Our rides around the island usually take us from Port de Pollenca along the coast to Zita corner, across the Bullrush Road, up the Col de Steps, down the Col de Walls, over the Schnell Bridge, past Smithy’s Hole and down the Rue de Two Dogs Shagging. Studying maps will reveal none of these place names (apart from Port de Pollenca), because they are coded references to incidents that have occurred over the years. The Schnell Bridge for example is so named because as we approached it once we bore down on a group of German cyclists in front. As we reeled them in over the bridge the rider at the back was heard to shout up to the front ‘Schnell! Schnell! Das Englanders!’, which almost caused our group leader Richard ‘Todger’ Todd to fall off laughing. Smithy’s Hole is named simply after a pothole hit at full pelt by Dave Smith, one of our number. While soaring airborne over his handlebars he looked like the most majestically graceful turkey you can imagine before he hit the deck with an audible splat.
Aerial dogfight re-enactments aside, it’s a great place to go and get some warm weather training done and while Egypt and Syria offer cheaper deals, it’s less noisy in Majorca and the natives seem friendlier. That said, I’ve never been there in summer when the vandal hordes of British tourists arrive. Let’s hope they never start rioting because it would be useless firing tear gas at someone who smokes sixty Lambert and Butler a day.
Training abroad also means you have the added satisfaction of knowing that everyone at home will be freezing their tits off and hates your guts every time you text them to tell them the local temperature and your daily mileage. I’ve always had to tread somewhat carefully with the lads I go to Majorca with like Todger and Andrew ‘Peachy’ Waters-Peach, a massively powerful time-triallist and huffing swimmer, because they are hardened cyclists and in this company I have always been viewed as something of a novelty. Being a triathlete means I am the only one to get back to the hotel after a day’s hard cycling, leap (slump) off my bike, don my trainers and head straight off for a bandy-legged two-hour shuffle. Mostly I was eyed with contempt by the cyclists, although they warmed to me after the occasion when my foot slipped out of the pedal as I dismounted and my bike’s top tube smacked me straight in the clinkers, leaving me to spend the rest of the day talking like Joe Pasquale. I am delighted to say, though, that I am now no longer alone, and the number of compression socks on cyclists, coupled with the number of wetsuits hanging on hotel balconies and the number of skinsuits and sun-visors seen plodding along beachfront roads in the midday sun, all indicate that the triathlete population is gradually taking over, forcing the cyclists out to the fringes. This may be thanks to Ironman Mallorca, which launched a few years ago. Whenever I go these days there are more people than ever out riding the racecourse and dicing with death by hurtling down Selva Gorge on their tri-bars. Happily the triathletes seem to have assimilated with the cyclists by observing the golden rules of training camps:
1. Always turn up at training camp saying you haven’t trained. Then try to duff everyone else up in the first session.
2. Always carefully select which race T-shirt to wear at breakfast so you can pose in front of your fellow continental buffet diners showing what you have achieved.
3. When bearing down on German cyclists, never ‘sit in’ behind them but instead attack and overtake at the first opportunity while maintaining a facial expression that suggests you are not trying.
4. The only Spanish phrase you should speak all week is ‘café con leche por favor.’
5. Always undo six days of Trappist monk-like living and avoiding anything deep fried at the buffet by getting out of your face on bargain lager on the final night and quickly resuming a potato-based lifestyle.
6. Have absolutely nothing to do with any nonathletic holidaymakers who are there at the same time, who look like a bunch of Wookies dressed by Primark, and often possess a backside so big you could crucify someone on it.
Cycling in the sunshine on quiet Majorcan roads is one thing, but if you want to be any good at it then inevitably you’ll have to do some of it in the winter in the UK as well, which is, of course, all-year-round fun – and I use the word ‘fun’ quite wrongly. Training in the winter is a necessary evil. By that I mean it is vaguely necessary but definitely evil. Being a triathlete in winter is hard enough anyway because one side of your brain says that as well as the season to be jolly, ’tis also the season of rest, recovery, cakes and long-postponed nights in the pub. You’ve trained hard, raced hard, eaten healthily, shunned alcohol and you bloody well deserve a rest. Except the other part of your brain nags you with thoughts that every pint, biscuit, Belgian chocolate and individual mince pie is weighing you down, making you slow and rubbish. You’ll be overweight in a week, next season everyone will beat you and your results will plummet faster than a fat kid off a 10-metre diving board. So we keep training.
