Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  Within a day or two, I knew I’d been worrying about nothing. We dovetailed perfectly. As readers will know by now, I can be feisty and obsessive; Tom is calm and considerate. Nothing is too much trouble for him – ‘yes’ features far more in his vocabulary than ‘no’. Not only did our living together not impinge upon my training, or even my life, it actually enhanced it. I found his relaxed outlook rubbing off on me. The little things that I’d built up as issues turned out not to be issues at all. We went to bed at the same time; we ate the same things. He’s a little tidier than I am (that’s the army for you). I tend not to fold my clothes with a set square. Mine are thrown into a cupboard. Brett used to say that the state of your wardrobe, like the state of your bike, is a window into your soul – perhaps I still have work to do!

  Our training meshed, as well. We both swam at Flatirons Athletic Club, and we did a lot of biking together. Or, rather, warming up on the bike. The minute any effort was introduced he was off down the road, and I laboured to catch him. Haven’t managed it so far. Indeed, I now judge my fitness at any given time by the distance between me and him at the end of one of our intervals. On the bike, Tom followed my programme, pretty much, but because he’s from a run back ground he had his own programme for running. We would see to it that our run sessions coincided with each other, but they would be independent.

  My life in Boulder was now everything I would have wanted it to be. After the initial problems the previous year with Simon Lessing and the goldfish-bowl phenomenon, the set-up I had found for myself was really paying off. I had finally discovered, in Dave, the right coach to build on the work I had done with Brett. Dave is a legend of ironman, having won at Kona six times in the 1980s. As such, he is a very busy man. This was a problem for me early on, because I didn’t feel I was getting enough of his time. But I came to accept that that was the way it was. Most of all, I just trusted him from the start.

  After my experiences with Simon the year before, I was also wary of being coached by a former athlete, but Dave has long been out of the sport. He is still very competitive, like Simon. He cranks out hard swim sets in the pool, and he’ll come back from a bike ride saying, ‘I averaged 36kmph over four hours out there!’ And I’ll reply: ‘Dave. I couldn’t care less.’ But the main problem with Simon was that he would join in with my training sessions, so it felt like a competition. Dave doesn’t do that. He watches some of my sessions, but mostly it is a case of me reporting back to him about each one. And where Brett was authoritarian, telling you to do something and expecting you to do it without discussion, Dave is keen to explain the rationale behind everything. He comes from a sports-science background, and is a strong believer in strength and conditioning and the right nutrition.

  He thought it important to address the weaknesses in my core, glutes and hamstrings. When I broke my wrist he agreed that I should have two Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) injections to treat my chronic hamstring tendinopathy. This is a new technique, whereby healthy blood is taken from your arm and injected immediately into a damaged tendon, helping it to regenerate. The injections were followed by five days’ total rest, then a programme of eccentric loading exercises, which means lengthening and shortening the tendon. I was really diligent with those during my convalescence and have been ever since. The hamstring pain that had plagued me for two years finally disappeared. My running started to improve significantly from that point on.

  If Brett was the perfect man to whip me into shape and turn a nobody into a champion, Dave was the man to refine me. He adopted a reciprocal approach. I was free to choose when and where I raced, and he was happy to incorporate the parts of Brett’s programme that I liked. He has since made changes gradually, almost without my noticing, so he is subtle. He knows I baulk at any change to my routine, and he has handled that very cleverly.

  One morning in early May I came in from a run, and the red light was blinking on the answer machine. The message was from my mum, asking that I ring home. She sounded emotional, so I rang her immediately.

  ‘Are you sitting down?’ she said.

  I wasn’t. ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  My mother then summoned her best posh accent and started reading from a letter. ‘Dear Madam, The Prime Minister has asked me to inform you, in strict confidence . . .’

  I started screaming. Then I fell to the floor in tears. Tom came rushing in. He hesitated as he tried to work out how serious things were. Laughter broke out, and then gave way to tears.

  I was to be made an MBE – a Member of the Order of the British Empire. Or at least, the Prime Minister was going to recommend ‘that Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to approve that you be appointed’ as one, in the Birthday Honours List.

  ‘Before doing so, the Prime Minister would be glad to know that this would be agreeable to you.’ I laughed again. I’ll say!

  We were all crying. ‘How proud would Nanna and Grandad have been,’ was the first thing I said to Mum. Dad’s parents, Harry and Romey, in particular, were staunch monarchists.

  How proud was I. At last, what I was doing was to be recognised not just outside triathlon but outside sport. This was not quite the first time I had received recognition beyond triathlon. After my first win at Kona I had been named the Toughest Sportswoman of the Year at the Square Mile Awards, where I met and befriended James Cracknell. And after my third win, just a few months earlier, I had been named Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year, which was a huge honour, beating off competition from the likes of Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton. There was a feeling then that our sport might be on the verge of breaking into the British mainstream, and here was another step towards that goal.

