Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  He came back with me to Putney and stayed the night, which was very unusual for me, to have that level of intimacy so quickly. The next day, as luck would have it, was Valentine’s Day. We had both bought each other a card, and he had gone so far as to buy me a rose. More brownie points – he could stay again.

  So he did. We went for a pub dinner at the Telegraph on Putney Heath. The next day I was going for lunch with my parents and brother, to say farewell before I left for Boulder. After Tom had stayed again, I took a deep breath and told him I was meeting my family that day, feel totally free to say no, I mean, this is all a bit soon, isn’t it, but I’m going to America tomorrow, you probably won’t want to, but do you think, um, would it be a not totally stupid idea if you, er . . . Do you want to come?

  He smiled and said, yes, of course he did.

  Oh, wow, this was getting serious, I thought. I’d known this guy for barely a fortnight, and he was about to meet my family! But I knew it was the right thing to do. I was off the next day, so there had been no choice but to force the pace in our relationship, and he handled it effortlessly. We went to my brother’s flat in Streatham and then for a pub lunch. He got on so well with them. My brother, in particular, really liked him, which was very important to me.

  Even if I was off to another continent, I was determined now to make this work. I hadn’t had a boyfriend for the best part of a decade, but for the first time I had found a man who made me want to change that. Tom is easygoing, yet authoritative. He is accommodating, but not the sort to be walked over. He didn’t seem to be at all bothered about the fact that I was world champion. Indeed, he made it clear from an early stage that he intended to beat me at ironman.

  He had been in the army for twelve years, working on telecommunications. They had given him time off to train and race competitively at middle-distance running and duathlon, in which he had represented Great Britain. He was fighting a three-year battle with a knee injury, but he was about to leave the army to train full time. In other words, he knew what kind of life I was leading. He had the same aspirations, too – the pursuit of sporting excellence, a desire to travel and an open mind. He was perfect.

  The next day, he drove me to Heathrow, and I flew off to Boulder to start training properly with Simon. Everything went smoothly from the moment I got there. Simon went to great lengths to settle me, showing me round and introducing me to people. I took a room in the house of a friend of his, Mark Gavach, just round the corner from where Simon lived.

  Boulder is a great place, liberal, relaxed and vibrant. The University of Colorado dominates the city, which is politically left of centre, until you venture out into the rolling farmland beyond, where it swings the other way. The bumper stickers at any point will tell you all you need to know.

  In the centre of town there is a pedestrianised precinct, lined with independent shops, buskers and street artists. You never have to go far to find a vibrant bar and music scene and alternative therapies, including legalised marijuna, are popular. But there is another side to the place, which attracts athletes by the bucketload – its sporty, health-conscious spirit. Triathletes of every level flock there. Dave Scott and Mark Allen came and made it their home; hordes of others have followed.

  In terms of training for a triathlon, it has everything. Boulder lies on a plateau around 1,600m above sea level. From out of that plateau rise the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The city is overlooked by a famous rocky structure known as the Flatirons, five smooth flat faces each rising to a peak, which have the look of five irons resting on the ironing board of the Great Plains. Beyond them, the hills swell into the Rockies.

  It is perfect for cycling and running. There is rolling farmland, there are the climbs through the hills into the mountains. For runners there are some wonderful trails, and then there is the Res, as it is known – a large reservoir where all manner of water sports are accommodated.

  Flatiron Athletic Club is where most athletes train, elite athletes right the way down to Dave Scott’s father, Vern, who is still cranking out 4km swims, aged eighty-seven. This was not Leysin, where we were tucked away in a mountain retreat. Here you were thrown in with hundreds of other athletes, only a few of whom were pros. I found it hard initially. I felt as if I were being watched, as if I had to put on a performance the whole time. As someone who loathes showing any weakness, I hated it if I had a bad day in front of everybody. But it also helped me to let go. I began to realise, as I do now, that people weren’t judging me as much as I presumed they were. If I had a bad swim session, for example, no one thought any less of me for it.

  But the goldfish-bowl phenomenon formed the background in those early days to what quickly became an unhappy relationship with Simon. It was always going to be difficult, I guess, for whoever coached me after Brett. I probably did Cliff a big favour by not going with him, and I probably did Simon none by choosing him instead. But Simon didn’t do himself many favours, either.

  He has mellowed a lot since then and now has a deservedly successful coaching practice, but at this stage he was only recently retired from his glittering career as an athlete. It seemed to me as if he couldn’t let go of it. These weren’t training sessions he was organising, they were competitions. We would go on a three-hour ride, and he would shoot off into the distance. Then he’d come back and say, ‘Chrissie, you’re pushing too big a gear,’ and I would think, ‘How do you know? You’re ten miles up the road!’ They felt like Simon’s training sessions, not mine. It was also demoralising to spend your time chasing, literally, the man you were paying to be your coach. I think he still felt he had a lot to offer as an athlete, which – believe me, as someone who has spent so much time trying to keep up with him – he did. It was as if he was constantly trying to prove himself to us, physically. But I didn’t want someone who could prove himself physically, and being a competitive sort myself I really didn’t enjoy the way he kept proving how much faster he was than me. I wanted someone who could watch me as I trained and make sound judgements on what was happening, rather than on what he thought was happening from several miles down the road.

