Looking back now with the benefit of ten years of triathlon incompetence, er, insight behind me, it is staggering to think that I thought this was going to end in anything but disaster, but as we have learned I have never been one to take much notice of, well, anything really. At that time having a training plan reeked to me of being the equivalent of having life goals, and nothing said, ‘You’re a loser’ more than having a personal motivational phrase about being a winner. Such was my all-encompassing ignorance of triathlon that ten minutes before the race I decided it would be a good idea to buy a bottle cage and a drinks bottle to put on my bike because it was feeling a bit warm – 32° Celsius warm to be precise.
Chucking myself into Royal Victoria Dock didn’t faze me in the slightest, although I have subsequently learned that this is the part of the race most newbies dread, and with memories of my former swimming abilities fresh in my mind I plonked myself at the front of the wave. I suspected I may be slightly out of my league a few minutes into the swim when, as I was in full front crawl flight, I was overtaken by a bloke doing breaststroke. I was, in fact, one of the very last to leave the water and lurch up the dockside gangplank like I had a wooden leg. The transition was inside the Excel Centre, which has all the architectural charm of a loading bay and I was off on the old pile-cream-machine towards the attractive flyovers of Bermondsey. The bike course was a two-lap affair and I remember starting to feel distinctly hot and tired during the second lap, which seemed remarkably free of other cyclists thanks to the pace I was maintaining. I arrived back to a transition area full of bikes and headed out into the now blistering sunshine for a three-lap run.
To my credit, I managed to run the first lap at a pace that would do credit to the swiftest steamroller ever built as I battled to keep my cadence up and my breakfast down. Laps two and three were conducted at a more leisurely pace (I walked) before I found enough dignity to run the final half-a-kilometre over the finish line where I had to be held upright by a skinny old marshal, making it look like I was being carted off by the grim reaper. My finishing time was a whopping 3 hours 20 minutes although the finish line photos suggest I was well pleased with my efforts. This may possibly be because I am the only person ever to pass through Bermondsey wearing a pair of Lycra shorts and live to tell the tale, but more likely because I never dreamed I would do anything like this ever gain.
Further evidence of the fact that I have become an Ironman by accident comes from what happened next. Despite a time so slow that I had to buy a mobile phone with a longer screen so I didn’t have to scroll down so far on the results page to see my finishing position, I had sort of enjoyed myself and was consequently feeling more conflicted than Anakin Skywalker about whether to do anything like this ever again. A week or so later I was over in Birmingham shopping and, to kill some time while Nicky was in Next looking at some bloody thing or other, I bought a copy of 220 Triathlon magazine, the one I would end up writing for. I was standing outside Next leafing through it and staring with wonder at the shiny carbon items contained within when I became aware of a couple staring at me. After checking my flies to make sure that wasn’t the reason, I smiled weakly whereupon they asked, ‘Are you a triathlete?’ It turns out that both of them were triathletes. The chap’s name was Paul Kingscott, one of the stalwarts of the Black Country Tri club. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were clubs that did this sort of thing, but Paul informed me that there was even one on my doorstep known as Coventry Triathletes.
Clearly, it was meant to be that I should become a triathlete, what with the chain of coincidences at work and even out shopping, which conspired to pitch me headlong into the sport. I’m not one to fight fate, so I decided I’d get in touch with the Coventry club and find out more. The first person I spoke to was none other than Mark Stewart, now my fellow would-be Roth-man, er Challenger etc, who invited me to the club’s weekly swimming session. A week later I duly turned up to meet Mark. The second person I met was Steve Howes, the Iceman from our channel swim and someone of whom you will hear more later in this book. I remember being massively intimidated by the race T-shirts everyone was wearing – such intimidation being an important skill in the triathlon world – and feeling distinctly out of place as a Zeppelin-sized laughing stock who couldn’t have looked less fit if I’d been smoking 40 fags a day through an asbestos cigarette holder. I’d always assumed cyclists were the kind of weirdy-beardies who owned Dido CDs and recycled jumper fluff but here was a bunch of very sinewy men and women who couldn’t have swum faster if they’d been fired out of a U-boat, particularly a man called Mike McGillion who said he was an expert in inflation, which turned out to mean he sold party balloons.
