Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  On the bike, things got even better. By around the 30km mark I had the lead. This was early by the standards of my first two races at Kona. I was surprised at how easily it happened. I remember going past Tereza Macel, now one of Brett’s athletes, after about 10km. She is a great athlete and had a couple of ironman wins under her belt that year. She didn’t come with me, or even seem to try to. I felt so comfortable. My confidence grew with every kilometre. More to the point, my lead did too. I knew I had to put as much distance as possible between me and Rinny Carfrae, in particular, whose speed on foot was my chief concern.

  The bike splits I was receiving boosted my confidence even more. I turned round at Hawi in great shape, spurred on by my family and friends who had taken up position there, as they had the year before. I was on course for a really fast bike split, but then I hit the Queen K. and a headwind that was particularly fierce. It meant that the wind had performed an abrupt turn since I’d last been on the Queen K. where I had felt a slight headwind going in the other direction. It had turned and intensified. And it was really hot now. We had a blast furnace to ride in for the last 50km of the bike. It is mentally tough to enter these conditions when you have been making such good progress. You have to drop your speed, and the road seems to stretch on for an eternity. But it’s a road you know well, and you break it up into sections. The men are also a great help, if only as targets to pick off. I started to pass some pretty well-known triathletes on that stretch.

  By the time I was setting out on the run, I had a big buffer on the nearest women. I was particularly grateful for that this year, because I had so little confidence in my hamstring. I hadn’t felt it on the bike, but it had been ever-present in my mind. Now it took centre stage physically.

  The dull pain kicked in almost immediately. It ebbed and flowed throughout the marathon. I was familiar with the pain now, though, having experienced it so often in training. The constant tug of the muscle intensified as the race wore on, but so did the realisation that I could run through it. By the halfway mark, I knew at least that my body was going to hold up. Because of my lead, this meant that, barring calamity, I was also going to win. Rinny was by now moving up through the field, but she had had nearly half an hour to make up on me over the run. She would have needed me to have broken down, and I had enough faith in my body and mind to know that this wasn’t going to happen. Still, the landmarks on the course were taking an age to loom into view. Never had I had to dig so deep in a race as I did on that marathon. The last six or seven kilometres really did feel like a death march. My rhythm was shot to pieces. My legs were seizing up. This stage of an ironman is never easy, but I am good at making it look as if it is. This time, that feat was beyond me. It was clear from the look on my face and the awkward nature of my stride that I was in real pain.

  I remember taking great strength from the memory of my grandfather Harry, who had died the year before aged 101. He was a man of such fortitude. I wanted to make him proud. The other thing that spurred me on was the message, which filtered through in the last few kilometres, that I was on schedule to beat the course record. At the time I didn’t know what this was. I just knew that it was held by Paula Newby-Fraser, which meant it had probably stood for some time (seventeen years, as it turned out). That did give me an incentive to keep pushing at the end, even though the race had been won much earlier. I was fatiguing fast. My form had gone. It had been the hardest fight of any of my races – the hardest fight between my body and my mind.

  Never had I been so relieved to see a finish line. It was a sight blurred by fatigue, blurred by tears. I approached it with laughter and relief tumbling out of me, as you might an oasis in the desert. Mike Reilly, the Voice of Ironman, whooped and hollered that I had broken the course record, as I reached out for the tape and with one last effort raised it high above my head. When I stepped back and lay down to perform my Blazeman roll over the line, I paused on the ground, exhausted. Jon Blais had never been far from my thoughts on that run. A few weeks earlier, his parents had given me the incredible honour of scattering his ashes in the New Hampshire countryside just before the Timberman half-ironman. If ever a tight hamstring needs a bit of perspective, there are so many tales of heroism against the odds that will render it laughable, and Jon’s is one of them.

  When I got to my feet, slowly, I looked around for my parents. A lei was hung round my neck and a wreath placed on my head. I continued to laugh and cry. I was wobbly with exhaustion, almost delirious. Finally, I saw Tom in the crowd and beckoned to him to come towards me. I really don’t think I could have made it to him just then. Then I saw my parents approach from another angle, and I threw my arms round them and enjoyed the feeling of them holding me up. Tom hadn’t been able to join us because he was behind a barrier, so next I went over and embraced him.