  I’d often been introduced as Chrissie Wellington, triple World Champion, sometimes even by myself, but I’d never really thought about what it meant. Now that the establishment was recognising me, it started to sink in. The Prime Minister had been made aware of what I had achieved, and soon the Queen would be. That meant I must have achieved something special.

  The hardest part, for me anyway, was that I couldn’t breathe a word of it to anyone until the list had been published. That was to be more than a month away on 12 June. By then my season had finally got under way, when I returned to Lawrence to win Kansas 70.3.

  But, because of the broken arm, my first ironman of the season wasn’t until Challenge Roth in the middle of July. The unique atmosphere in Bavaria, the support from the race organisers and my world record the year before made returning to this great event a no-brainer. I have described the atmosphere at Roth already – 2010 served merely to demonstrate that 2009 was not a one-off. The German passion for triathlon knows no bounds.

  I hope I gave them something to celebrate in 2010. I smashed my own world record from the year before by nearly thirteen minutes, coming home in 8hr 19min 13 sec. My marathon was nearly nine minutes faster at 2hr 48min 54 sec. But it wasn’t just the run – everything came together. I described it afterwards as my perfect race. That doesn’t mean that there was no pain or discomfort; it simply means I overcame the pain and discomfort perfectly. And the finish time was significant. I’d broken my own world record by a lot, which was great, but I’d bettered the previous world record, Yvonne van Vlerken’s mark over the same course in 2008, by nearly twenty-seven minutes. Bek Keat, whose time the year before had also beaten Yvonne’s record, came in second again, but this time nearly thirty-three minutes behind me.

  The real mark of progress, though, was the inroads I was making into the men. Against a top-class field, I came seventh overall. My time was less than 6 per cent slower than that of Rasmus Henning, the overall winner. The time is always useful in its own right, but Dave considers it, as Brett did, in relation to that of the lead man, as the true measure of my performance. This was as close as I had come to the lead man in a major ironman. It felt as if I had taken another significant leap forward.

  However wonderful you feel after a race, you have to respect what your body has been through and observe an appropria
te interval of rest, even if you feel ready to crack on within days. You should always err on the side of caution. You tend to balloon after an ironman. Everything becomes swollen and distended with fluid retention. Quads merge into knees, which merge into calves, which merge into feet. I look as if I’m wearing a Teletubby outfit. That goes down over the next few days, and the temptation is to think yourself recovered once it has. But there are deep-rooted changes to the chemistry of your body that take place during an ironman. You need longer to recover from these, and you may not be aware of when the process is complete – or not complete. Also, the sheer mental fatigue – the pressure beforehand, the nerves, the strength of will required during the race and the euphoria at the finish – should not be underestimated. These races take a hell of a lot out of you in so many ways, some of which may not be so obvious.

  After Roth that year I took the usual few days’ holiday, relaxing with Tom at the wonderful Sonnenalp resort on the border with Austria, by the end of which I had recovered from the more superficial scars of battle, the swelling and the physical fatigue. I flew back to America the following Saturday, six days after the ironman, but instead of flying to Boulder I flew straight to Chicago for some promotional work with one of my sponsors, Brooks. It was great fun, and brought me into contact with so many wonderful people, but it was not the most relaxing way to spend three days. All the more so given that Jesse, a Brooks sales manager, is a high-class marathon runner and suggested we go for a run on the Sunday, just seven days after Roth. Of course, I agreed. We ended up running for two hours.

  I mention this because of what followed. I mention it because of all the agonising, soul-searching and reviewing that followed what followed.

  I went into Kona in good form. In August I had won Timberman 70.3 in New Hampshire for the third year running, setting a new course record. But something was not quite right. Three weeks before Kona, I started to feel tired on the bike. In training, you’re constantly treading that fine line between fitness and fatigue, so I thought I might just have crossed it and suffered a couple of dodgy sessions as a result. It didn’t worry me unduly, but when I left for Hawaii ten days before the race I was still feeling a bit off. It was difficult to put my finger on what was wrong, other than that I just felt a little tired.

  During race week this sluggish ness on the bike continued, and now I was also overheating during my run sessions and suffering bad night sweats. I would wake up in the morning with the sheets wringing wet. That might not have been particularly note worthy for a lot of people – this was Hawaii, after all, where it’s ninety in the shade. But I tend to adapt well to the heat. This reaction was abnormal for me. I tried to focus on the positives, and shut out all thoughts of illness from my mind. I have often suffered from ailments in the build-up to a race, and come through them with the conviction that all will be OK.

  Then, the day before the big day, I went for my usual 2km swim, followed by an hour-long spin on the bike. When I came back from the ride, my throat was sore. Something was definitely not right.

  The Wellington crew were having their usual team barbecue that day, so I popped down to say hello. As far as possible, I tried to be myself, but in a quiet moment I told my mum that I wasn’t feeling well. Later that afternoon, I went to rack my bike and saw Asker. My face was bright red, and I confided in him over my worsening condition.