It was inevitable that, upon mixing with this company, I would be lured down the slippery slope from doing a triathlon to being a triathlete and within nine months of joining them I had done not one but TWO Half Ironmans. I’d also returned to the London Triathlon and taken an hour off my previous finishing time. Not only that, but the gut that pressed against my belt like a balloon full of mud had vanished to be replaced with the musclebound Adonis you see before you to this day, if you have conjunctivitis. No longer did I look like a flabby-faced toff about to steal the chips off your plate when your back was turned. The catalyst for this transformation was simply that I had found a group of people I liked, who were willing to allow some hapless cock-end to train with them, and who opened up the arcane world of triathlons to me, showing me where the races were, and how to enter in that nanosecond between online race entries opening and the red banner arriving that says ‘Race Full’.
These days I am so experienced that I am handing out words of wisdom to newbies myself, constantly stunned at how my elevation to a kind of triathlon-idiot-savant could possibly have happened. This was apparent recently at a race put on by my club – still Coventry Triathletes – when I was asked to give a talk to people who were doing the race for the first time, advising them about what to expect. One glance at my shambling semi-existence should have revealed to them that I can’t even be trusted to give advice about how to sit the right way round on a toilet, but this didn’t stop people listening rapt with attentiveness as I bullshitted massively about what I had achieved in the sport. Watching the newbies race while I was marshalling out on the bike course of that race was also instructive for me because I learned that I am not alone when it comes to some of the weirder habits I have picked up from doing triathlons.
For example, sometimes I talk to the weather. I realise this makes me sound as sane as the secret lovechild of Josef Fritzl and Glenn Hoddle, but while cycling I regularly shout at the wind, which stays in my face whichever way I turn, bellowing ‘Is that all you’ve got!’, or stare up at the rainclouds saying, ‘You just couldn’t hold off for half a fucking hour could you?’ I’m barely suppressing an all-encompassing rage equal to football’s greatest nark merchants. I’d always assumed this was just my steady descent into bumbling senility but no, it seems I am not alone and that other triathletes are weather-talkers, too. In fact, m’lud, I put it to you that triathletes not only talk to the elements but they also talk to their bikes, to cars, to potholes, to junctions, to their legs and to themselves.
My particular job on my club’s race day was to stand on a traffic island in a rectangular yellow bib that made me look like SpongeBob SquarePants, pointing at approaching cyclists and shouting, ‘TURN LEFT!’ This gave me an excellent vantage point to secretly sneer at people’s cornering skills and to clearly hear what they were muttering to themselves as they rode past. I should point out that the weather was about as pleasant as being kicked in the shin by David Nalbandian, and the poor novices racing had to negotiate puddles you could breaststroke in and rain so heavy I was contemplating building an ark. As a result, people had plenty to moan about and I was delighted to hear people chuntering away to themselves. The most popular mutters appeared to be ‘Come on legs’ when people stood up on the pedals to ride away from the roundabout, ‘Piss off rain’ as they approa
ched the roundabout, and ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ when they had to stop for a car coming round the roundabout. Any clunking of gears was immediately reacted to by the rider looking down at their bike and saying, ‘Get in, you bastard’ while any cars that were slowly driving just ahead of the riders were treated to a strange Buddhist-like incantation that grew slowly in volume and went, ‘Go-on-go-on-go-ON-GO-ON!!’
