Accidental Ironman

by Brunt, Martyn

  I mentioned that I was shit at all sports except one, and that one is swimming. I was actually a reasonably good swimmer as a kid and swam for City of Coventry as a junior and teenager until girls, going out, girls, drinking and girls began to occupy my time. As ever with me, it wasn’t a straightforward story; as a toddler I apparently hated the water, screaming the pool down as my dad towed me round in a rubber ring making chugging noises – although this may of course have been because he was wearing some multicoloured knickerbocker trunks. At the age of seven, though, I broke my leg after dicking about on a hillside with some other kids and once I’d left hospital after eight weeks in traction, the doctors told my parents that swimming was the best way to get me up to strength, so I was packed off to Livingstone Road Baths to kick my way up and down the pool. This time I took to swimming like a duck to hoisin sauce and soon I was in the team in galas, enduring that horrible moment of total silence you get just before a race starts while you’re standing on the blocks bricking yourself.

  Now forgive me if I digress for a moment but this is MY book. Okay, you’ve paid for it so technically it’s yours, but this is my only chance to get something off my chest that has been on there for almost 40 years. My leg-breaking incident took place at my junior school during playtime and was caused by me falling awkwardly after being pushed down a hill. The fall not only broke my leg but also knocked me unconscious and when I came to I was being dragged – yes, dragged – by the shoulders by two older kids into the assembly hall under the supervision of one of the teachers. Once in there I was laid flat on my back on one of those long wooden benches whereupon the teacher, now accompanied by another teacher and presumably fellow member of the Hitler Youth, tried to straighten my leg out. Needless to say I screamed the place down, leading them to declare my leg was broken. I was then carried to the entrance hall, sat in a chair with my bent leg propped on a table, while they phoned not an ambulance, but my mum to come and pick me up. Mum was left to carry me to her car alone, lie me on the back seat and drive me to Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital where a passing stranger helped her carry me into A&E where I spent the next eight weeks. I don’t remember seeing either of these teachers again after this, presumably because my dad went up to the school and killed them with one of his golf clubs.

  Anyway, violent recriminations aside, I carried on swimming with a modicum of success until my mid-teens, but drifted away from the sport until my mid-thirties when taking up triathlons made me start the old early-morning torture again. Unusually for a triathlete, swimming is my favourite part of the race. All the coolest animals in the world swim. Sharks swim, as do dolphins, whales, otters, seals, penguins, clownfish, manta-rays, seahorses, manatees, duck-billed platypuses, Sharron Davies, dreadful spindly killer-fish and, of course, Ironmen in training. Let’s be honest, swimming is what makes triathletes special, because it scares the crap out of ordinary people. If I had a pound for every non-triathlete who told me they could ‘do the bike and run but couldn’t manage 40m never mind 400’, well I’d have about a tenner, but you get the picture. For most people a few lengths of semi-drowning in their local pool is enough without adding the concepts of open water, wetsuits and getting booted in the face. Consequently, if you want to stand tall among mere mortals as a fearless giant with a granite jaw that could deflect kettles being hurled at your head, it’s the swim that will do it for you.

  Even among experienced triathletes, the swim is often something to be endured rather than enjoyed and for newbies it’s the part of triathlon that has them sweating more than Peter Andre on University Challenge. Neither Mark nor Joe, my fellow Challenge Roth-men, are relishing the swim while for me it’s going to be easily the best bit of the whole race. Having spent a lot of time paddling about, I have acquired the following tips about triathlon-swimming, which I now pass on to you at no extra charge.

  Tip 1 – Choose your swim cap carefully

  Just as triathletes spend ages selecting the right race T-shirt to wear to intimidate others with evidence of their athletic brilliance, the same goes for swim hats. A cap with a race name on it trumps a plain one, and any cap with Ironman on it trumps that. The only thing that trumps an Ironman cap is a swimming club hat, because it marks you out as someone who enjoys this kind of thing. The only exception to all this is bald men who can swim bareheaded. It’s one of the few occasions where being a baldy is an advantage – no cap to worry about, no towel, no shampoo, just a quick half-hour cry in front of the mirror and you’re ready.

