Life Without Limits, A
Page 21
It’s all a bit of a shame. Nevertheless, there was a lot of speculation before the race over whether I would break the women’s world record, unofficial or otherwise. I couldn’t wait to try. Roth was one of the first ironman races I had known about. When I turned pro, I remember Belinda raving about it. She had raced it five times and regularly used to wax lyrical about the atmosphere, the organisation and the race itself. The year before, I had found Ironman Germany in Frankfurt incredibly special. I could only guess at what an event this must be. And, yes, maybe I could become the fastest female ironman (note the lower case!) athlete of all time. At least this time I knew what the record was.
I felt in great shape, but about ten days before the race I was overtaken by a strange condition. I was in Boulder when I developed an odd sensation in my right upper arm. It was somewhere between an itch and somebody stabbing me. I thought I’d just been bitten by something.
It didn’t go away; in fact, it started to get worse and was keeping me awake at night. I did a Google, and all the symptoms indicated it was shingles. Ice was the only thing that alleviated the pain. A week before the race I was running round getting blood tests, seeing neurologists and my sports doctor. Nothing came up in the blood tests, but they put me on anti-viral tablets anyway. On the plane over to Germany I was beside myself with discomfort. Not for the first time, I was wondering how I was going to race. I didn’t feel ill or particularly run down, but I wasn’t getting any sleep, and I was just so tired.
Kathrin Walchshofer, Felix’s sister, met me at the airport and was my first introduction to the unparalleled care and support that Challenge provide for their athletes. She dropped me at my apartment, and as it was Sunday and all the shops were shut she brought me a basket of goodies to tide me over. I confided in her about my condition, imploring her not to tell anyone, not even her brother. To my knowledge she kept her word, and she did everything she could to help me seek treatment.
We went down the natural-remedy route. It turns out that for shingles, which all of the medics were assuming it was, there are three. I spent the week munching chillies, drinking vinegar and crushing leeks with a pestle and mortar, then rubbing them into my upper arm. I stank. I told Tom and Ben about it and spoke to my mum, who had suffered from shingles. Oddly, I wasn’t getting the rash that commonly goes with it; just this awful stabbing sensation in my arm.
But let’s leave me there, stinking from a cocktail of vinegar, chilli and leek, my mouth burning, my skin seething; let’s focus on Roth. It is a picturesque town in typical Bavarian style, about 25km south of Nuremberg, surrounded by equally picturesque Bavarian villages, through which the race wends its way. Around 4,500 competitors take part, cheered on by around 120,000 spectators. The Germans are incredibly passionate about the sport. In places, the support is like that at the Tour de France. The Solarer Berg climb is unlike anything else on the ironman circuit. Crowds five deep on either side roar you on up the incline. In places they close up to leave a passage only a few feet across, and a motorbike has to carve a way through them. Spectators play chicken with the riders as they lean forward to cheer them on, then pull away as they pass, precipitating a kind of Mexican wave as each rider runs the gauntlet. The noise of their rattles, whistles and cheers is non-stop. Then there is the Beer Mile at Eckersmuhlen, where tables and benches line the route, at which spectators sit down to watch and drink beer from seven in the morning. And, yes, the temptation just to stop and join them is almost unbearable.
The course is closed to traffic, and the signs directing you on the route are permanent, making the whole event feel like a part of the local landscape. It does inspire you, constantly. It’s no surprise to me that the fastest times in ironman history have been recorded there.
On the day itself, the conditions were perfect, and the journalists were wetting themselves with excitement. I hadn’t been confident at all because of my arm, but if there is one talent I do have it is an ability to put such doubts aside on the big occasion. I don’t know how it happens. For no obvious reason, I performed as if I didn’t have a care in the world. Not once throughout the race was my arm a problem. Then, at the press conference afterwards, it came back and continued to plague me in the days that followed.
