Accidental Ironman (15 page)

After completing an Ironman this was surely going to be a piece of cake, and so it proved to be after an imperious swim and powerful first half of the bike course. In fact, all was going spiffingly until 25 miles into the bike course when I started getting a dull ache in my knee, which became a stabbing twinge and finally searing agony. It seems that in my lazy, arrogant haste to reassemble my bike after unpacking it from its bike box I had put my saddle back on too high and thus the repetitive overstretching with each pedal stroke had strained my knee, making me squeak like a rusty bog door. I arrived in transition with a leg that now resembled a chicken drumstick but, not to be deterred from finishing, set off on the run with a style that looked like I’d sat on my own testicles. As I limped along another triathlete of my acquaintance, who shall remain a nameless bastard, sidled past me and said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Leg. Hurts,’ I replied through gritted teeth.

‘Ah, that old chestnut,’ said Bastard before skipping lightly away.

And lo! I was sore distressed at this insult and accusation of malingering and the skies didst darken and there was a mighty clap of thunder as I didst chaseth after Bastard like a hellhound before I overtaketh him and chargeth all the way to the finish line in 1 hour and 16 minutes for 20 kilometres, where St John Ambulance didst give me painkillers, apply soothing creams, strappeth me up and calleth me a bloody idiot.

At least this medical tent experience teed me up nicely for my crack at Ironman Lake Placid a year later. Lake Placid is a beautiful spot in New York State famous for its Winter Olympics ski jumps and a giant man-eating crocodile that may or may not live in the lake, which was guaranteed to make the Ironman swim faintly unnerving. It’s a race that is apparently usually held in either pouring rain or brain-cooking heat and in 2007 it proved to be the latter, which was good news for Nicky’s tan and bad news for my prospects of finishing without looking like I’d been dragging a cartload of scrap metal through a housing estate. In the lead-up to the race I’d followed the same 12-week training programme as the year before when I did Ironman Canada, supplemented by my previously mentioned driving ban, which kicked in around this time and led to me doing so many miles on the bike I had to be intravenously fed orangeade and liquidised Monster Munch to keep me upright.

Once again, the swim proved to be my best bit of the race and I even managed to emerge just ahead of Mr Howes, although soon screwed that up by grabbing the wrong bag as I ran through transition and then had to battle against the incoming flow of Ironmen in a hurry to swap it for one that didn’t have a pair of running shoes and a box of Jaffa Cakes in it. The bike course was a lot lumpier than Canada but, thanks to my enforced non-driving regime, I was round it in just over six hours before it was least-shit-foot forward for the run. Things were going okay until WHAM – the exact same cramp attack hit me in the exact same spot on my leg at the exact same distance as in Canada. As I stood stock-still, swearing mightily, Mark jogged past me looking genuinely concerned about whether or not I was going to live, let alone finish, but I bade him carry on or, if he could find a gun, shoot me in the head and put me out of my misery. As it was I got going again and managed to keep my pretty little legs moving to the finish line, which I reached in an underwhelming 11 hours and 53 minutes. I looked so gaunt that two medical attendants grabbed me, frog-marched me to the medical tent, shoved a drip in my arm and told me things like ‘Way to goooo’ and that I’d done a ‘good jaaaaaab.’

I’d lost an absurd amount of weight during the race thanks to becoming massively dehydrated in the heat and it took several days of consuming lard and booze in New York with Nicky (her reward for having to listen to me relive the race in the same kind of forensic detail reserved for crime reconstructions) before I was able to look like myself again and less like some kind of nightmarish Christmas decoration.

Not all my Ironman experiences have been bad and, by degrees, over the following years I started getting less inept at them. This may have been because I started being coached by Dave, who introduced a degree of competence into my pre-race planning, forcing me to consider such things as a pre-race eating plan, hydration strategy and not being a training dodger. The first Ironman Dave coached me for was Ironman Austria, which took place in Klagenfurt, a name guaranteed to get a snigger out of any schoolboy. With a beautiful swim in the blue waters of the Worther See and a cycle around the set of
The Sound of Music
, it’s an event that attracts a lot of entrants, and one of the toughest parts of the race is getting registered before it sells out. My memories of this race are far more pleasant, with a swim of one hour on the nose followed by a bike leg of 5 hours 40 minutes and a somewhat shuffling but effective run to give me a much healthier-looking finishing time of 10 hours and 48 minutes – this despite it being so hot that Nicky was forced to remain in the beer tent for the duration of the marathon lest she run dangerously low on Holsten Pils. Being of Germanic extraction (one of my great-grandads snuck ashore in a WW1 U-boat), I felt much more at ease in Austria than I did in the US, and resolved to make more of the European triathlon scene. So I immediately booked to go and do Ironman Florida. Sigh.