As an aside, this was my first experience of being a race marshal, and it mostly involved sitting around doing nothing – and in my case the devil makes work for idle hands. Some of my mates were racing, so I thought I would lift their spirits by holding up a large card with a certain four-letter word that rhymes with my surname scrawled on it as they rode by. I’m pleased to say that it did the trick and not only distracted them from the rain, it almost caused them to crash. As well as abusing triathletes, my duties also involved justifying my presence to passing motorists and explaining the legalities of racing on roads to outraged hypocrites and the exceptionally slow-witted. Mostly, I had drivers shaking their head at me if they were delayed by a nanosecond by a rider at the roundabout, and handily I had my hand-drawn sign to hold up to them. One lady wound down her window to demand, ‘Who gave you permission for this!’, to which I replied, ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ which is always an answer that gets you left alone. Although many racers were busy chatting to themselves, quite a few did shout a ‘thanks marshal’ as they went by, and that was genuinely lovely because sitting on a roundabout in the pouring rain, watching melanin-deprived triathletes wearing expressions that made them look like a face trapped in a haunted mirror, is slightly less pleasant than a piss-bomb exploding in a skip full of rusty forks. If ever asked to marshal again I will claim that the date clashes with the opportunity to go to Twycross Zoo, coat my clinkers in honey and dangle them over the bear enclosure.
After competing in triathlons for a few years the whole thing can occasionally seem somewhat routine and a typical Olympic distance race for me these days goes roughly thus:
4.00 a.m. – My alarm goes off. My instant thought is ‘sod the race’ and I go back to sleep until I remember I’ve paid a £60 entry fee. I doze until five past, then 10 past, then quarter past – what is it about getting up that means you will only do it when the time ends in a five or a zero?
4.15 a.m. – A double espresso in the morning really jolts you awake – especially if you have it as an enema.
4.20 a.m. – I spend ten minutes deciding which T-shirt to wear so I can show off while I’m racking my bike. Do I wear an Ironman shirt or, because it’s an Olympic distance race, should I wear a GB team shirt – or would wearing an international shirt to a local race make people think I’m a knob? I opt for a 2004 Olympic finisher’s T-shirt to imply I’m experienced, but which just means that I probably have fillings older than most of the other competitors.
4.30 a.m. – I stare at the kit I’ve unpacked from my bag because of the nagging feeling I’ve forgotten something due to the lack of sleep making my brain so dense that light actually bends round it. I physically enact the process of putting kit on in T1 and T2 while muttering a strange incantation that goes ‘sock, sock, shoe, shoe, race belt, sunglasses, helmet, gel, GO’ so it looks like I’m doing some kind of weird t’ai chi exercise.
4.31 a.m. – I make up my energy drinks. How many scoops of powder is it per bottle? I can’t remember. God, I’m useless, I hate me, I think I’ll put ten scoops in, which should at least take the edge off my failure.
6.00 a.m. – I’m in transition laying out my kit, and watching as people stumble around trying to balance their kit boxes on top of their tri bars. One of my favourite parts of any triathlon is the walk into transition before a race, where I amuse myself watching people trying to balance a plastic box containing their kit on top of their bike. I’m not sure who first decided that carting all your kit around in a box was de rigueur for triathletes, but balancing a foot-square rigid cube on top of an inch-wide circular tube, while it’s moving, is a catastrophically inefficient means of transportation. I take perverse pleasure in watching people’s tempers flare as their bikes slide away from beneath their grip, cracking them meatily on the shin, or hearing the lavish swearing as the box tips over scattering their kit like a cluster bomb. These days I avoid this humiliation by keeping my kit in a contraption known as a ‘bag’, which can be slung over one’s shoulder and which also enables me to ride my bike right up to the transition entrance rather than walk, making me look experienced, manly and slightly sexy. Being experienced has its downsides though because I’m surrounded by people who are twenty years younger than me. So in my 2004 finisher’s T-shirt I feel as self-conscious as a chimp with a viola. A man wearing a GB skinsuit walks past and the lad next to me mutters ‘knob.’
6.55 a.m. – Wetsuit on.
6.55 a.m. and 10 seconds – I realise I’ve also forgotten the stuff to rub on my neck to prevent chafing. I KNEW there was something.
7.00 a.m. – The race starts.
7.00 a.m. and 10 seconds – My wetsuit starts rubbing my neck.
7.22 a.m. – I exit the water. Someone has been tapping my toes for the past five minutes; however I have been weeing down the legs of my wetsuit, so we’re even. I run in to transition and try to look like I’m not checking out how many bikes are still there.