Mine’s not to reason why. The important thing was that I raced as I’d never raced before. The swim was good, although there was room for improvement. It reinforced the need to concentrate at the start and get in among the flying body parts and on the feet of the fastest swimmers. Leanda Cave held a clear lead, but I came out of the water only slightly behind Bek Keat, who once again was shaping up to be my main rival. Brett had been working his magic on her, and she was responding.
The bike ride was the best I had ever ridden. And, it turned out, the best any other woman had ever ridden. The road surface at Roth is immaculate. There are climbs on the course, but there are also some nice, gentle descents. It took around 40km before I could put any distance between me and Bek, which I needed to, because she can run like the wind. As can Catriona Morrison, the Scottish athlete (and another good friend) who was racing in her first ironman and was hot on Bek’s heels for most of it. I overtook Leanda at about 60km. I just felt stronger and stronger on the bike. The sight of my brother at the top of Solarer Berg jumping up and down, screaming, ‘Give it some, Christine!’ was particularly uplifting. I’d never seen him so emotional. The last 10km is slightly downhill, and I steamed into T2. My time of 4hr 40min 28sec was a new world record for a bike split. Maths has never been my strong point, but I knew I must have been roughly on track to make history.
I felt pretty good for the first 10km of the marathon, too, but that was actually where I lost some ground to Bek and Cat. I knew I couldn’t let up for a moment. Then from kilometres fifteen to twenty-five I started to feel like a plank of wood. That is when you just have to switch off the brain and go into autopilot. It wasn’t until the final 5km that I really came out of it. By then I knew it was in the bag. People were shouting at me that I was on course to smash the record. With about 3km to go, you’re presented with a range of hands to high-five, and you oblige. But I didn’t want to celebrate until the finish line was in sight. As I said, maths has never been my strong point, but I knew my swim and bike times, and, roughly, what my transition times were, so I could tot it up. But the ironman athlete’s mentality of one step at a time somehow doesn’t allow the sum total to register fully.
It wasn’t until I’d turned into Stadtpark to see the finish line that it hit me. There was the clock, and it read 8hr 31sec. I was flabbergasted. There were a few yards still to go, but I was going to break the world record by nearly a quarter of an hour! The noise was deafening, as Tina Turner blared loud over the cheering crowd: ‘You’re simply the best!’ Four children followed me to the line trailing balloons. I waved and laughed and cried. A bouquet was thrust into my hand, and a Union Jack.
I reached for the tape 8hr 31min 59sec after we’d started. I’d improved Yvonne van Vlerken’s mark by 13min 49sec. The elation was overwhelming. After the doubts and the shingles, I really felt I had achieved something remarkable. I dropped immediately to the floor to perform the Blazeman roll over the line and was hugged by Felix. Then came my mum and dad and brother, who were among about twenty friends and family at the finish. They give you a massive, three-litre glass of beer. I poured it over myself. Maybe it would help the shingles.
Bek crossed the finish line eight and a half minutes after I did. She, too, had beaten Yvonne’s mark. She poured her beer over me as well. Cat came in nine minutes after that, breaking the nine-hour barrier in her first ironman. And Belinda came in fifth, having been hit by a car the week before.
It was a great day for the girls. We were pushing back boundaries in our sport. I’ll take their word for it, but the mathematicians told me later that I had closed to within 7.5 per cent of the winning man’s time – normally it is about 10 or 11 per cent. These were heady days! Anything seemed possible. We had raised the bar.
Before we get too carried away, records in ironman are arbitrary. It is not a controlled environment, as it is in an athletics stadium. You can be fitter and stronger, but there might be a hellish wind on the bike, so your bike leg is ten minutes slower. And people then speculate that you’re not as good as you were. Wrong.
Times are not necessarily the best indicator of performance, but they are one of them. Is it more satisfying to break a world record than to win at Kona? No. I want to beat the best athletes in the world in the most important race of the year. That’s what Kona requires of you. Doesn’t matter how. I just want to beat the buggers. Once you’ve done that, you receive a gold medal that can never be taken away from you, whereas your world record is ephemeral and there precisely to be taken away. So winning is the most important thing. But second is the time.