In the UK, training in the winter isn’t that different from training in the summer except the days are shorter and you have to clean more crap off your bike, but there’s only so much rain a cyclist can take before their feet become webbed so there comes a point when we are driven indoors. Fiendish minds have been at work and have devised a glittering array of fun-packed ways to ensure you stay at it no matter what the weather.
Firstly there are turbo trainers, which began life as an instrument of torture with the first recorded use being during the Spanish Inquisition, when confessions were extracted from heretics by attempting to sweat them to death. Now adapted as a training ‘aid’, they sap your legs and your soul by clamping your back wheel into a static metal frame, pushing a magnetic roller against your tyre and allowing you to pedal while sitting still, giving you all the effort of cycling outside but without some of the pleasanter aspects such as air to breathe, a view to see, and blood to circulate around your groin. My turbo trainer sits in the garage staring malevolently at me as the nights draw in. I am convinced it is evil because I once cut myself on a tyre lever and my blood seemed to flow towards it. Soon it will have my rear wheel in its vice-like grip, and it knows it. Hour upon hour of crotch-numbing pedalling awaits.
Turbo trainers are not the only means of indoor cycling torture. Oh no, there are spinning classes, which are the fitness equivalent of Chris Evans in that they shout fun but they feel shit. They typically involve thunderous pedalling to pumping music which is so bad that if it came on the radio while I was in my car, I couldn’t kick the knob off the stereo fast enough. The music does at least have the blessing of drowning out the excited whoops of the spinning instructor exhorting us to ‘feel the burn’ while I am wishing they could feel the lash of a bicycle chain. The other downside to spinning classes is that they tend to be attended by non-cyclists who are just there to keep fit (or get fit judging by the look of some of them). While training for Ironman Canada I did a deal with the Esporta gym opposite where I worked at that time, that I could go in and join their spinning classes while training for the race. I duly turned up and plonked myself on a bike in the middle of the studio and started warming up. Around me were several people, mostly women of a certain age and wealth, wearing pristine Nike kit with attendant accessories such as headbands, drinks bottles and make-up. Most were pedalling slowly and chatting away while the excitable female instructor started cranking up the music and hormones. I did as I was bid, and started powering away, sweating like a piece of cheese under Anthony Worrall Thompson’s jacket and spraying perspiration around like a garden hose. After a few minutes of this I glanced up to see that I was now surrounded by a ring of empty bikes, the cast of Loose Women having moved to the fringes of the studio to avoid that awful man whose skin appeared to be leaking.
It is worth mentioning at this point that you can also train indoors for other parts of triathlon. In running you can try a treadmill, which is a bit like a turbo trainer except that it has the extra comedy potential that you might see someone trip over and get fired out the back like they’ve been shot from a catapult. Then there’s circuit training, which involves running round a room doing press-ups, squat
thrusts, box-jumps, burpees, reverse dips, pull-ups, sit-ups and ‘Oh, God my stomach hurts and my arms are going to drop off and I think I’m going to diiiiieeeeee!’ If you are really committed you could also try weight training, which involves hanging around in strange rooms where scantily clad people spend a lot of time looking at themselves in mirrors and making the kind of loud straining noises you only otherwise hear in the toilets at motorway services. Being able to lift enormous weights is less important than being world class at posing around while inadequately clad, and I don’t find going to the gym a comfortable experience. To be honest I’m a bit clueless about it all. For example, the push-up bra I bought recently is hopeless. Even when I’m wearing it I can still only do about ten of them.