  And, OK, I admit it – I couldn’t shake off the shadow of Brett either. I was constantly comparing Simon’s programmes with his. I was constantly asking myself what Brett would say about this and that. In most cases, the answer was unprintable. I would challenge Simon with this, but he stood his ground. Who would want to have their methods constantly compared to those of someone else? Simon felt he was always playing second fiddle to this ghost, but he had consummate faith in his programme and remained inflexible. A coach does need to have faith in his methods – Simon was no different from Brett in that regard – but, if you can’t convince your athlete, the relationship is doomed.

  Very quickly, I started adding and removing things from my programme. I started forging relationships with other people. The British Olympian Julie Dibens was one pro I bonded with especially quickly. She coached herself, and that sowed some seeds in my mind. I started going to places and people other than the ones Simon told me to go to – new bike fitters, Dave Scott’s swim sessions.

  The upshot of it all was that I drifted apart from Simon. By the end of March, barely a month after I had moved out there, our relationship was strained and uneasy. When I flew to Sydney for the defence of my Ironman Australia title, it was with relief to be getting away.

  I love flying into Sydney. The Opera House, the Harbour Bridge – it’s a beautiful, beautiful city, and it reminds me of so many happy times. It was not at its best then, though. It was pouring with rain. Pouring when I got there, pouring when I got to Port Macquarie, pouring all week. There was doubt over whether the race could go ahead at all, but there was a real possibility of its becoming a duathlon, with the swim dropped. The water at an ironman has to satisfy certain standards of quality, and the swim for Ironman Australia takes place in an estuary. All kinds of things had been washed down from the farmlands and hills into the water. Not knowing about the swim made t
he week’s preparation hard to handle, mentally.

  They had put me up in the same place as the year before, The Observatory, a beautiful apartment block, even when the rain is lashing non-stop against the french windows onto your balcony over the ocean. Also staying there were Nicole and Tim DeBoom. Tim has won at Kona twice. I had never met them, but they are fantastic people. I shared with them my fears about whether I could live up to expectations at the race. My confidence was not overflowing, just because I knew Brett didn’t have my back. I was in the enemy camp now, and, what’s more, the girl to beat was Bek Keat, whose generosity with the gas canister had saved my bacon in Kona. She had just changed coaches, too. You guessed it: she was with Brett now. I knew he would have revised a plan for her. It was unnerving.

  We ended up racing the full triathlon, which I am particularly glad about, because it was the strength of my swim that set me up for what followed. The water might have passed the tests, but it was brown, warm and full of debris – weeds, logs and if rumours are to be believed there might have been a cow in there somewhere. I didn’t feel I was going particularly fast (who would, wading through all of that?), but I came out of the water first, neck and neck with Bek.

  On the bike I started to pull away. The rain was torrential at times, and I developed a niggle in my leg, which started to concern me. Would I be able to run? All you can do is block it out and believe that it will go away.

  The roads were lined with umbrellas and waterproofs – not that the Aussie spirit was ever dampened. At no other ironman do the spectators offer you beer at regular intervals. At no other ironman have I been offered seven proposals of marriage, as I was on that race, two of them from women! And I think the flasher in the raincoat who appeared out of a bush towards the end of the bike leg was offering me something as well.

  It all served to keep the adrenaline pumping, and by the time I was out on the run I was feeling comfortable. The niggle, whatever it was, had gone, and the miles fell away to the sound of crashing waves, cheers and the offers of alcohol. I finished in under nine hours, for only the second time, and I had my sixth ironman win out of six, twenty-four minutes ahead of Bek in second.

  I have read Brett say somewhere that it was my complete race. It was certainly an important one. Brett was gone, and to win my first race without him as comfortably as I did was a huge boost to my confidence. For him to acknowledge that I was racing better than ever felt strangely as if I had his blessing.

  It did a lot for my confidence, which meant it didn’t do much to help my relationship with Simon. When I returned to Boulder, I pretty much developed my own programme. Mentally, I had all but left him, even if our professional relationship would run for another few months yet.

  My next ironman was to be Challenge Roth in July. Before then, I had a short-course race in Columbia, Maryland. This ended up being a defining race for me. I had entered it almost as a training exercise, to break me out of my long-course comfort zone and to work on my speed. It was also important to me as a means of supporting the Blazeman Foundation, the nominated charity. But I didn’t respect the race, I didn’t prepare properly and I simply didn’t perform. I came sixth. It felt as if my world had caved in.

  It was not the first time I hadn’t won a race, and certainly not the first time I hadn’t won a short-course race. But this was my biggest flop relative to expectations. I had come twenty-second in Tongyeong the season before as a world champion, but that had been only three weeks after Ironman Australia and against a top-class field of Olympic-distance athletes. In this race, however, I really should have made it onto the podium, at least.