  By the time Mike Reilly came over to interview me he had a wreck on his hands!

  ‘Three years in a row!’ he said. ‘And a record we thought would never be shattered here in Kona, but it was, and you did it! Chrissie, it’s beyond words!’

  He was right about that. I just couldn’t speak. The spasms of joy, relief and fatigue kept pulsing through me, the tears kept falling. I wanted to reply, but he had to stand there with his microphone for a while longer. Feeling practically drunk, I eventually put my arm round his shoulder and murmured the word mahalo into the microphone – Hawaiian for thank you.

  When I had regained a measure of composure, I said: ‘I never thought I would come here and break Paula’s record. She’s an absolute legend, and I feel kind of guilty to have taken the record away! This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, definitely the hardest ironman I’ve ever done. I had to really dig deep. I’m so proud!’

  I thanked my friends and family for coming out to support me, and the crowd for spurring me on. I had finished in 8hr 54min 2sec, an improvement of just under a minute and a half on Paula’s record. But I no longer held the marathon record at Kona, which I had set the year before. Rinny had shaved nearly a minute off that to take second place, having raced through the field on the run. It was a warning shot, in her first ironman. She had finished twenty minutes behind me, but if she hadn’t left herself so much to do after the swim and bike it could have been interesting. Her run had been more than six minutes faster than mine, although at 3hr 3min mine had been my slowest marathon at Kona to date.

  My strength returned quickly in the minutes that followed the race. After drug testing, the Wellington crew headed to the King Kam Hotel, where we broke open a few bottles of champagne. I devoured my obligatory three plates of chips. I jumped into the pool in my race gear; my mother jumped in after me in her clothes. We were drunk on champagne, drunk on euphoria.

  After a shower and the press conference, it was back to the finish line, as always, at about 7.30 p.m., to cheer in the age-groupers until the gong sounded at midnight. It is tiring on the legs and makes for a long day, but adrenaline and caffeine get me through. Our sport is the only one I can think of where the elite take part alongside the amateurs, and it brings me such pleasure to honour that spirit and hand out medals to the age-groupers as they come in.

  I never sleep well after an ironman. I was up at first light the next day to write my speech for the awards ceremony. And so the mayhem continued. There is never a spare moment in the hours after Kona, but I cherish every memory that I can take away from the scenes that flash past, particularly when they start to slow down in the days after the awards ceremony. Enjoying a long, lazy lunch with my friends and family; swimming out to the Cook Monument with Tom, Cat Morrison and her husband; touring the north of the island with John and Linda after everyone had gone – these were beautiful ways to spend the days that followed.

  It was special, as well, to be able to share it with someone else. Tom and I went from Hawaii on a whistle-stop tour of America. We stopped at the Oakley headquarters, a huge silver monolith in Orange County, California, where they presented me with a special-edition watch con
taining nineteen diamonds. We went down to San Diego. We saw U2 in Phoenix. We returned to Boulder to pack up, then to the UK, then back to my old haunts in Nepal for an amazing three-week holiday, during which we trekked to Everest Base Camp, this time on the south side. It was wonderful to be with Tom in a country that meant so much to me.

  It was a far happier way to spend the weeks following Kona than the stresses and struggles of previous years, and Tom was a large part of that. My third Ironman World Championship was a coming of age. I was my own boss now. The most important man in my life was my boyfriend, rather than my coach. With this race, I had finally walked free of Brett’s shadow. I was confident in myself at last, knowing I could still dominate, even without him. It was a relief to be free of the politics of Team TBB, but I also realised that I had completed the picture Brett had had in mind for me. In Tom there was that person in my life to share things with. I hadn’t spoken to Brett for a long time, and if I ever thought about him it was in a peaceful, affectionate way. I was striding out on my own two feet, and the further I walked away from him the more his teachings were being vindicated. I don’t think I would ever have achieved what I had at that point without him, but, if going our separate ways had been hard, we both knew that it had to happen. I still needed reassurance, as most of us humans do, but I could seek that from other people. In terms of the overall strategy, I was in charge of my life now, and it was empowering.