So far we’ve discussed how cycling dominates my free time in the winter and summer, but it dominates my working life, too. Partly this is because these days I don’t own a car, just a campervan that is capable of passing everything on the road except a petrol station, so consequently I cycle everywhere as my main mode of transport. It is also partly because I now have a job in cycling, which came about as a direct result of me taking up triathlons. Let me explain …
If you’ve ever heard of me before, it’s probably because you have read a column I write in a monthly magazine called 220 Triathlon (the 220 being the number of people who read my column, timesed by ten), an opportunity that came my way after winning a readers’ competition to see how many knob gags one person could fit into a single paragraph. Despite appearances I am not a professional writer – which you may well have worked out for yourself if you’re still with me this far into the book – and I’ve had several jobs in what I laughingly call ‘my career’ so far, all of them crap. However, these days to keep a roof over my pretty little head I have a job that involves helping to convert old railway lines into cycle routes, and travelling round the country identifying places where new cycle paths and bridges can be built. This obviously sounds like a lot of fun – and it is, I won’t lie. The organisation I work for is a charity called Sustrans, which is responsible for creating the 14,000 miles of the National Cycle Network, and as its development manager I spend most of my days on a bike, riding around looking at places where cyclists have a hard time as a result of the design of roads and speeds of traffic, trying to see what can be done about it. Admittedly, I’m usually riding round on a Brompton folding bike that makes me a figure of fun to schoolkids and the occasional commuter on the trains I catch but, as I recently pointed out to one gentleman with a face like a dog’s bum with a hat on who suggested that my 6 foot 3 inch frame perched on top of a mini-wheeled roller skate made me look like ‘a twat’, in my world it wasn’t as hopelessly twattish as wearing an ill-fitting Marks & Spencer suit on a train with 300 identically dressed people who all wish they were doing something else other than spending 40 hours of misery a week in a corporate shitfarm.
Going to work for Sustrans was a complete departure from the previous jobs I’d had, which all involved working in ‘head office’ type roles for large corporations, doing things so pointless that if I tried to explain them you’d be asleep before I reached the end of the sentence. A great test of this is whether or not you can explain what you do for a living to your mum. Mind you, based on what she’s heard from me, my mum thinks triathlons basically involve cycling around in a leotard, shitting in hedges. However, something happened to me while I was training for Ironman Lake Placid a few years ago that changed all this, which is that I got banned from driving. I’m at pains to point out that I was not banned for drink-driving or insane speeding, but under the totting-up rules that come with regularly acquiring three points on your licence thanks to driving through speed cameras at 5–10mph over the speed limit. The camera that did for me was in Melton Mowbray, which I was only passing through because I was off to do a triathlon at Rutland Water called The Vitruvian. It was about 4.00 a.m. and I was peering for road signs when a flash alerted me to the fact that the speed limit had just dropped from 40mph to 30, and with 11 points already to my name, I’d just fucked my driving licence into a cocked hat. I subsequently had to appear at Melton magistrates court and stand before three very stern looking public servants who pronounced the death sentence until reminded that this wasn’t an option any more. I hoped that transportation to Australia would be next, but instead I got a six month suspension and told that if I drove during that six months I could go to prison. My prosecutors did not look amused when I said, ‘I thought all the prisons were full’ and it was with their dire warnings ringing in my ears that I subsequently drove all the way back to Coventry …
Fair dos, though I didn’t drive after that and I have no complaints because I deserved it, having driven like an arse for many a moon. Not one to have his stride broken, I took this as an opportunity to do some extra cycle training by riding to work every day. What I hadn’t considered, though, was that commuting by bike through towns during rush hour is very different to Sunday morning training in country lanes, and the roads these days are just about safer now than in the Middle Ages when we slept on straw and were regularly attacked by marauders. The longer I went on cycling every day, the more I realised how bad it could be trying to get around on a bike thanks to the way roads were designed and the way some drivers behaved, and the more I resolved to do something about it. Consequently when my six months’ ban was up three important things happened:
1. I didn’t bother getting another car because despite the difficulties with cycle commuting, I was better off and less stressed than when I had a car, and if anything was getting to places earlier.
2. I decided to leave my job and get one that tried to improve the lot of cyclists in the UK.
3. I ended up spending a fortune on chafe cream and Anusol to get rid of the bad case of arse-biscuits (those small but painful lumps that appear on your chuff) I’d acquired through cycling every day.
