Accidental Ironman (14 page)

Since I started writing this book, I have become a British champion – twice! Earlier on I described how I had contrived to become National Masters 10-mile champion and, while taking a well-earned break from all this writing, I have also come first in my age group in the British Masters Athletics 10,000m Championships, bestowing upon me a gold medal and the title of National Masters Champion! Impressed? Well don’t be, because not only was I the
first
in my age group to finish, I was also the
only
one in my age group to finish. What I did in that previous sentence was what all triathletes are notorious for doing after races, which is to make our results sound as good as they possibly can without telling an actual lie. In every triathlon, one person wins and the rest of us are left trying to make the best of it by coming out with cobblers like, ‘I was in the top twenty in my age group’ or ‘I did a PB for the swim’, each of which can be neatly summarised as ‘I lost.’ In every triathlon I’ve ever done, people cross the line and start wailing like Mariah Carey folding a theremin in half, coming out with justifications that wouldn’t fool a hen, but which we need to share to un-bruise our egos.

It’s fair to say that since I turned 40 I’ve profited from the availability of masters prizes and scarcity of masters competitors, and I now have so many medals that if I wore them all at once I’d need an osteopath to punch the crick out of my neck. One or two of these races have involved beating an actual person, but I’ve won a fair few by virtue of simply being alive. Don’t get me wrong, being British Champion is a big deal for someone like me who has the social standing of a plughole and it’s great to finally get a bit of recognition from someone other than the police. However, finishing first out of one does take some of the shine off my victory – as does the fact that I’ll forever remember the race as the one where I was constantly hooking my shorts out of my bum crack. There’s also the embarrassment that, despite concentrating really hard on my running form, I STILL looked crap on the photos, crossing the line with my mouth wide open like a basking shark preparing to swallow an acre of krill. By now you’ll be well aware that when it comes to serious advice this book is about as useful as an episode of
Hong Kong Phooey
, and I don’t generally make it my business to hand out tips to eager triathletes like a zookeeper feeding sprats to barking seals. However, to give you a bit of light relief from me crapping on about myself, I thought I’d try and pass on some examples so you can recognise triathlon tosh when you hear it.

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that I’m British champion. As yet, it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to the way people treat me as I pound the pavements on my training runs and I still have to weave my way through the undulating blob monsters on their way to McDonalds. Don’t these people know who I am? Why, at the Swashbucker Half Ironman I finished in the top twenty in my age group in a race full of ex-pros, despite having a cold all week, and if I’d been eighteen months older …

When I am training for an Ironman there are certain clues that give that fact away:

1.   I attain a scrawny physique – doing Ironmans has made me look more haggard than ET’s nutsack and my plummeting weight means I have to buy a whole new summer wardrobe, although, to be fair, the old one was full of restraining orders and photos of Kelly Brook. As an example, I vividly remember getting towards the end of the training programme I did for my very first Ironman in Canada and I was sitting in my friend Steve Hundal’s back garden having just got back from a six-hour bike ride with him. By now I was so thin I could have got a tan by slotting my face into a toaster, and one of Steve’s relations told me she thought I looked ill, whereupon Steve announced: ‘That means you’re ready!’

2.   I will generally cycle so many miles on my ride to work, with the wind blowing in my remaining hair, that the hush that descends over the office as I walk in isn’t awe-inspired respect, it’s my workmates holding their breath. And no wonder because my body odour can now bring down a camel at 50 paces. And this is despite my washing machine being in permanent use trying to keep my kit clean. In fact, if the scientists in Cern want to see something that travels at a million miles an hour they should scrap the Large Hadron Collider and just come and watch my electricity meter.

3.   Before I took up triathlon my entire diet could be summed up by the nursery rhyme ‘One potato, two potato, three potato, four’ and I was so fat I had man-boobs like a pair of toad skin saddlebags. I would sweat like soft cheese just getting out of a chair and I’d only manage to reach my holiday weight if that holiday took place on the planet Mercury. I still eat like this now, except that thanks to the extreme hunger caused by Ironman training I’ll eat whatever is in the kitchen cupboard and frequently have post-ride meals with food combinations that would make Heston Blumenthal throw up.

4.   Having spent years not realising that times like 4.30 a.m. actually existed, I can now be found slogging up and down my local pool while the general public are still coming in from the pub. It must be great to be an elite triathlete and train when you want, and I bet they don’t have to sit through afternoon meetings at work with one eye open so it looks like they’re awake, and the other closed because they were out running at five o’clock.

And all this is despite having an Ironman career that has been about as successful as a North Korean missile. As we shall see, despite the many Ironman races I have now done, I’ve got them right, I’ve got them wrong and I’ve got them badly, badly wrong.

I suppose it was inevitable that I would start doing Ironmans, although while I was training for my first one I was warned that the experience of a full-on Iron race would either make me love them, or never ever want to even hear the word Ironman again without assaulting the speaker. Having spent 2005 steadily improving in Olympic distance and Half Ironmans, I decided that 2006 would be the year to lose my Iron virginity by joining the aforementioned Steve Hundal, plus Steve Howes the Channel-swimming Iceman, to have a crack at Ironman Canada. It was a perfect choice for my first long-distance race because it was a country I had always wanted to visit to see if they really do shag mooses and pick up their own litter. It also meant that, having endured my training regime on top of my moody pre-Ironman nerves, Nicky would get a very nice holiday out of it. This mattered because I dread to think what patch of skin I would have lost if I’d said, ‘Hey, we’re off to Bolton.’