  Now it was time to take things to another level.

  13

  New Records and a Vicious Virus

  The Surrey Hills is an area of outstanding natural beauty, so the signs say, and I couldn’t agree more. A light sprinkling of snow on a January morning renders them even more picture-perfect. It also renders them lethal for cyclists.

  It was a Saturday, the second day of the new year, bitterly cold. So many reasons not to go cycling in the hills. Then again, the prospect of another session on the turbo-trainer in a sweaty dungeon was not exactly appealing.

  Since the start of 2008, whenever I have been in the UK I have rented a room in a beautiful big house in Putney. It is an ideal place to be. Owned by a wonderful lady called Liz, Hambro House is a home from home for athletes. Liz and her late husband, Rod, were heavily involved in running the Wandsworth Swimming Club, where their son was a star performer. When Rod was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, they decided they would help support other athletes, so now Liz rents out the rooms in her sprawling house to anyone whose home is wherever they lay their Lycra. With Richmond Park, one of the best places to run in the world, a few steps one way, the Putney Leisure Centre swimming pool a few the other and her own generosity and warmth in the middle, Liz is certain of a steady flow of coming-and-going athletes. Her son and daughter may be away, but we bring a youthful energy to the house and a slightly disgusting smell of sweat. The whole place is turned over to our bizarre habits.

  Liz’s basement is where we set up our turbo-trainers, so that it is not dissimilar to Brett’s dungeon in Leysin. After a month of cold weather, one of my fellow Hambro House-dwellers, Jonny Hotchkiss, and I had had enough of our confinement down there. The freeze was easing and the roads were clear, so we decided to wrap up warm and head for the hills for our next session. Tom came with us, as did another friend and fellow triathlete, Stu Anderson.

  We headed south towards Dorking, then turned right onto the A25. Around Abinger, we turned off onto a B road, heading up Leith Hill. It was in the shade, and you could see the white frost glistening on the surface. I remember thinking, why are we on this road? Someone’s going to have an accident here.

  Sure enough, despite riding at a snail’s pace, my back wheel caught some ice and suddenly went from under me. I slid into Stu’s path, so that he fell on top of me, and I threw out my wrist to brace myself for the fall. Snap.

  I knew immediately that it was broken, even though I was wearing a pair of big ski gloves. A car pulled up behind us. In it were a young family, who kindly drove me and Tom to the pub in Abinger Common. Jonny and Stu walked my bike there, which was about two miles. I was taken by ambulance to the Royal Surrey Hospital in Guildford. En route, they gave me gas and air to help deal with the pain, which was excruciating. My stomach churned at the sight of my wrist bone sticking out at an abnormal angle. At the hospital they yanked it back into place, after diagnosing impressive fractures in my radius, two metacarpals and a couple of fingers. Of my writing hand. Arm in a cast for six weeks. Happy New Year.

  The pain I could endure. What concerned me most was the need to regain full mobility in my hand. My career was, if not quite at stake, certainly liable to be affected, should the treatment I received at this delicate stage not be up to scratch.

  I needn’t have worried. I was operated on there and then, with wires inserted into my wrist, and I settled down for a two-night stay.

  Now, having won a fair few races, I am often asked for my advice on the various aspects of training and racing, and I willingly give it whenever I can. People should know, though, that if I come across as wise and all-knowing, it conceals the fact that I have often been guilty in the past of all the things I warn people against. One of my favourite subjects to hold forth about nowadays is how to deal with injury, but only after I had broken all the rules myself. I shall now describe how not to deal with injury; I shall now describe what I did in the aftermath of that crash in the Surrey Hills.

  As soon as I came round from my op, with my right arm raised in a cast, I was trying to perform strength exercises in my hospital bed. The day after I was released from hospital I was down in the Putney dungeon on the turbo. I went running. I used the elliptical trainer. Within days, I was wrapping a plastic bag round my hand and going for a swim. One day I swam 4km with one arm. The bag leaked. My arm started swelling up, so that it was soon pushing against the inside of the cast. The pain was awful. Back to hospital. Off came the cast. My hand and wrist had blown up like a red balloon. The stitches had become infected. I was put on an antibiotic drip. Another few nights in a hospital bed. They took the wires out and gave me a new cast (this time waterproof), to be worn for another two weeks.