My relative success in Austria led to a period of the strongest performances I have ever achieved. I ran my first sub-three-hour marathon without particularly focusing on any training for it, and was going so well on my bike that I rode off the front of the Coventry Road Club training group, earning me the affectionate nickname of ‘Tosser’. All this was good news because, inspired by my steady ascent towards becoming a vaguely competent athlete, I had decided that at Ironman Florida I would set my sights on this being the place to secure my spot for the World Championships in the land of Magnum P.I. Joining me in Florida were Steve Howes (inevitably) and my great friend Phil Richmond, aka ‘Tigger’ due to his bouncy running style. Phil and I started doing triathlons at the same time and joined Coventry Triathletes in virtually the same week, sparking a close friendship that continues to this day despite him being unmasked as an Aston Villa supporter living in Coventry and having to move to Inverness for his own safety. This was going to be Phil’s debut Ironman and he was looking forward to it enormously, not for the challenge but for the many opportunities it presented for faffing about with his kit, something at which Phil is world-class. Another man present was fellow Roth-attemptee Joe Reynolds, who had made himself even more exciting by deciding to do the race with a broken collarbone following his umpteenth bike crash.

In my previous North American races, I had become so dehydrated by the heat that I’d virtually turned into a pillar of salt, so this time I was determined to take steps to avoid the advanced stages of death by doing some acclimatisation. Finding places in the UK that are 30 degrees centigrade and 75 per cent humidity in October is not easy unless you count my mum’s living room, but that’s where Loughborough University Sports Science Service and their fiendish heat chamber came in. For a few weeks before the race I beat a lonely path from my home to Loughborough to sit on a turbo trainer in a small room packed full of heaters, humidifiers and wallpaper steamers, and pedal like mad for an hour while resident physiologist Beth Hanson analysed my heart rate, temperature, rate of fluid-loss and constant complaining. The acclimatization sessions were not only to get me used to racing in the heat, but were also designed to calculate how much I needed to drink during a race, when to drink and most importantly what to drink. This involved Beth maintaining a high degree of professionalism while taking blood and urine samples from an extremely sweaty and sweary man moaning about having a numb crotch. At the end of all this, I not only had an impressive array of sweat rashes but at last a tolerance for cycling in ovens. Nothing could stop me now!

A week before the race I went out on my final ride before packing my bike away. I was pedaling serenely, full of dreams of a sub-10 hour Ironman, when my thoughts were interrupted by an engine behind me. ‘Hello,’ I thought, ‘that sounds a bit close I wonder if …’
BANG
. What happened next is a bit of a blur but I remember a terrific impact, everything turning upside down and then sliding gracefully down the road on my face before coming to a halt head first in a gutter. The only other thing I recall was the same engine revving frantically and then speeding off up the road. To cut a long story short, I was the victim of a hit and run incident that involved my back wheel, a blue Ford Transit and an utter bastard. The crash left me with a gashed face, skinned hips, multiple cuts and bruises, a sprained wrist and, more significantly, a fractured elbow and a shattered dream as I watched my Ironman go up in a puff of gravel. My stubborness and refusal to accept the blindingly obvious can occasionally serve me well. It did on this occasion because, despite my injuries and a bent bike, I got back on it, unwound the brakes to accommodate the bent back wheel, jammed it into a gear, clamped my hand on to the handlebars and pedalled home. Upon arriving I simply curled up on the settee and quietly fainted.

It wasn’t until Nicky came in and took one look at my sheet-white, blood-caked face that I was whisked to hospital. Even now it’s hard to put into words how I felt when the doctors told me my arm was broken. Even though I couldn’t move it, even though they’d had to drain a syringe-full of blood from the joint to reduce the swelling, and even though I was so cross-eyed with pain I thought the hospital was full of twins, I was clinging to the hope that I could still make the race. When they told me I’d be out of the game for six weeks at least, I did what any dignified, self-respecting adult would do – I cried. After a decent period of self-pity I reported the incident to the police. It might be a sign of my age, but the policeman who took my statement was so young I half expected him to write his report in alphabet spaghetti.