The party continued long into the night. We stayed at the finish line, as always. It meant so much to share it with those closest to me. It was the first race my brother had ever been to, which was special.
Important people were there from all stages of my life. My cousin Tim made his usual appearance and cried his usual tears at the finish. This time he was joined by my other cousin, Rob; Billi was there, fresh from the summit of Everest; my Manchester University friends, Naomi (now pregnant), Laura and Rich; and Jules from, well, just down the road. Jules is my longest-standing friend. I’d stayed with her and her family in Bavaria as part of an exchange programme during my schooldays, when MC Hammer was all the rage and my hair was large. Little had I known I would be returning nearly twenty years later to break a world record! Jules and I have remained friends ever since – she lives in London now – and a few days after Roth I went to see her at her family home once more.
Roth had been a chance to see Tom, as well. He had spent a week with me in Boulder in April, but otherwise our relationship had consisted of endless Skyping, which was suboptimal but better than nothing, I suppose. Having him there was really special, and our relationship just grew stronger. We stayed in Europe after the race and embarked on a magical mystery tour of France and Germany for ten more days, taking in the Tour de France and the wedding of Gabriel, my friend from my teaching days in Boston. We rounded it all off by staying with Billi and celebrating her triumph on Everest. She lives in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, an Alpine town on the border with Austria. We had a lazy few days with her, during which we climbed the local mountain, named Wank. Cue a lot of comedy photos. But wait till you get to the top. You can eat, and even stay, in the mountain hut up there. It’s called Wank-Haus.
Suitably refreshed, Tom and I headed for Munich airport and went our separate ways, he to England, I to Boulder. That was it in terms of quality time together for the next few months. I knew more than ever that this was going to work, and that I wanted it to. I was in love with him by now, and because we were both confident the other felt the same way, there were no huge, teary goodbyes. It wasn’t as if we were never going to see each other again. Leaving was sad, but I’m pretty pragmatic about these things. What can you do? You have to spend time away in our profession but if the will’s there, you do what it takes to make it work. It helps, certainly, to have been single for so much of my twenties. I’m used to being on my own, and I know how to look after myself. I would have loved to spend more time with Tom, but I didn’t need to. Knowing that he was simply there, though, put a spring in my step. I returned to Boulder ready to take on anything.
That meant tackling, finally, the situation with Simon. This was definitely not putting a spring in my step, so it had to end. The final split came at the running track. He knew that I hadn’t been following his programme, so he’d guessed it was coming. In effect, our relationship had been over for a while, but bar a couple of inquests into why it was misfiring, we hadn’t quite faced up to it.
‘It isn’t working,’ I told him at a track session. ‘I don’t believe in the programme. It’s too different from what I was doing before.’
He didn’t take it lying down, nor did I imagine he would. ‘You can’t let go of Brett,’ he retorted. ‘You’re not willing to try new things. There’s no way it’s going to work if you’re not going to follow what I set you.’
I accepted that. It wasn’t easy for him to coach me, when I came with such a rigid idea of how things should be done, instilled in me by so powerful a personality as Brett. After that, there was probably only one other person who could be my coach, and that was me. Julie was doing all right for herself as her own coach, so why shouldn’t I? In August, though, I started working in an informal way with Dave Scott – mostly strength and conditioning initially, but he set me a programme leading into Kona that year, and our relationship was to develop from there.