  A week after the crash I had received an email from Brett. ‘Just heard about your accident,’ he said. ‘Very very sorry to hear that you broke a few things. Take a tip. Don’t rush it back. You got nothing to prove. A false start will cause you more drama than taking the month off now.’

  Right, again. His words were actually a weight off my mind. One of the reasons I had pushed too hard too early in my convalescence was that I had thought this was what Brett would have recommended. In fact, the opposite was the case.

  Only after my arm had been reset did I do what I should have done from the outset – relax, and realise that this injury was actually an opportunity to vary my training. Think about what you can do, rather than worry about what you can’t. Swimming, I had to concede, was a bad idea with my wrist in a cast. Instead, I made regular appearances in the dungeon, using a towel to stop the sweat dripping down my arm. I worked furiously on my notoriously weak core, my hamstrings and glutes. The Swiss ball and I became best friends.

  Talking of friends, this was an opportunity to see more of them than usual. There may be a temptation to dismiss such activity as frivolous, but I don’t believe so. Often we athletes like to see ourselves as invincible, turning away from help because the idea of it challenges our claims to self-reliance. But when things are tough, particularly mentally (and injury has just as much of a psychological impact as a physical one), those rocks we call family and friends come into their own. Seeing them was a reminder that there is more to me than being an athlete. If that were all I saw myself as, my emotional and physical well-being would be determined only by my sporting performance, with debilitating consequences should that facility be taken away by injury or illness. But to see myself as, say, a daughter, girlfriend, Scrabble champion and Masterchef addict, as well as an athlete, is to leave me with other roles, so that my happiness and self-esteem ca
n be main tained when the day job is compromised. It’s a question of balance.

  In mid-February, the cast came off. My arm was white, withered and hairy, but it was working again. That longed-for moment would have come sooner had I not rushed off to the pool so quickly with my leaky plastic bag, but I was fit to resume work just in time for some warm-weather training in Spain with Cat Morrison. We headed off to Águilas for around eight weeks. I have made a lot of friends in triathlon, but Cat is probably the closest of these. It was wonderful to spend some quality time with her away from the triathlon Mecca that is Boulder. We shared an apartment and went on rides through lemon and orange groves, often returning to base with our cycle jerseys laden with fruit. Cat is a superb cook, which was another benefit of spending time with her. She makes the best pizzas this side of Naples. Tom also came out for ten days and loved it. By the beginning of April, I was tanned and fit. All thoughts of icy roads and broken wrists might as well have been from another lifetime.

  I flew out to Boulder in April for the new season. And it was to be new in a number of ways. First of all, after a semi-official relationship with him in the build-up to Kona the year before, I was now working with Dave Scott as my coach. Second, Tom and I were moving in together. We found an apartment in Gunbarrel, a suburb of Boulder, and so began a new phase of my life – cohabiting with a boyfriend.

  I was very anxious. When I’d first met Tom, just over a year earlier, and been swept away by it all, I was fearful of losing control of my life and my independence. The idea of compromise, I realised, would sooner or later be introduced. Now the time had come. Our first year together had passed like a dream, but we had been living, for the most part, on different continents. This was jumping in at the deep end. Not only were we moving in together, we were doing so thousands of miles from home. It was a totally alien experience for me. And Tom was embarking on a new career as a professional triathlete, having had the operation that finally cleared up his knee injury. He was coming out to Boulder to be with me, yes, but also to train full-time. There was a lot at stake. I wasn’t sure what would happen if it didn’t work out. And then there were all the other concerns that I’d harboured when we first started seeing each other, but that had remained theoretical because we were living so far apart. These were about to become very real issues. All those questions of compromise that, I guess, are familiar to any couple, but were new to me. What would it be like going to the supermarket and having to choose for two? How would my beloved routines be affected? My obsession with control? I’m very set in my ways – could I continue to be? I was worried about dinner, and whether we would agree on what to eat. I was worried about bedtimes. Most of all, I was worried about my career. I was committed to Tom – I’d known that from the very start – but how would living with him affect my training?