Accidental Ironman (2 page)

Now you’ve got this far into the book and I can be absolutely certain you’re not some commuter killing time by leafing through the sports books section of the station newsagents (or have I been categorised in comedy – or perhaps ‘Bargain Bin’?) we can relax a little and get to know each other some more. Not that this will lead to any lessening of writing standards by the way, oh no, I’m determined you shall have value for your money and if you feel at all short-changed by the quality of words and punctuation I’ve used please feel free to write to me at: M Brunt, A Yacht, Somewhere, the Bahamas. Anyway, now that we can be free with each other, I am happy to tell you that I’m here because I’m told this particular race is a fast one, and I am thus likely to come away with a very impressive time, always assuming I don’t cock it up. I’ve trained quite hard for this race and my coach Dave, a man about whom you shall hear more, has terrified me with tales of what future training regimes he will put me through should I not return victorious. A couple of years ago the all-conquering Chrissie Wellington set a new record for this course, which made all sorts of people like me put aside our usual below-par work ethic and think ‘Hmmmm, I could crack that race out with the usual level of effort and get a much faster time than usual.’ Right? We’ll see …

I’m also here because I have a bunch of mates who have also been drawn here by the prospect of turning up and knocking out a fast time with the minimum of effort, and the time has come to introduce them to you:

1.   Mark Stewart, a gadget-obsessed sex pest whom I’ve known for ten years and who has become one my closest friends, despite him continually, narrowly defeating me in races. Physically he is the tall, sinewy type: if Andy Murray ever went missing for 30 years and the police released one of those e-fits that tried to show him as he’d look at that age, Mark would get rounded up sharpish. He’s actually a very good athlete who has the ability to hit his peak fitness for races at exactly the right moment, and a complete inability to complete any race without having to stop at some point to do a massive dump. Mark is starting in one of the waves behind me and is currently flapping about in transition (the area where bikes and kit are stored) trying to sort out a puncture he seems to have acquired on his bike’s front tyre (actually the way I’ve written that ‘seems to’ implies I am to blame in some kind of Dick Dastardly, race-nobbling act of vandalism, but I swear I was nowhere near his bike your Honour). Mark’s least favourite part of the race is the swim and he has been crapping himself all morning about the prospect of being stuck in a canal with a load of neoprene clad knees and elbows, and I have been soothing his nerves by saying things like ‘Not much room is there?’ and ‘Looks punchy to me.’

2.   Joe Reynolds, a man who, on paper, is the most exciting human being in the world given that he is already an Ironman, he works in Formula One racing, and he once appeared in a band on
Top of the Pops
– and a really cool band too; he was the saxophone player for eighties ska legends The Selecter, playing on their classic anthem ‘Three-Minute-Hero’, which already gives him masses more credibility than Dustbin Bieber or anyone who’s ever slithered into our realm via
The X Factor
. On top of all this, Joe has five daughters – yes, five – all of whom range from loud to absolutely deafening. Joe tends to be at the slower end of the field and is expecting to finish somewhere around the 14–15 hour mark but, to be fair, if you had five gobby daughters you’d want to stay out on the course and get a bit of peace and quiet, too. Physically Joe is the short, sinewy type and in terms of what he looks like, picture if you can a slightly bewildered looking Ferrero Rocher. Joe is currently swimming for his life because he is in one of the waves in front of me, and he too likes the swim part of the race least of all. I have been soothing his nerves all morning by saying things like ‘I wonder how long it will take me to catch you and swim over the top of you?’

3.   Steve McMenamin, a gristle-kneed former-rugby-player-turned-swimmer who hails from that well known part of Ireland known as Coventry. Steve is someone I seem to have known all my life, although I can’t actually remember when I met him. As well as being one of the funniest people on the planet he constantly baffles me with how he managed to persuade his wife, Kay, to marry him, given how nice she is. Steve now lives in Brighton and once persuaded me to swim the Channel with him (more on that later). He’s also the only Olympic Torchbearer I know, having carried it through Sussex for a mile, trying desperately to ignore the mobile phone constantly going off in his pocket with texts from me, Mark and his other mates urging him to be the first person to trip over, drop it or set fire to the next runner. Steve is an extremely good swimmer and is also out there somewhere ahead of me, ploughing through the field and any unfortunate flounderers in his way, and is probably relieved to be under way to escape the jokes about being India’s number-one triathlete. Before leaving home he ordered some Irish flags for his family to wave, only to open them in Germany and discover that he’d been sent Indian flags by mistake, so as far as we were concerned he is the subcontinent’s sole representative in the race and he has endured four solid days of curry-based piss-taking.