  I could bore you with all the reasons why I didn’t, but there are no excuses. The controllables were not controlled. Something, I am ashamed to say, approaching arrogance was the root problem. I did not shut myself away in the build-up, as I would have done for an ironman. My days were spent meeting people and eating out irresponsibly – heavy meals I would never have dreamed of eating before an ironman. There were other things I couldn’t have controlled, such as the fire alarm that went off at my hotel the night before and wouldn’t stop, and, possibly related, the wild party in the room next door. I kept telling them to turn it down, but of course that only made it worse. They were very definitely not controllable.

  When I woke up in no state to race I had only myself to blame. I just couldn’t get my body to cooperate. This can happen. It happens in training, it happens in the ebb and flow of even an ironman, when the body is screaming at the mind; but it usually passes. Here, it stayed throughout the race. And when it does happen there’s a good reason for it, and it’s usually to be found in some inadequacy in your preparation. As a control freak, failing to control the controllables is something I cannot accept, because it means I have left myself open to failure through malpractice. I was incredibly hard on myself after Columbia. For a week I was in turmoil, utterly despondent. Simon got it in the neck. He, perfectly sensibly, told me to bank it and move on. I found myself pinning yet more blame on him, which in this case was totally unfair as I had stopped following his programme. I was in tears on the phone to Tom.

  It made me draw lessons, certainly. Most of them about the importance of preparation.

  But it also made me question the concept of winning and losing. I hadn’t won; therefore I had lost. But what did losing mean to me? Surely, I had visited a part of the world I had wanted to come to. Maryland is beautiful, very like home, with rolling farmland and deciduous forest. I had supported the Blazeman Foundation. I had met some amazing people, including the race organiser, Robert Vigorito, who remains a friend to this day. I’d stayed at the finish line and hung medals round the necks of all the other age-groupers. In so many ways, even if less tangible, the trip had been a success and so worthwhile. It forced me to learn to accept so-called defeat. There’s still a lot for me to learn on that front, but the importance, which Brett was so keen to impress upon me, of being able to separate out what happens in the race from those other things that might enrich me is brought home when I reflect on Columbia.

  Things went better in June, when I won a half-ironman in Lawrence, Kansas. I hadn’t been able to resist the chance to race in the state of The Wizard of Oz. As a child, my Scarecrow had taken the Feltwell Fête by storm, so this was a special pilgrimage for me. I stayed with the race organiser, Ryan Robinson, in his beautiful house. He and his wife, Jenni, and their boys, Hunter, Hayden and Hudson, looked after me royally. Hudson, who was three, was in fancy dress at the finish line, alongside Dorothy, Scarecrow (a rival version), Tin Man and the (not so) Cowardly Lion. Hand in hand, he and I ran down the Yellow Brick Road to the finish line. What a thing, to marry victory with such iconography from a girl’s childhood!

  As usual, we partied at the finish till the last competitor had made it home. It was a wonderful weekend, but one of the highlights would have to be my chance to meet an institution of Lawrence, the legendary Red Dog. He is a guy in his seventies, who reminded me of Frank Horwill. Since 1984 he has led community workouts, called Dog Days. The set-up is basically Red Dog (or Don Gardner, as he was more boringly named), a megaphone and a field of as many as a thousand locals. He and his wife Beverley run three of these gatherings, every day in the summer, at six in the morning, midday and six in the evening, and twice weekly in the winter. They use the city’s sports stadium, entry is free, and the assembled masses include people of all ages and all standards. Red Dog belts out the instructions for his off-the-cuff routines, and hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes follow his lead.

  I was truly inspired. Every community around the world would benefit from this sort of activity. It reaffirmed for me the power of one individual to effect change, and the power of sport to unite people. There were two-year-old children taking part, eighty-year-old grannies and everything in between. In these fragmented times, when people go to the gym, stick an iPod in their ear and work out alone, this simple model represented a heroic counter-revolution. It left me buzzing with
excitement.

  Back at Boulder, I was now, by early July, to all intents and purposes my own boss. I was doing bike sessions with a few pros, including Julie. I attended the swim sessions at Flatirons run by Dave Scott and others. I drew heavily on Brett’s programme, with a few ideas from Simon thrown in. The goldfish-bowl aspect of living in Boulder was getting easier to handle, and I found it actually had much to commend it – a world away from the isolated, claustrophobic bubble of life on Team TBB.

  The next event on my schedule now was Challenge Roth. This is one of the oldest and most famous races on the circuit. It used to host Ironman Europe, but it is no longer part of the WTC series of official ‘Ironman’ races. It is run by a family company headed by the passionate Felix Walchshofer, who inherited the organisation from his late father, Herbert. The politics that led to their split with the WTC in 2001 are complicated, but they have grown their race in Roth, a town in Bavaria, into a series of races around the world, called the Challenge series. It is a rival to the Ironman series, which means that the latter do not recognise the records of the former. This is a shame, because Roth is and always has been a fast course, and the fastest times over ironman distance have been recorded there. The men’s world record of 7hr 50min 27sec had been set there in 1997 by Luc van Lierde, which was OK because that was pre-split. The women’s world record, however, was not officially recognised by the WTC, because that had been set at Roth only the year before by Yvonne van Klerken, in other words post-split.