  Tip 2 – Join a club

  Rebecca Adlington did not become a champion by having to battle past a fat bloke doing widths, and neither will you. With lakes and seaside out of bounds for six months of the year, a swimming pool is the best place to get the metres in, which inevitably means mixing it with the public doing breaststroke in the fast lane. Take it from me, no matter how many times you splash or ‘accidentally’ kick them, they never get the message. So you’re much better off joining your local club where you can acquire that lovely permanent chlorine smell after hours of untroubled pull-buoy reps.

  Tip 3 – Learn to fly or tumble

  If you must share your training time with the public, creating a bit of room for yourself is vital. Nothing says ‘Piss off out of my way’ more than doing butterfly or tumble turns. Neither will help you in a triathlon, but they are an important skill for keeping the head-out-of-the-water-don’t-get-my-hair-wet brigade at bay.

  Tip 4 – Avoid cold-water weirdos

  When you start training in lakes and seas, you will notice some people stand out from the rubber-clad crowd by wearing nothing but a costume that gives all the cold-protection of a Borat-style mankini. These are open-water swimmers who are training for some ridiculous venture like swimming to Denmark, and no matter how freezing the water, these people always claim to feel warm, in the way that people are when they carry a bit too much weight. Have nothing to do with these dangerous lunatics, because I know to my cost they will talk you into some kind of salty torture. This has happened to me, as we shall see in a moment when I was talked into joining a Channel swim, and which was the worst idea I’ve had since I tried to convince some girls that I could speak Japanese by shoving some really hot chips in my mouth.

  Tip 5 – Make your decision about the Piranha Pack

  The piranha pack is that collection of triathletes who start on the front row of the race, charge into the water at full tilt and spend the next 750m/1500m/3.8k cheerfully beating each other up. These are not places for the faint-hearted and even as an experienced swimmer I once got duffed up so much that when I went for a medical examination the doctor started doing a post-mortem. However, the pack always takes the shortest line so you have to decide whether to join the punchy fun for the quickest route, or stay well out of it and take a longer way round.

  These tips won’t give you superhero powers, but they may help you survive in the water a little bit more easily, and we don’t need any superheroes anyway, there are already enough people out on the streets of Britain fighting each other in their pants. There’s no doubt that all my pool training has helped my triathlon swimming enormously although, on the downside, it has led me to start taking part in a number of Masters swimming galas. For the unknowing among you, Masters swimming tournaments are open to 24-year-olds and over – and in many cases quite a long way over. In fact, some of the competitors don’t look like they’re pushing forty, they look like they’re dragging it. They are run along exactly the same lines as all those swimming tournaments you see on the telly, although sadly without the opportunity to talk to Sharron Davies at the end while wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos. Distances vary from 50m sprints up to 1500m death-battles, and you can choose between the different strokes of front crawl, breast-struggle, back-struggle and butter-flop. A typical advert for a Masters swim gala could easily read: ‘Hey you! Are you old enough to pay income tax and go to bed at a time of your own choosing? When you swim, can you dive in without knocking yourself unc
onscious and do a tumble-turn without half the pool going up your nose? Do you fancy the idea of walking around with more gold round your neck than Mr T? Then it’s Masters swimming for you!’