And then there’s me, Martyn Brunt, currently awaiting the cannon’s boom while burdened with the weight of expectation and teetering on the edge of self-befoulment. Through years of self-sacrifice and gritty determination I have carved out a reputation as one of the sport’s top mediocre performers, whose only talent appears to be being able to tolerate limitless amounts of pain (although not my own). My kicking has seen off Monsieur Froggy and as the seconds tick down to the start it occurs to me to wonder whatever happened to Katie Laws who was the first girl I fancied at school, what the capital of Peru is, and is it just me who thinks that Alan Sugar looks like a dog’s bollock balanced on top of a suit? None of this has any relevance to the race I’m about to do, but it just goes to show how your mind wanders when you’re nervous.

I check my watch, wondering whether to start it now or leave it until the cannon actually goes off so I will know to the precise second how much I’m failing my target times by throughout the race. These final seconds before the start are the closest you will feel to your fellow competitors, a kinship based on shared suffering, shared nerves, shared effort and the shared joy that completing this kind of event weirdly brings you. Triathlon is an egalitarian sport that makes little distinction between the poor (me), the rich (my friend Neill Morgan), the exciting (Jenson Button), the dull (Neill again), the upper classes (my friend Will Kirk-Wilson), the lower classes (anyone from Bedworth), the good (Chrissie Wellington), the bad (Ponce Armstrong), the old (Alistair Brownlee), the young (Jonny Brownlee), the fat (my friend Tony Nutt), the thin (Tony’s hair), the popular (Spencer Smith) and the friendless (me after this). I like to think that something we’ve got in common is a vague sense of wonderment about why we’re doing this. Why get up at 5.00 a.m. to go swimming? Why give up a nice cozy bed to go cycling for hours in all weathers? Why go swimming in a freezing lake? Why run so far or fast that you virtually collapse? Why give up your night out because you are too tired to move – or because you have to train the next morning?

Like most triathletes in training for an Ironman, I never really dwell on ‘why’, being naturally more interested in ‘what’. What was my time for that last lap? What is the weather going to be like for the ride? What kit should I wear? What can I do to get stronger towards the end of races? What will happen to my weight if I eat that biscuit? What is the price of those wheels? The only ‘why’ that I’ve ever dwelt on is ‘why don’t girls seem impressed when I tell them about my marathon splits at the end of an Ironman …?’ However, at the start of any race there’s nothing like having the feeling you’ve bitten off more than you can chew to give you a moment of self-awareness and to question what on earth you think you are doing! Am I here because I want to fit in? There’s certainly part of me that enjoys fitting in with people whose athletic achievements I admire, and I enjoy listening to someone talking about being ‘on the rivet on the K10/10 in a 53/12’ and knowing exactly what they are talking about. Or am I here because I want to stand apart? Try as I might I can’t help but glow with smugness when I hear someone talk about going to the gym or jogging a Park Run as the pinnacle of their fitness without thinking ‘Christ, that’s not even a warm-up!’ And, yes, I confess to feeling shameless superiority when I’m out in public and I see the undulating blob monsters waddling their way into certain tax-averse coffee shops and fast food chain restaurants, taking pleasure in thinking ‘I’m not like you – and plug up your tophole fatty, you’re eating too much.’

Frankly, I don’t know, but I wish I could understand, why I’ve been so cold while cycling that frost formed on me, so hot after running that I jumped into someone’s ornamental fish pond, and so tired I’ve fallen asleep in a plate of food. I’ve been soaked and sunburned; I’ve had heatstroke and hypothermia; I’ve crashed, fallen, punctured, tripped, collapsed, been hopelessly lost, had endless bollockings from my wife for being late for things, been lectured by a beach lifeguard for ‘causing distress to the public’ and cautioned by the police for exposing myself to a passing coachload of pensioners while urinating up a tree. Maybe by the end of this book my reasons for participating in this nonsense will be clearer to both of us (not that you give a toss probably but I’d like to know).