As usual I was biting off an awful lot more than I could chew by joining the Steves, because both of them were experienced athletes aiming to qualify for the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii. Steve Hundal is the most terrifyingly fast short-arse I have ever seen on a bike, while Steve Howes is a Barry Chuckle lookalike who has qualified for the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii so many times he has his own hula skirt – and he is a phenomenal athlete despite the double drawback of being both short AND ginger.

Training with the Steves involved following a punishing 12-week programme of steadily increasing hours and distances, culminating in a memorable day when I did a six-hour bike ride followed by a two-and-a-half hour run and a ten-hour lie-down in a dark room. Looking back at this time it was incredibly generous of the Steves to allow me to train with them when they were focusing on securing a world championship slot, although I didn’t feel like expressing much gratitude at the time because I was so exhausted I’d finish every ride coughing like a chimney sweep in the advanced stages of black lung. One of the more memorable aspects of the Steves’ training plan was called ‘The Lung Run’, a weekly two-hour, cross-country run around the badlands of South Warwickshire. They said it was aimed at building leg strength and giving us some mental toughness to call on when things got bad during the Ironman – gulp! This kind of run sounds benign but when I tell you that during its lifespan The Lung Run accounted for Steve Howes breaking a rib when he fell on a furrow that was frozen solid; Steve Hundal getting borderline hypothermia when he fell into a river that had burst its banks; and me getting ten stitches in my hand after ripping it open on barbed wire, then you’ll get the picture that this was Ironman training the hard way.

Having survived this punishing regime I was certainly full of fitness immediately prior to the Canada race, if not confidence. On arriving at registration in the town of Penticton, which was playing host to the race, I was handed an awful lot of plastic bags to put my swim, bike, run and dry kit in, some stickers to plaster all over my bike, helmet and skin, and a programme with a photo of the fearsome Richter Pass. We would have to cross the pass during the bike leg and it looked like it should have Nepalese Sherpas manning the drinks station. I don’t mind admitting I was a bag of nerves in the days leading up to the race. How Nicky didn’t brain me with a track pump I’ll never know. It was an enormous relief to all concerned when the race arrived and I could piss off out of everyone’s way.

This was my first time swimming with this many people (over 2,000) but I didn’t find the experience all that worrying, unlike Steve Howes who had gone down to the front with the piranha pack and received a kicking he’d never forget. Somehow I managed to come out of the water ahead of Steve Hundal, although he remedied that soon into the bike leg when he came past me (and 1,000 others!) like he had his arse on fire. The first 40 or so miles were slightly downhill before we turned north and Richter Pass reared up in front of us. Despite its fearsome reputation, I found myself doodling up it past toiling Yanks and reached the halfway point of the bike course well pleased. What follows is a section of the course known as ‘The Six Bitches’ in honour of the six rolling hills you encounter, which soften you up until you start to feel as though you are made of Play-Doh. This is followed by a climb called Yellow Lake, so-named because of all the dehydrated triathletes trying to wee in it. This climb was much harder than Richter and at about 80 miles into the 112 mile bike course I was starting to think that the world was my oyster, meaning there was a good chance it was going to make me vomit. I eventually rolled into transition after 6 hours 10 minutes and set about recalling the dire days of The Lung Run to give me something to ‘call on.’

This worked a treat until exactly seventeen miles when a pain shot up the inside of my left leg, raced up my spine, rattled round my teeth and then raced back down to my leg again. I had cramp; not just the kind of cramp that makes you go ‘Ow’ but the sort that snaps you in half and leaves you rooted to the spot unable to move a single muscle. From where I stood I could see the 17 mile sign but I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t even tell any appalling jokes. I began to have my first doubts about whether I could finish. Cramp, being evil, subsided after a time and I was able to walk, then jog, then run, then be rooted to the spot again cross-eyed with agony as another wave hit me at 21, 23, 25 and 26.1 miles. I managed to hobble over the finish line in 11 hours 48 minutes to the sound of a man with a microphone saying ‘You are an Ironman!’ It was a lovely feeling but secondary at that point to my search for any scrap of savoury food I could lay my teeth on – frankly after 12 hours of gels, fruit and sweets I’d have eaten the cardboard box that pizzas come in.

In the huge, thronging crowd it was ages before I found Nicky and the Steves, mostly because I’d given Nicky my glasses and without them the entire world looked like an episode of
Roobarb and Custard
. Nicky was quite emotional when she saw me, having known me from when I was a fleshy non-achiever. I also had a happy reunion with the Steves, who had finished either side of the 10-hour mark with Steve Howes securing his Hawaii slot agaaaaain, although with the amount of kit that I went and bought with the words ‘IRONMAN FINISHER’ emblazoned on it you’d have thought it was me off to Hawaii having won not only my age group but the entire race in a new world record.

It was next morning when I was nursing a bowl of cornflakes and a massive hangover at breakfast that the question about whether this was to be my only Ironman, or whether I would be condemned to a life of fruitless toil with absurdly large thigh muscles, was answered. Steve Howes spoke of possibly, maybe, perhaps doing Ironman Lake Placid the following year and without even waiting to be invited, or considering the financial implications, or the feelings of the somewhat furious-looking wife sat immediately to my left I said, ‘I’m in.’

And so it was that about a week later, thanks to some secret Masonic back-door arrangement Steve had with the race organisers, I was an entrant in Ironman Lake Placid, this time with fellow Roth-er Mark Stewart, who had decided that he was pissed off knocking around with a ‘Half Ironman UK’ T-shirt and us all saying, ‘The only trouble with that T-shirt is the word “half” on it.’ In my defence, being an Ironman made me feel utterly invincible and, if you had put a bullet through my forehead the only difference it would have made is that I’d make a whistling noise when I ran. Evidence of this was the fact that just one day after returning from Canada I headed off to Rutland Water to take part in a Half Ironman called the Vitruvian.