  Because I’m over 40 and farcically competitive, Allison talked (shouted) me into trying my luck in a tournament some time ago and, to my astonishment, I won a medal. Admittedly, it was a bronze medal in a race where there were only three swimmers in the M40 category, but if someone wants to give me a medal for basically not being dead, I’m up for it. When I first started out I had the typical triathlete’s view of swimming – no dives or tumble turns because you never do them in races, and every pool swim is merely a training opportunity so doing anything other than freestyle for anything less than 400m is pointless heresy. However, over time I realised that it’s the other strokes where the medals are to be found, precisely because no other bugger does them. At my most recent Masters tournament I won SEVEN medals – three golds, two silvers and three bronzes – and only one was for freestyle. I even won one for individual medley, a vicious invention that sees you do all four strokes at once before spending the next ten minutes trying to get your heart rate back under 200. Now I don’t mean to denigrate the athletic abilities of Masters swimmers, who frequently have bodies shaped like Dairylea triangles and can post times for 100m that I’d be hard pushed to match on a bike, it’s just that there aren’t many of them. The numbers get even fewer if you are female or over 40 – in fact come the day I’m a 73-year-old woman I’ll be quids in. It’s also worth noting that, although I’ve made it sound easy, there are lots of ways to get disqualified at swimming. You can choose from false start, screw-kick, not touching the wall with both hands, not turning properly, not handing your racecard in, and farting on the starting blocks – although that might just have been me. From the moment you step on to the blocks at the start you are alone and horribly exposed, and there are no opportunities for the usual triathlon open-water-mass-start skulduggery because the water is crystal clear and proceedings are watched over by more referees than – I don’t know, I ran out of metaphors after the Mr T gag, from now on you’re on your own.

  As well as the obvious benefits of getting faster at swimming and winning a chest full of non-ferrous metals, there are lots of other plus-sides to Masters tournaments, not least that hanging round swimming pools all day is fantastic for your core strength because you spend hours holding your stomach in. The only downside to Masters events that I can think of is that they are uncomfortably like being back at school doing swimming galas, and in the changing room it’s hard for me to repress the urge to flick my teammates’ backsides with a wet towel or swing the metal clothes basket against the floor so it kicks up sparks. Actually no, there is another downside, which is that you are surrounded by swimmers, who have an uncomfortable habit of wanting to do lots of swimming. And it’s for this reason I got talked into swimming the Channel…

  It was all the fault of the fourth member of our Roth party, Muhammad McMenamin, who, one stormy night while we were both pissed, said, ‘We should have a go at the Channel’ to which I, of course, replied, ‘Yes.’ Because I’m a twat. I thought no more of it and dismissed it as the usual, inebriated nonsense triathletes come out with when they have sniffed the barmaid’s apron, but little did I know that Steve, who is also a Masters swimmer, was serious. Before I knew it, he’d booked the pilot boats, registered us with the Channel Swimming and Piloting Federation, organised medical tests, ordered a vat of goose fat and sent me a white feather.

  Swimming the Channel is the ultimate challenge in open water swimming, a pastime that has more than enough challenges associated with it. Ironmans all involve open water swimming in the sea, lakes and canals, with temperatures ranging from Baltic to Arctic. In fact, I think I’m beginning to suffer from a rare new medical condition – ‘Open Water Tourettes.’ The symptoms appear to be the sudden and violent urge to say the f-word repeatedly, whenever I dive into a lake for a training swim. This is usually to do with the coldness of the water and there’s no denying I suffered a particularly bad case of OWT at the start of this season, when the British summer finally arrived with a 10-degree drop in temperature and two solid days of rain. Despite the confident declaration of the swim-marshals at the lake I was training in that the water temperature was ‘14 and rising’, on diving into the lake I still exploded into a barrage of swear words that made Gordon Ramsay sound like Noddy. This was particularly unfortunate because there was a group of Cub Scouts watching and I don’t think Akela was very pleased that his troop witnessed a blue-faced man shooting out of the water like a Polaris missile while shouting ‘faaaaarrrrrrkkkkk’ at the top of his voice. It’s also worth mentioning that when I say ‘dived into the lake’, I’m stretching the definition of the word ‘dive’ a bit. The reality is that, like most of the Saturday swimmers at my local lake, I pick my way into the water like a clown crossing a minefield, before standing waist deep in the water for five minutes trying to summon up the courage to pitch forward into the icy wastes. I usually try to do this while staring off into the middle distance with hands on hips and jaw sticking out, trying to look tough and gritty just in case any girls from the Playboy mansion should happen to be passing.

