By the time it came to drive to the race and start racking my bike in transition and faffing about with my kit, the weather had mercifully dried up but the presence of black clouds overhead was making me more edgy than a broken pisspot. The last thing I needed was a chatty transition neighbour with views about the weather – so right on cue my neighbour cast his gaze skywards and said, ‘Looks like rain,’ which made me want to belt him so hard across the shins with a track pump that he started dry-heaving. In the event I said, ‘Go away before I climb over this rack and slay you.’ He seemed surprised but continued to talk about puddles on the course, which provoked my response, ‘Go and arrange for someone to bury you cheaply, and I’ll pay half the expense.’ Oh, how I yearn for the good old days when you could tell people what you thought about them with a hatchet or a bow and arrows.
My race started promisingly with a new personal best of 21.20 for the 1500m swim – good news you might think, but it only served to accentuate what followed. The roads were still dry so I scampered along the first six miles of the course like a drugged up Power Ranger until we reached a sign that said ‘Welcome to Wales.’ I’m aware that until the seventies Wales was an undersea kingdom and it is making a concerted effort to return to its naturally submerged state, so sure enough, no sooner had we passed the ‘Croeso’ sign than the heavens opened. It didn’t just rain, it chucked it down, and my fear and loathing instantly kicked in until I became about as comfortable on my bike as an early Christian martyr tied against a stake. My speed dropped to the point where I was worried about being overtaken by the fucking Karaoke Runner again and, to add an extra kick in the teeth, half the field overtook me.
This miserable experience lasted until we reached the ‘Welcome to England’ sign two miles from the end, whereupon it instantly dried up and I immediately turned into Chris Hoy and blasted into T2 like a curry-powered fart. My overall bike time was a weaselly 1:12.30, a full ten minutes slower than I normally do for this distance, with the added humiliation of being exposed as a cringing weakling. Stung by my cowardice and nicely rested after my gentle ride, I tore round the run as fast as anyone can when they basically look like an unbaked gingerbread man. My run time on a lumpy 10k was 37.30 despite running so hard that I had to hold my mouth shut to prevent myself from throwing up a warm glop of energy gels down my front.
So my training for Roth had started the way these things always start, with me questioning how in the name of our Lord Brownlee I was ever going to manage to cover 140.6 miles when I had just made such a hash of covering 30. And how the hell am I going to manage if it rains? Oh, and thank you Sally Plummridge, wherever you are, for starting all this by setting off a chain reaction that those scientists at Cern who are trying to make a black hole would be proud of. And I believe we said that the wager for me completing the London Triathlon was a tenner, which I have still not received even after a decade of waiting. Bloody bankers.
Chapter 7
It is a piece of received triathlon wisdom that doing a few races as part of your build-up to an Ironman is a good idea, which is how I came to be racing in the rain in the Welsh-border badlands. Partly this is so you can get a sense of your form before your main event of the year, partly because they are good training sessions under race conditions, and partly because after a winter of knocking about with swimmers, cross country runners and other forms of aquatic life, you need to remind yourself how to do a triathlon at all. More specifically you need to relearn how to perform a transition between swimming and cycling, and then cycling and running, without scampering around the transition area looking for your bike amid the many hundreds of identical overpriced carbon shapes. Many is the time I have seen early-season triathletes looking vainly for their bike, helmet, shoes, trainers, gels and competence before trying desperately to find the way out of transition amid the maze of bike racks and kitbags. I remember seeing one guy running three times round a particularly complicated transition in Belgium looking for the run exit shouting, ‘Ariadne, the thread, the thread!’ Being grammar-school educated meant I got this joke but from the po-faced reaction it got from others I guess that triathlon is not awash with classical scholars.
Finding the right balance between training to achieve peak fitness at just the right time (i.e. 6.59 a.m. on the morning of Challenge Roth), and knackering yourself out by doing too many warm-up races, is a fine balance to get right and one which my coach, Dave, plans to perfection for me, if only I did as he said. This year Dave and I decided I would do two Half Ironman races as a warm up, as well as a week of overseas cycling on training camp in Lanzarote to ensure I took to the start line with some top quality tan lines halfway up my arms and legs, the cultivation of several cycling and running tan lines of different lengths until you look like a walking barcode being an important way of marking you out as a triathlete. My plan to do just the two races didn’t take account of two unforeseen factors though:
1. A brand new race had been organised right on my doorstep, organised by a friend of mine.
2. My friends were planning to do different races to me, and I am pathologically incapable of saying no when they suggest I should come and do their races with them.