So when I say cycling rules my life more than anything else, it’s probably true because it accounts for work time, playtime, commuting time, training time and toilet time. I now have seven bikes in my garage, each with a specific purpose – road racing, triathlons and time trials, commuting, mountain biking, winter training, turbo-ing and unfolding so I can perch on top of it to be mocked by schoolchildren. I’m not ashamed of having this many bikes, in fact I’m quite proud of it, and my only real fear is that one day my wife will sell them for the amount of money I told her that I’d paid for them …
Chapter 5
I am currently typing while sat at my dining room table wearing nothing but a pair of split-sided running shorts, long compression socks and nipple tape – and if that mental image doesn’t put you in the mood for romance, nothing will. The reason for this singular look is that I have just returned from training with my running club, and the stench emanating from me is enough to drive away even my usually loyal Welsh Springer Spaniel Freddie, a creature frequently to be found with his nose up his own arsehole.
Running training kills me. Tonight’s session was two one-mile laps out on the road at 5.45-a-mile pace, followed by eight times around the 400m track at 80 seconds per lap, before going back out on the road to repeat the two miles at 5.45 pace. Of course, what this turned into was the first mile at 5.30 pace, the second at 6 minute pace, then the eight 400s at a pace progressing (regressing) from 72 seconds up to 85, before going back out on the road to run another mile at 5.59 pace and the last at about 7 minute pace, by which point I am running like I’ve tipped a bag of crisps down my bum-crack. To make matters worse I am doing this session with my running club Coventry Godiva Harriers. Godiva, as it shall henceforth be known, is the real deal when it comes to running clubs, with a wall in the clubhouse covered in photos of club members who have been Olympians. My running companions tonight included my friends Emerson Combstock, Pete Banks and Noel Edwards who have all represented England at distance running, Iwan Jones who has represented Wales, Zara Hyde-Peters who has run for Great Britain and Ian Gower who looks like he com
es from the same planet as the Klingons.
The wider training group contains people who have won marathons, cross country races and various national championships, others who represent their counties, and several youngsters on the cusp of breaking into the international teams for European and Commonwealth games. To make matters yet more intimidating, this training session is being watched over by Dave Moorcroft (Commonwealth gold medallist, Olympian and former 5,000m world record holder), Colin Kirkham (ran the marathon for Great Britain in the 1972 Olympics) and Bill Adcocks (ran the marathon for Great Britain in the 1968 Olympics and broke the course record for the classic Athens marathon course, which he subsequently held for 30 years). And then there’s me, huffing along at the back like an overweight stalker – and despite my angular physique, in this company I look distinctly overweight. The session is presided over by running coach Mike Peters, himself a sub 2.30 marathon runner and Stuart Pearce lookalike whose training sessions are guaranteed to turn me into a gastropod, in that by the end I am slow-moving with a slimy sheen.
Being able to run a long way without turning into a human daddy-long-legs is a vital part of training for an Ironman, so training sessions such as the one I have just endured must be completed if I am to have a hope in Roth. I put myself through this torture about three times a week, one consequence of which is that, thanks to my massive capacity for sweating, my kitbag now smells worse than a wrestler’s loincloth and nothing I do can shift the stench. I even tried spraying it with Nicky’s perfume but all that happened was a sailor followed me home. Running with this bunch is a far cry from where I started back in 2002. As I mentioned earlier, neither of the schools I went to were big on athletics, my junior school because anything other than football might as well have been pressing wild flowers and stamp collecting, and my senior school because only team games could turn you into the kind of upstanding member of the community that would make the school proud – solo sports were the preserve of loners and tomorrow’s book depository gunmen. Consequently, I did not grow up having much to do with the athletic world and missed out on the halcyon days of the sport when boys raced boys, girls raced girls, and horses raced through your digestive system. This is a shame because in international terms this was a golden era for British athletes with Steve Ovett, Seb Coe, Alan Wells, Daley Thompson, Tessa Sanderson, Steve Cram, Brendan Foster, Peter Elliot and Fatima Whitbread all achieving world class success and, in the case of Fatima Whitbread, some top quality schoolboy jokes.
Accidental Ironman Page 6