  Still trying to ignore the signs, I went out for my customary thirty-minute jog. When I came back, I was dripping with sweat and my throat was closing. I was concerned now, but continued with my race routine – tuna pasta and bed at 8 p.m. When I woke up to the alarm at 3.45 a.m. the next morning, covered in sweat, my throat closed up and my head pounding, I knew immediately that I wouldn’t be racing.

  Still, I had my pre-race breakfast, then called Tom and Ben. They knew something was up because I would never normally ring them on the morning of a race. I asked their advice, but in my heart the decision was made. When I called Dave, I told him that if I felt like this on a normal day I wouldn’t train.

  ‘Then you have your answer,’ he replied. ‘You’ll have a great swim, a great first half of the bike. Then your body will give up on you.’

  He was right. This is not the hundred-yard dash we’re talking about here. This is not even the ironman in Roth. This is a brutal, brutal race. The heat, the humidity and the wind in Kona are relentless and make it the toughest race in our sport. It’s not the Ironman World Championships for nothing. The damage you inflict on your body when you enter into it 100 per cent fit is quite enough; the damage you would inflict when only 50 per cent fit doesn’t bear thinking about. At 5 a.m., with my head and heart in turmoil, I told Ben to announce my withdrawal.

  It was the hardest decision I have ever had to make. The worst part was that I was not on my deathbed. I hadn’t broken my leg. I could have started. But could I have finished? Never, ever give up, it says on my wristband, and, once under way, I would have given everything to get to the finish line. I might well have made it, as well. But at what cost? I could have put myself in a hole it would have taken months to emerge from. You have to keep things in perspective. I was not willing to take such a risk for one race, even if it was the World Championships, however much it hurt. It would have been dangerous.

  It may not be politically correct, but there was another dynamic at work, too. I was unbeaten, and this would have been my tenth ironman. I do worry about the day I lose one of these races for the first time, but if and when it happens I want only one thing – to go down fully fit and able to fight to the very end. I never go into a race expecting to win, but I do go in expecting to fight. I couldn’t have fought that day. I couldn’t have done myself justice.

  Cat had been ill that week, as well, since the Wednesday, but by the Saturday she was feeling better and chose to race. She pulled out halfway round and beat herself up over it. Should she have started at all? She didn’t do her body any favours by racing, and when she gave in to the inevitable she gave her mind a battering as well. But there is no escape for the mind in that situation. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, just as I was. Dede Griesbauer raced fit and did finish, but well down on her expectations. What did she do? Beat herself up over it. The three of us were in despair the day after the race. We had all taken different paths but ended up at the same place.

  The other thing that tore me apart was guilt that so many family and friends had travelled so far to watch me. I stayed in my apartment on race day. It was agonising, and would have been unbearable but for the steady stream of visitors. I cried and got angry, but no one let me wallow. We talked about anything but the race. We focused on the future. Tammy, my friend from Card Aid days, had come out, and we chatted about the foundation we want to start together.

  Not for the first time, though, it was my brother, Matty, who offered the most telling reality check. I spoke to him that morning. ‘Christine,’ he said very firmly. ‘No one’s died.’ This resonated all the more, because his best friend did die when he was seventeen. It has given Matty a more rounded perspective on life, and his simple words helped me enormously.

  I followed the race intermittently online. It was a wonderful day for the British women, with three placed in the top ten. Julie Dibens finished third, while Rachel Joyce, my close friend from the swimming club at Birmingham University, came in fifth. Leanda Cave, the third Brit, was tenth.

  But it was Mirinda Carfrae’s day. I’d known she would be the girl to beat, and so it proved. She lowered her own record for the marathon at Kona and finished in under nine hours. She would have given me a real race, which made it all the more frustrating. Because I wanted a race; I wanted an ‘iron war’, the phrase they use to describe the epic race in 1989, when Mark Allen beat Dave, my coach, then the champion, by less than a minute. I wanted a race that forces me to finish absolutely crawling. Sometimes I think it’s disrespectful that I’m OK after an ironman, that I dance at the finish line until well into the night. Did I really give it
everything? During the race I feel I do, but I hadn’t yet had to face that visceral desperation to dig to the depths that racing shoulder to shoulder with a competitor might inspire. I don’t think you ever know just how much it is possible to give until someone pushes you to the limit. Rinny was shaping up to be that rival for me.

  I kept a low profile in the days that followed. It wasn’t my show; it was Rinny’s. She had had a great race, and was a worthy winner. It was important not to detract from that. I spent time with my family, and as the days passed I came to terms with my no-show and started to deal with the practicalities of my next step. Back in Boulder, the results from my blood test came through – I was suffering from a vicious little cocktail of strep throat, pneumonia and West Nile virus. That told me what I needed to know – I had been right not to compete. I was suffering from a genuine illness. Every time you feel a niggle in the build-up to a big race, every time you feel the faintest flicker of ill health, the alarm bells ring. You monitor the situation minutely and obsessively until you’re no longer sure whether the ailment is real or a figment of your imagination. I knew by race morning that my condition was genuine, but it was reassuring to see just how genuine. In the end, it took me two weeks and a course of antibiotics to recover.