So it was that on top of my planned races of the ‘Kernowman’ Half Ironman in Cornwall and the Cotswold 113 Half Ironman in the, er, Cotswolds, I now added two further races, namely the excitingly titled ‘Swashbuckler’ and ‘Avenger’ – both of which were also Half Ironmans. This made a total of four middle distance races in my pre-Iron/Challenge/packet-of-fags build-up, exactly double the number that I needed. Ho hum as they say, and yet more evidence of the accidental nature of my approach to Ironmans. I like Half Ironmans, though, because with a 1900-metre swim, 56-mile cycle and 13-mile run they are usually over and done with inside a morning, you can usually fart them out without the training taking over your life for months on end, and they still have the word ‘Ironman’ in the title to make you sound impressive to the wider public who know no better. It’s my favourite distance, so I’ve genuinely lost count of how many I have done over the years and I have travelled to such exotic locations as Monaco, Belgium, Weymouth, Milton Keynes and the dark side of the moon (Leicestershire) to do them, although this does not mean I have become wise in their ways.
For example, back in 2007 I was about to start a Half Ironman in the USA when I stubbed my foot on a rock and took the skin off the end of my big toe. This mishap was soon forgotten as I addressed the more pressing problem of trying to stop 2000 swimmers from booting my goggles off as we sprinted for the first buoy, or boooeeeey as Americans inexplicably call them. In fact, all thoughts of my skinless toe vanished until halfway round the bike course when I needed the loo and decided to save time by peeing while cycling. I hoiked up my shorts and began the freewheel of shame as I did the disgusting deed, at which point I was sharply reminded of my earlier foot-stubbery as some wee leaked into my shoe and hit my toe with the ferocity of a snapping turtle. As the stinging hit warp-factor 10 on my personal pain threshold, a shocked group of spectators were treated to the sight of a man streaking past them with his knob out and the haggard look of someone who fought at the Battle of Stalingrad.
I do not tell this story in support of personal hygiene, but to underline the point that this is how I learn my lessons – by making catastrophic mistakes. This makes me a dangerous person to seek advice from, as some novices tried to do at a Half Ironman last year when I was exposed as the most experienced triathlete at the race briefing. The race in question was the Ely Monsterman, a middle-distance dash around the flatlands of Cambridgeshire and in the pre-race pep talk people were asked to hold up their hands to indicate how many Half Ironmans they had done. When he reached six races, I was the only person in the room with arm still aloft and there were audible gasps when we worked out I’d done some unspecified number of middle distance races above 20. As soon as the briefing was over I was pounced on by first-timers asking questions; they seemed to revere me as some sort of triathlon Termin
ator with origins as a nude man who materialised in a transition area and whose first words were, ‘I need your Oakleys, your Carnacs and your Cervelo P3.’
I had to repeatedly point out to them that despite being a triathlete for ten years I am basically triathlon’s equivalent of Alan Shearer, in that we both spend much of our time commenting on a sport we clearly have no recollection of having participated in. I felt this was terribly important to stress to people trying to harness the terrifying power of my black hole of anti-knowledge. Fortunately the Ely Monstermunchers soon realised that I was not some sort of glowing, hovering brain with massive JCVD-style biceps when I started giving advice about how to unpeel your gel-covered hands from your handlebars as my top tip.
In truth, I’ve always recognised myself as a resolutely middle-of-the-pack athlete, a sort of triathlon equivalent of the house wine at a suburban Indian restaurant, and this image did not change in the first warm-up of my pre-Roth build up, the aforementioned ‘Kernowman’, which involved a jaunt around southern Cornwall with a sea-swim in the shadow of St Michael’s Mount, a bike-leg down to Land’s End and along the north Cornish coast, and a run on the slopes of Mount Everest, renamed on this occasion as Tregurtha Downs. I chose this particular race because Nicky is Cornish and she fancied a trip back to her homeland to stock up on proper pasties, saffron buns, clotted cream and a wicker man to burn her enemies in.