Julie was showing me how to do things in more ways than one. My next race was the long-course triathlon in Boulder. I found it strange preparing for a race at home on the course where I train. There was none of the travel and sense of anticipation that usually precedes the big day. On this particular big day, Julie was the better athlete. I came in second. It was a big disappointment, as always, not to win, but this was not quite Columbia. Julie is a top-class athlete, and losing is a very real possibility any time you toe the line with her. I hurt for a couple of days, but I suppose I took some consolation from the fact that it wasn’t an ironman. This was becoming an unhealthy situation, I realised. The ‘oh well, it wasn’t an ironman’ line of reasoning after any defeat was all very well, but where was I going to go if I ever lost one of those? I was now feeling as if the ironman was somehow my special race. Nothing could come between me and the ironman. But what if it ever did? How was I going to cope? It didn’t bear thinking about.
Before heading back to Kona, I had one more race, the Timberman half-ironman in New Hampshire. I won it, but my run wasn’t pretty. For a while, I had been carrying a niggle in my right hamstring. I didn’t know it then, but it was a hamstring tendinopathy. I had told Brett about it when it had first developed in 2008. He made me wear rubber pants. He made me put green clay on it and wrap it in cling film. The pain would come and go, come and go, but now it was coming more than it was going. I’d lost the fluidity in my run and felt heavy and stiff. It hurt and was starting to plague me mentally. By the time Kona came along, seven weeks later, it was still troubling me.
One of my favourite moments is landing at Kona airport. That wave of warm air hits you on arrival. The smell of the bougainvilleas, the lei that is put round my neck by my Kona ‘mom and dad’ John and Linda, the smiles and the pre-race buzz lift the spirits. This is the island that has changed my life. I always feel as if I am coming home.
I savoured the week’s build-up. Kona is a circus, but I was happy to expose myself to it now. I choose to run along Ali’i Drive, knowing that the attention I attract will give me a boost and add to the sense of occasion. But then I go straight back to the apartment and shut the door.
Behind that closed door, I was becoming increasingly concerned. My hamstring was so painful I was doubting whether I could run anywhere near my potential. An added dimension was the presence of Mirinda Carfrae for the first time. She had qualified by winning the Ironman 70.3 World Championships the year before. This was going to be her first full-length ironman – it was even her first marathon – so she was an unknown quantity. But what we all knew about was her running speed. If I was going to beat her, the damage would have to be done on the bike.
I sat with her at the pre-race press conference. Someone asked how I had improved since last year. I took the microphone and said: ‘I’m stronger on th
e swim, stronger on the bike and stronger on the run.’
It was a bluff. True enough, maybe, for the swim and the bike, but my running was a major source of concern. This, though, was the most effective way of putting down a marker without inviting further scrutiny. Pick up the microphone, say something punchy, put the microphone back down again. I have never been a great one for ‘smack talk’, the art perfected by Chris McCormack, whereby athletes look for an edge through pre-race pronouncements, as a heavyweight boxer might. Here, though, was a rare example. It was relayed across the triathlon press in the build-up, creating a standard for myself to live up to and, hopefully, giving my competitors something to think about. I could see the benefit of that.
The big day dawned, and I was encouraged by an unusual steadiness in my bowels. This was the first time I had ever raced an ironman and not been plagued by gastrointestinal issues. In short, I didn’t shit myself once, nor did I have to go in anybody’s garden. I had a new pre-race meal – gone were the English muffins with cream cheese and honey; in came rice cereal with honey and nut butter. I drank a nice big cup of coffee as well, and didn’t take caffeine tablets during the race. The key might have been not taking those tablets, but the upshot of it was that my constitution was settled on race day.
One of the special moments at Kona is sculling in the water just before the off. I turned to look towards the shore. It was shaping up to be a perfectly clear day. The dawn sun cast a beautiful light over the volcano. I was at peace, perfectly at peace.
And then the cannon fired. Cue carnage.
It turned out to be the best of my three swims to date at Kona. For much of it, I was alongside Normann Stadler. You can tell how well you’re doing in the water by the athletes around you. I was surrounded by men. It later transpired that there were only seven girls ahead of me when I left the water in 54min 31sec, a two-minute improvement on the year before. So far so good.