Unfortunately, without a registration number, which I didn’t get due to having my face jammed into a kerb, we were down to studying CCTV of the area to see if a blue Transit popped up anywhere. We never found him, which was a great shame because the machine gun I’d hired for when we did ended up costing me a fortune. I decided to go to Florida anyway as the trip was paid for, and because it’s not Coventry, so at least I got to spend some time lounging around in the sun drinking beer. The private apartment we stayed in was fantastic with a view over Panama City beach, and I’d have loved to have stayed there longer (and in less pain) although I did have to go to some lengths to hide the fact that I’d got blood and ooze all over the bathroom walls from changing my dressings while sat on the toilet. It was a bittersweet trip for me, with the genuine joy of seeing my friends, Phil especially, complete their Ironmans, combined with the depressing low of being left standing literally alone on the beach when the gun went and everyone started the race. I did my best to be cheerful, but mostly I was self-absorbed, miserable and a complete nightmare to be around. In fact, after my petulant, self-pitying display I’m surprised I’ve got any friends left. Watching races when you are injured is crap – even in a place as nice as Florida. I must admit, though, that I was genuinely overjoyed to see Phil bounce over the line to become an Ironman, and Steve Howes romp home in 9.57 – though at least now I suppose I could say that I got to a finish line before Steve.

Pain heals, girls like scars, and glory lasts for ever, so there was no possibility of me retreating into my shell or knocking Ironmans on the head. In fact, the first thing I did was to enter Ironman Florida for the following year – and I was going to finish that race come hell or fucking high water. The physical scars healed over the next few months although the mental ones took a bit longer to shake off, and I remember being so tense during my first cycling time trial of the following season that my neck muscles were locked up tighter than a male escort in Boy George’s flat. Phil and coach Dave virtually had to prise my fingers off my handlebars with a claw hammer after the race. All of this did not bode particularly well for my return to Florida, although weighing more heavily on my mind and elbow was the prospect of completing ANOTHER Ironman first, this one called ‘The Outlaw’ and taking place on the sun-kissed shores of southern Nottingham. I’d entered this race before any of the Florida shenanigans happened, so was well and truly under pressure to sort my lily-liver out before the race came. Fortunately, Dave brushed over any mental weakness I may have been feeling by giving me a good, old-fashioned boot to the goolies (metaphorically speaking) in the form of a training plan that I’d need the energy levels of a crackhead to complete, along with a handy list of places where one could dispose of a van driver’s body.

In the event, my subsequent performance at The Outlaw showed that it is Dave who knows best and not me. As a result of sticking to what he told me to do I smashed my Austria time to pieces, taking nearly half an hour off my personal best. This was the first year of The Outlaw race, although it’s now a well-established fixture on the Iron calendar. Racing in Nottingham was much like racing in Austria except that the Austrians spoke much better English. My finishing time of 10 hours 24 minutes was not only a marvellous feeling but my finishing position inside the top thirty was a splendid novelty for me because, for once, the post-race recovery tent wasn’t packed out with stinking, groaning men and women descending on the cake like a squadron of Japanese Zeroes.

The race had begun promisingly enough in the lake at Holme Pierrepoint and despite a 1,000-strong field of people all funnelling into the same three yards of water it was remarkably well-mannered compared to the punchfests I’ve experienced elsewhere. Any odd clump about the head was forgotten by the time I hopped out of the water and tried to get my cloying wetsuit over my ankles, kicking my legs around like a drunk trying to shake a turd down his leg. My watch declared that I had done the swim in 56 minutes and 13 seconds, a huge PB that I almost blew by standing gaping slack-jawed at my watch for the next two minutes. The bike course was very fast with plenty to keep me occupied – people who didn’t know how to ride a bloody bike mostly. There was one memorable moment when I realised that a wasp had perched on the arm of my sunglasses about 6 millimetres from my eyeball as I barrelled down the A6097 at 25mph. Normally, when confronted with this kind of situation people react either by freezing on the spot and holding their breath, or they start waving their arms around like they are having a sword fight with the Invisible Man. I chose to stare it down, which gives you some sort of insight into what a dickhead I really am.