And is it just me that wonders why, in the name of sweet baby Jesus, I’m about to do what I’m about to do? As the last few seconds of inactivity tick by, I can’t help but wonder how big Katie Law’s breasts are these days and whether anyone else out there is an
Accidental Ironman
.

BOOM!

Steve Elliot

Craig Freer

Mark Edwards

Graham Harris

Okay, there go the good footballers. I expected them to be picked first because, even at the age of seven, they have that easy ability to control a ball with their feet without looking at them, a handy turn of pace, the ability to make space for themselves and the confident swagger that comes with being good at something that everyone wants to be good at. The bastards. Steve especially has talent and will go on to play at county level and be scouted by Coventry City before vanishing somewhere into the masses of kids who don’t make it, possibly as a result of pissing his talent up the wall. He’s good, knows it, and behaves accordingly, treating weedier kids with disdain and having girls waiting to carry his bag for him. Craig too has talent and will also go on to play at secondary school and county level. He’s less showy than Steve but a more prolific goal-scorer and much nicer with it, which makes his loss to cancer as a teenager all the sadder. Every kid has their nemesis at junior school, and Mark Edwards was mine for a time. The same age as me, similar looks to me, same interests as me, lived very close to me and our parents knew each other, which meant we often went on day trips together. We were sort-of friends in an uneasy kind of way, but rivals too and the occasional fights between us tended to be more vicious than any fights with other kids. And of course he was a much, much better footballer than me.

Darren Rose

Guy Slater

And there go the goalkeepers. Again, no surprise that they have been selected by the respective team captains picking their teams from the knot of pale, scrawny schoolboys standing on a muddy football pitch behind the main school building. Teams need goalkeepers and these two seem keen to do it, although Darren is actually quite good. I am not good as a goalkeeper, being poor at catching, kicking and throwing and disliking being in the way of a wet leather ball that assumes the weight and velocity of a small planet when slogged at you from ten yards away. Guy was my best friend at junior school, which meant we spent a lot of time riding bikes together and fighting. A local farmer’s son, I can still picture him wearing the same baggy, grey home-knitted sweater to school every day (this was the early seventies when homemade clothes were standard stuff). Why he wanted to be a goalie I can’t imagine and we lost touch soon after we went to different secondary schools, though his absence from any First Division teams throughout the eighties and nineties suggests he may have dropped his interest soon after – as well as seemingly dropping every cross I recall him flailing for.

Timothy Lloyd

David Homer

John Kerr

Craig Burden

Fair enough, these are the fast running kids who seem happy enough to peg it up and down the pitch all afternoon. Timothy is the short, squat, burly type of sprinter; David the tall, long striding choppy-handed sort; John his short-arsed equivalent and Craig the bandy-legged sort who looks like an egg-whisk when he runs. Every team needs players with pace, although ball control is definitely a secondary consideration to speed with these four. Tim is a nice lad whose mum knows my mum and who regularly plays at my house, David too is an inoffensive, slight sort of kid who seems more keen on being a runner than playing football. John is a spiteful little turd who should change his first name to ‘Juan’, while Craig is the other candidate I have for ‘best friend at school’ and is one of those cheery rascal types who always seems to be up to something but gets away with it by being cheeky and funny. He also has an older brother who is his chief supplier of
Penthouse
and
Knave
magazines.

Robert Greenway

Christian French

Richard Lee

Paul Randle

Hmm. These are more your solid, workmanlike types, not particularly skilful but able to control a ball, pass it, and head it without squinting or shrinking their heads into their necks like a turtle. I’m not particularly surprised these have been picked ahead of me because they definitely try harder than I do and get more involved in any game of football than I do. In my mind’s eye both Robert and Christian have massive heads (physically I mean, I’m not suggesting they bragged a lot), which may account for their abilities in the air. I don’t remember much about Richard and Paul other than a vague memory of them believing that they were much better at football than they actually were. Paul went to the same secondary school as me but we were in different classes so we might as well have been different Zimbabwean political parties for all the contact we had with each other.