was little prospect of any crown-wearing out in the Philippines. I love the country, and I love flogging myself under Brett’s tutelage, but there were no airs and graces out there. The former naval base is about 40km long by about 10km wide. It is now what’s known as a free port, a kind of economic haven with tax and customs breaks, all contained within the fence that used to surround the base. We rarely ventured beyond it. We were ironman triathletes, so that meant a lot of bike work up and down what were essentially the two main roads in the complex. I have an unusually high capacity for enduring boredom, which was just as well, because we soon knew every inch of those roads.

  The accommodation left a bit to be desired. I was sharing a house with two others, and in the first week it was broken into. So Brett moved us into a hotel. Which was also a brothel. There were girls screaming throughout the night and doors were banging. I couldn’t imagine professional athletes in many other sports having to deal with this. But we knew better than to complain.

  All of which was in stark contrast to what greeted me at my first ironman of the season – Ironman Australia in Port Macquarie at the start of April. All of a sudden, everything was laid on. I was flown over for the race; Ben had negotiated an appearance fee; they put me up in a stunning apartment overlooking the ocean. I don’t deny that it was great – certainly, it made the job of preparing for a race a lot easier. I didn’t miss the poverty of my race accommodation the year before. Besides, I had had plenty of that back at the brothel.

  But if life was cushier, it came with the added pressure of being the champion. Everyone knew who I was. I sat in front of press conferences. I posed for photographs. I have never felt entirely comfortable in front of the camera, but winning in Hawaii seemed to have given me confidence. And, when I saw people wanting to be photographed with me, and how my story seemed to energise them, the pleasure of inspiring such enthusiasm swept all self-consciousness away. I loved being world champion. To me it meant pleasure, not pressure. It gave me a platform. I like to be able to speak to people about issues I’m passionate about, to convey messages and to inspire, and it’s so much easier to do that when you have a voice.

  The race went well. It was pouring with rain, and I was overtaken quite early on the bike by Kate Major, but I’d regained the lead 30km before transition and then finished with a three-hour run. I won in a course record of just over nine hours.

  That was the first time I performed a ‘Blazeman roll’ over the finish line. After my win in Kona, I had met Bob and Mary Ann Blais, parents of Jon, the ironman athlete who had died of ALS, a form of motor-neurone disease, only six months earlier. I never met him, but his story, discussed later in this book, cannot but touch your heart. Bob and Mary Ann have become close friends, and I am a patron of the charity in his name, the Blazeman Foundation. At the end of every race since I met them, I have performed a Blazeman roll across the finish line in honour of Jon.

  To have been doing it in first place was a huge relief. However well Hawaii had gone, there’s always the nagging fear that it might have been because the others had had a bad day, or that it had simply been a fluke. To back it up with another win, my third out of three at ironman distance, was very important. You start to feel that it might not be a fluke after all.

  Which was all well and good, but Brett would never let me rest on my laurels. He still thought I should keep my hand in at Olympic-distance racing. There was almost no chance of me making the Beijing Olympics later that year, but all the same he had convinced me to enter the ITU World Cup race in Tongyeong, South Korea, three weeks later. There were problems, though. The first was that Olympic-distance races require a road bike, not a time-trial bike, and I didn’t have a road bike. The second problem was that, well, it was three weeks after an ironman, and on a different continent. Such details tend not to concern Brett. So it was up to me to find some road bars for my time-trial bike, which turned out to be a head ache. And nobody could do anything about the issues relating to time and space.

  Racing Tongyeong wasn’t a wise decision. I came twenty-second. By that point, I didn’t think I was ever going to make Beijing anyway, but I definitely wasn’t going to after that. It drew a line under any aspirations I might have had in that direction, but it also made me realise how much I preferred ironman. I would have liked to have arrived at that realisation on my own terms, rather than to have had it thrust upon me by an impossible schedule, but it probably didn’t make any difference. I don’t believe you can juggle ironman with Olympic-distance racing, so we were always going to have to make the choice, and it was pretty obvious by now that ironman was the distance for me. My spam box keeps telling me that size matters, and in this respect I agree. There’s something about the sheer length of the ironman that inspires awe among all triathletes, and I was happy to devote myself to it, even if it meant no Olympics. Kona would be my Olympics, and I got to do it every year.

  So with that matter cleared up, it was back to Leysin in May for the summer training camp. I felt focused and at ease – a happy place to be. I love Leysin. What more could you want than to be ‘at work’ in the Alps? It’s beautiful, it’s remote a
nd it’s peaceful. And the training is great. Life is very easy there. What’s more, I now had a far nicer apartment closer to the centre of town. I had friendships with my team-mates that were really blossoming, particularly with Belinda Granger, Donna Phelan and Hillary Biscay. You know you’ve bonded with girlfriends when you go with them to see Sex and the City. Belinda, Donna and I watched it in the room with a big screen that passes as Leysin’s cinema. We went for dinner beforehand. It was such a treat, as we generally led such monkish lives. And, just as importantly, I had organised it. In my previous life I had always been proactive in organising friends and functions, so this small development made me feel a bit more normal again. To have gone from that previous life to feeling ostracised and alone had been so hard, but now I felt as if I had found my place again among friends, not enemies. The on-going intensity of the training meant that I was physically in the best shape of my life, but this new happiness was doing great things for me mentally, and that kind of contentment is so important when you are an athlete.

  The relationship that dominated, as always, was the one I had with Brett. By the time we got to Leysin it was better than ever. Mainly because I was no longer quite so scared of him, and yet I was still desperate to please and impress him, to win that rubber stamp of approval. We used to do hill repeats, up and down the hill outside Brett’s apartment, and he would be standing there in his misshapen, baggy blue tracksuit bottoms, tucked into his equally misshapen beige Ugg boots, with some kind of shirt – he had a lilac one, a blue one – buttoned up all wrong. But I would always sneak in a glance to check he was looking at me. Then he would pull me aside afterwards and simply say, ‘Good job’. That was enough.