Despite a long journey down to the land of the Ewoks in my campervan, having one was well worth it when I arrived at the race venue because I was able to drive right up to the transition area in Marazion field, pull on the handbrake, unfurl my bed, stick the kettle on and scratch myself lavishly before going sleepy-bye-byes – and it’s always pleasurable sitting on a chair as the sun sets watching some other poor schmuck having a duel to the death with a tent in the dark. The only downside to my van is that it has no loo and, thanks to my sneaky wee out of the door on the morning of the race, there is now a part of Marazion field that looks like it’s been subjected to a scorched-earth attack where nothing will ever grow again, not even on a cellular level. The transition was a fairly as-you-please affair with a couple of bike racks set up in the field with some netting to make sure the accursed public were kept at bay, and the morning began with all the racers strolling together down to the beach to start the race. I can honestly say I love the more laid-back atmosphere of these kind of locally organised races compared with the high-intensity, nerve-shredding fandango you get before most Ironmans, which feel like you’re in The Shawshank Redemption (only with more tunnelling through shit and no redemption.)
The race itself started inauspiciously for me because the sea was at the chillier end of hypothermic, which I found out when I plunged under the waves only to hurtle straight back up again cursing and spluttering like a sweary surface-to-air missile. Before the race we’d been told the water temperature was 11 degrees, and I think there might have been a decimal point missing from that number. Not being able to feel my limbs made for a slower-than-usual swim, although this did at least delay the effects of having not adjusted my wetsuit properly before diving in, and trapping a certain part of my private anatomy. Within minutes I was scanning the horizon for a railway line to lie across in a desperate attempt to remove the lower half of my body and relieve myself of the phenomenal pain being inflicted upon me. Although as a man I lack the required experience, I’m going to estimate that this was at least eleven times more painful than childbirth, and on exiting the water some lucky spectators were treated to the sight of me charging wildly into transition bellowing like a mountain gorilla with its toe caught in a mousetrap, and then cannonballing arse first on to the grass while tearing at the crotch of my wetsuit. The net effect of this experience turned my private parts into a maroon coloured bag of agony. I could now pass urine in three positions: standing, sitting and curled in a ball weeping.
The 56-mile bike leg was much less eventful apart from one motorist, who I’d describe as an enthusiastic self-partner, sitting two inches behind my rear wheel through the town of Hayle. I always say there’s no better way for a driver to signal that he wants to go faster than by increasing the chance of my death by 40 per cent. Happily 99 per cent of the course was on scenic lanes along the Cornish coast with no traffic, which was excellent because race-day motorists are usually about as endearing as a gang of Nazi wasps. A quick stop for a wee up the side of a barn was witnessed by a passing local who suggested that I’d missed a bit of my shoulders when applying sun cream and that I was looking ‘as burnt as a crow.’ I worked very hard on the bike to make up for my swim, so by the time I set off on the half-marathon I was starting to look like the lone equine survivor of a fire at a donkey sanctuary.
The run course was extremely hilly with long off-road sections. Fortunately, inspiration was on hand because Nicky’s parents, who have a summer caravan in nearby Porthtowan, had come down to cheer me on enthusiastically, although I noted this enthusiasm didn’t extend to her dad putting his teeth in. All his toothless encouragement to ‘Pickssshhh your knesssshh up’ had the desired effect, though, and I was soon shuffling along. After just 90 minutes I was skipping over the line for my highest ever finishing position, with a pint of Skinners in one hand and a pasty in the other. In terms of being a good warm-up for Roth it couldn’t have gone any better. If nothing else, it proved I’ve got the drive, the desire and the tenacity to be whatever I want to be, and the only thing holding me back is myself – and the two-year suspended prison sentence for what I did during that last lager blackout.