8.00 a.m. – I’m out on the bike course. I eat an energy bar, which basically tastes like textured air. I overtake some people and some people overtake me, so I make a note of their kit so I can get them back on the run, and I kid myself this is realistic. I pass a man who’s had a puncture. ‘That’s one place higher up the leader board,’ I think to myself. Overall, my sympathy could fit into a Japanese thimble.
8.30 a.m. – I’m in T2 going through the ‘shoe, shoe, sunglasses etc’ thing for real, although the ‘shoe, shoe’ bit is harder when every leg bend threatens to give you cramp.
8.45 a.m. – I’ve done one lap of the run course. I overtake some kits I recognise from the bike course, and a man in a GB skinsuit about whom I mutter ‘knob.’
9.15 a.m. – I will finish in about 2 hours 15 minutes and some seconds. I next scan the results to work out that I have finished in the top ten (yes, that means ninth), and, realising that I haven’t, I look to see if I have finished in the top ten in my age group. Realising that I haven’t, I try to refine this some more until I work out that I’m in the top three of men over 40 from the West Midlands, which is what I’ll tell my friends. I put on my finisher’s T-shirt, and so begins its 12-month journey from flavour-of-the-month, to running top, to bottom of the drawer to bike-cleaning rag.
10.15 a.m. – I stop at the services on the drive home because I’m starving. The sandwiches all look disgusting and exactly what people who are too lazy to put their own stuff between bread deserve, so I opt for a bag of breadcrumbed abattoir scrapings. The services are full of people who are all staring at me, possibly because my breath smells like I’ve slept with a tramp’s toe in my mouth, possibly because I’m walking like I’ve been kicked very hard in the coccyx, but most likely because I’m wearing a skinsuit unzipped to the waist, compression socks and a T-shirt that says something like ‘Big Cow Racing’ on the front.
11.00 a.m. – I’m home. I haven’t won the race, but I haven’t finished near the back either. I saw some friends, I got some new tan-lines and I’ve lost another sock. The world hasn’t changed, women are not now looking at me in a different, more sultry manner and I have not acquired a group of slim, toned friends with witty facial hair who sit around in light airy rooms laughing as they Bluetooth each other.
It has taken me years of turning up and farting out deeply average results to achieve this kind of efficiency, but in rare moments of self-awareness I still sometimes wonder what my life would be like if Sally Plummridge hadn’t said those eight words, or if I hadn’t bought a 220 Triathlon magazine, or if Paul Kingscott hadn’t been walking past and spoken to me and made me think, ‘Hmm, these triathletes seem like a frien
dly bunch.’ Not that I am now the perfect triathlon machine, by the way, as my current training for Challenge Roth continues to reveal. Even ten years on from my first Olympic-distance race I don’t get them completely right and I continue to have more weaknesses than the Maginot Line. Let’s be honest, every superhero has their Achilles heel. Superman has kryptonite, Achilles had his, er, heel, and Lindsay Lohan had several Ketel One vodkas. I am no different, only my Achilles heel is a bit more abundant than kryptonite – it’s rain.
I realise that this book may contain the odd factual error because of clones, evil counterparts from other dimensions, shape-shifting demons and the illusions of villainous magicians. Trust me, however, when I say that I despise racing in the rain as much as Jeremy Kyle presumably despises himself. The reason for this loathing is, of course, fear. As a result of several wet-race bike crashes over the years I now regard every rainy road as being covered in ice-encrusted glass and thus the most dangerous strip of tarmac outside of a Mad Max film. Never was this more evident than in my first race of this season, which was an Olympic-distance race in the Midlands. I entered it as an early leg-stretcher for what awaits me in Roth. I realised I might be in for a trying day when I woke at 6.00 a.m. to the sound of hail drumming on my campervan roof. I attempted to make breakfast but got tired of a pre-race meal consisting mainly of rainwater, so gave up and went to a local café to join the truckers for their early-morning fry up. It’s always a joy to share a table with a man who has sinus issues, a T-shirt with a Star Wars joke on it and an astounding conception of what constitutes personal hygiene.
Accidental Ironman Page 9