  Our training for the Channel swim mostly took place in Brighton where Steve lives and where there were indeed plenty of girls passing, normally on their way back from a hen night just as we were picking our way across the stones to the water’s edge at 6.00 a.m. wearing nothing but Speedos and a look of terror. Conditions for swimming at Brighton are best described as ‘borderline’ (i.e. borderline psychopathic) with 7ft waves, driving rain and a howling wind all combining to make it about as pleasant as type 2 diabetes. Having been thrown about like a piece of flailing human jetsam for an hour the real fun came though when I tried to get out, with two waves smacking me so hard they ripped my goggles off and threw me headfirst into a kind of pebbly washing machine before I was spat out on to the beach. To complete our pleasure a large female lifeguard with everything a man could want (muscles and a moustache) was waiting for us with three key questions:

  1. Did we see the red flags that forbade swimming that day?

  2. Why didn’t we tell them we were going to be swimming?

  3. Did we know that we were ‘causing distress to the public’ who had seen us lolloping around in the water and assumed we were drunks who had fallen off the pier?

  To which the answers obviously were:

  1. Yes, but we pretended we hadn’t.

  2. Because you were still in bed when we plunged in at 6.00 a.m.

  3. If you think that’s bad wait ’til I take my trunks off.

  So far you’ll note that I’ve successfully implied to you that we were going to be swimming the Channel solo, whereas I’ve actually been bending the truth so far it’s virtually a balloon animal. I was just one cog in a well-oiled machine of a team called ‘The League Mentalmen’, which was making a relay attempt to get to France without spending any money on ferries. And what a team it was! There was Steve ‘Ice Man’ Howes, Robin Corder and a bloke I hadn’t met yet called Andy Heath, who I was counting on to be a relative of Michael Phelps. The Ice Man was so named because I’ve got more fat in my fingernails than he has in his whole body and he had been finding the sea temperature a bit on the nippy side. Lastly there was me, with my legs the size of a bookie’s biro. How could we possibly fail?

  But what of Steve Mac? Well, he had assembled a rival team that was taking the whole business far more seriously than us and was made up of biriyani-boy himself, Karen Throsby and Jamie Goodhead. As a Brighton resident, Steve was experienced in sea-swimming, making regular attempts to kill himself by swimming under Brighton Pier. Karen was doing the relay version first as a warm-up for having a go at a solo crossing, while Australian Jamie, having lived in the UK for too long, was trying to make a swim for it. All in all, they didn’t stand a chance against us. Earlier on I cautioned you against getting involved with these open water swimming
types, and here’s why … Imagine it is 2.45 a.m., pitch dark, and you’re on a small boat in the middle of the English Channel. You’re standing on the back of the boat holding on to a ladder with your feet in the water, waiting for a klaxon to signal the moment at which you will jump into the sea. The water temperature is 16 degrees and you are wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos. Should you ever find yourself in this position, I can absolutely guarantee what you will be thinking, and it will be: ‘WHAT AM I DOING?!’ This is certainly what went through my mind as I clung to the back of the good ship Sea Satin, waiting to take my turn on our relay swim.

  Our team of four had been going for two hours, starting from Dover just after midnight. Big Andy did the first hour, Robin was just completing the second hour and I was the next in to bat. Both Andy and Robin swam well and looked comfortable, heaping pressure on me not to be crap. Inevitably the klaxon of death went and I jumped in. I was expecting it to be cold and we’d been told the water was a cool but manageable 16 degrees. The water I jumped into felt more like 1.6 degrees. It was so cold I couldn’t swear. Or swim. Or breathe. I just made this gasping noise and started windmilling frantically to get round to the side of the boat where the spotlight was. I don’t know if you have ever swum in the sea, in the dark, but take it from me, it isn’t for the nervous-natured. I’m not usually afraid of the dark, but then I don’t usually encounter quite so much of it. It was above me, ahead of me, behind me and, most importantly, underneath me. I am not afraid to say that I was absolutely cacking myself and I stuck to the spotlight beam like a moth. So began possibly the least pleasant hour of my life, which involved a freezing, pitch-black swim through the saltiest, most seaweed-blanketed water in the world, and I swam as though my life depended on it – which it did. After trying desperately to count the seconds and minutes that make up an hour, I was mightily relieved when a green flashing light on deck signalled that our fourth and final team member, Steve the Iceman, was readying himself for a watery grave. The klaxon went and I was on the boat faster than a Somali pirate.