My next move after becoming a Kernowman was to attend a coaching talk given by Malcolm Brown MBE, former running coach for UK Athletics and current coach to the Brownlees, Non Stanford and various other professional triathletes who seem to have been getting the hang of the sport. I was hoping to absorb some wisdom from the man who has coached athletes to World and Olympic level because I’m fed up of looking for athletic advice on the internet, which appears to be plastered with adverts for baldness clinics, poor quality university courses, and gadgets that will solve all my training needs in exchange for a giant number made of coins and money. I’m sure marketing types think all triathletes sleep in a giant rustling money nest with a life-mantra of ‘If you can’t beat them, buy something.’ Malcolm’s talk was fascinating and what I actually learned was that the Brownlees are in fact robots, that what appears to be sweat on their brows is in fact a metallic sheen, and that when they get tired they are merely plugged into a USB port by which they are recharged. By now you’ve probably got the suspicion that this might be utter cock, and you’d be right, but the truthful point was that the Brownlees have led active lifestyles since they were toddlers (frankly they’re still bloody toddlers when you’re pushing 45), so when it came to taking up triathlons they had a fantastic base fitness on which to build. This was enormously useful news to me because as we have discussed already, as a kid in the seventies the only exercise we got was avoiding the groping hands of Radio 1 DJs. Thus the complete absence of an active lifestyle for the first 35 years of my life gave me a handy excuse for why I haven’t won Kona – or indeed anything – yet, and helped keep any pressure of expectation off my shoulders during my preparations for Roth.
An equally educational experience came when, a fortnight later, it was time for me to do the Swashbuckler Middle Distance Tri which I had been talked into by my friend Joe (he of the five daughters and no hair) who was also training for Roth and who was bored since the police came and took his bong away. The race took place in the New Forest at an idyllic spot called Bucklers Hard with a swim in the harbour, a cycle around the scenic lanes between Beaulieu and Brockenhurst (giving way to ponies at all times), and a run around some lanes which may be equally scenic but which I didn’t notice because I banged my nut on the bike rack in transition so spent most of the run clutching my head like I’d been clobbered by the riot police.
Again it was campervan time. I also drove Joe down with me with both our bikes perched p
recariously on the back. Normally, sleeping arrangements in the van involve me in the downstairs compartment on a pull-out, upholstered, comfy bed surrounded by noise-deadening metal walls and amenities such as sink, stove, spotlights, radio and pornography. My guests are usually condemned to the upstairs compartment aka the pop-top roof which involves a wafer-thin mattress, canvas walls and several midges who seem to live up there. However, Joe had no plans to be my live-in lodger and had brought his own tent to sleep in, on account of having a bladder the size of a squash ball that forces him to get up three times a night. At our pre-race campsite I slept the sleep of the righteous, cocooned in my tin box on wheels, listening to the muffled bickering of Joe giving the length of his tongue (6 and three-quarter inches) to some dickhead who was using a noisy generator to power the reading light in his tent.
With the race starting at 6.00 a.m. the next day, bike racking was conducted in a largely semi-conscious state and again I enjoyed the relaxed ‘as-you-please’ nature of the arrangements. The transition was on a first-come-first-served basis with people setting up their bikes in the most tactically advantageous spot for themselves – in my case this was next to the bike exit, and in Joe’s case next to the Portaloos. The grass on the barefoot walk to the swim start was freezing so I prepared for the race by stamping on the ground like I was blasting away at the earth’s crust in search of shale gas, while a weary Joe contented himself with doing massive yawns, which, without his teeth in, was like peering over the rim of a damp bucket. The swim was in the natural harbour and timed to take advantage of the highest tide and fewest number of gin-palaces heave-hoeing out of the anchorage. Having selected my starting position as usual to keep the maximum number of swimmers on my right and the maximum number of teeth in my head I awaited the klaxon in a relaxed frame of mind, practising for the Roth start by winding Joe up about how punchy the swim was going to be. The swim came and went in its usual maelstrom of thrashing about. I was swimming alongside someone whose pace and stroke count matched mine exactly, the only difference between us being that he kept trying to swim me into the sodding boats and I kept trying to send him out to sea. I emerged from the water in a little over 30 minutes, unleashed a massive salty burp on the spectators gathered on the slipway and set about getting out on the bike.
Accidental Ironman Page 10
