Accidental Ironman (21 page)

Resplendent as I was in bright yellow Ironman Lanzarote T-shirt I wasn’t alone. For one thing just across the way I saw Dave Fenton, my fireman friend and the man who single-handedly got me back into triathlons after making me feel like a self-pitying goon, who was also wearing his Day-Glo Ironman Lanzarote T-shirt, making him look like a barrel-chested canary.

The swim in Ragley Hall’s ornamental lake was in two waves – ladies, relays and men 45 and over in the first, men 44 and under in the second. Yours truly lined up in the old gimmers wave, going off first, I assume, because race organisers reckon we’ve been up half the night anyway going to the toilet. Entering the water at the start of a race is always a reflective moment because it is literally the point of no return. While on the bank you still have an opportunity to fake an injury or just slink away unseen from the crowds of identically dressed frogmen, but once you start to wade into the water, you are committed to the contest. No matter how cold the water feels; no matter what you put your foot on – or in – under the water; no matter whether your goggles leak or your swim cap rides up your head and makes you look like Papa Smurf, you have to keep going because there are people behind you queuing to follow you in. Backing out now would be something you would never, ever live down. Like every swim start, I was presented with a choice of slowly immersing myself under the water over the course of about a minute, letting the cold water seep into my wetsuit like the icy claw of death, or just simply plunging head first into the water and running the risk of having the breath knocked out of my body and ending up with a face more numb than Audley Harrison’s. As usual I opted to stand waist deep for a few seconds until the cold water started to hit the small of my back and make me swear, then pitch forward quickly into the water and start windmilling furiously, shamed by all the people around me who have just dived in and are in danger of making me look like a coward.

I spent the usual, nervous pre-race minutes treading water while trying to pinch a metre or two over the start line without trying to look like I was. Then, as ever just at the moment when I was about to start my watch, the klaxon went and the cold, the leaky goggles and whatever I put my foot in were instantly forgotten as we headed off haphazardly towards the first buoy. At the first turn I realised to my horror that I was in the lead. Normally, you would think that this kind of endeavour would be a cause for celebration but it meant that, on a swim course I had never done before, with the entire wave behind me, all the pressure of potentially leading everyone the wrong way was on my shoulders. I was enormously relieved when a thump across my legs told me I was being overtaken and I could get on someone’s feet and indulge in some massively irritating toe-tapping. The swim course was over two laps and, as we passed through the start area, we were close to the bank where I could see some people I knew standing watching me. The fact that they were not making any kind of encouraging gestures suggested I was flying, and you could almost see the expressions on their faces saying, ‘He’s going well, the wanker.’ By now I knew there were at least a couple of swimmers in front of me that I could see, and there’s always one stealthy type who has somehow snuck past on my blind side. I was convinced that one of the swimmers ahead of me was my mate and watery nemesis Keith, so I set about hammering it after his distinctive form, determined not to let him beat me out of the water and thus claim any bragging rights. I emerged from the water in fourth place behind two relay swimmers, neither of whom was Keith, and a woman/mermaid who must have done the 1900 metre swim in about 23 minutes flat. After chugging my way round transition, I was off on the 56-mile bike course, seeing Keith arriving out of the corner of my eye just as I was leaving – blimey, I had been quick!

Being a reasonable swimmer often means bike legs are a depressing procession of hearing the distant thwack-thwack-thwack of an approaching disc wheel as the bike monsters come past, but on this day it was me doing the overtaking as I passed the mermaid and one of the relay teams, and set about duelling with leading lady (and eventual female winner) Emillie Verroken. Emillie passed me after 22 miles of the course, and then passed me again after 28 miles, having gone off the wrong way, something which she seemed remarkably sanguine about when we briefly chatted as she nailed it past me. I was also to-ing and fro-ing with a relay cyclist and while I asserted my dominance on the climbs, he had more bottle than me on the descents, which led to a fairly even contest, helping me get round the first lap much quicker than I otherwise would have. By this time I had noticed the absence of anyone else from my wave overtaking me, particularly any men in the 45-plus age group, and I was trying to suppress excited thoughts about winning, mixed in with the usual ones about Holly Willoughby’s dress. By now I had caught up with the back markers from the second wave who were on lap one, and there’s nothing like powering past a bunch of slower riders to make you feel like a cycling god with quad muscles the width of the average human head. Mile 50 came and went and no one came past, then mile 55, at which point we turned and re-entered the grounds of Ragley Hall for the final mile of cycling. Then I heard it, thwack-thwack-thwack ... Yes, I’d finally been hunted down inside the last mile, and by my friend and all-round bike monster Greg Ashley, too.

Greg and I spent the dash through transition bickering about the poor sportsmanship of overtaking someone in the last mile of the bike course and he emerged on to the run 100 metres ahead – game on! The run was three laps of Ragley Hall’s grasslands, which are about as flat as a taxi driver’s man boob. If you ever visit the splendid grounds of Ragley Hall then be sure to have a look at the obelisk at the edge of the extensive woodland, and as you huff and puff your way up the hill to reach it, spare a thought that our run course went up there three strength-sapping times. Every yard of it was on the kind of lumpy grass you normally find in fields where cow pats live. Despite the terrain, by the end of lap one I’d closed the gap on Greg to about 20 metres, a cause of some surprise to the race commentator who said ‘There goes Greg Ashley, one of the region’s finest athletes, and … oh?! That’s, er, someone from Cov Tri behind him.’

Greg, however, is no mug, and I am. I had tried too hard, too soon to chase him down, and when he put a burst of pace in at the start of lap two, I had fewer answers than Wayne Rooney on
University Challenge
. Watching Greg steadily pull away and knowing I couldn’t keep this pace up put me in an interesting position. As the gap soon became more like 500 metres, my chances of victory were gone unless my prayers for Greg’s hamstrings to snap were answered, so I began to worry about hanging on to second. By now there were runners all over the course and it’s hard work trying to figure out how old someone is when they all look like they’ve aged about twenty years since the start line. After spending the last lap pursued by paranoia and a squadron of flies, I finally crossed the line in second place for a silver medal and my first ever podium finish in a triathlon.

My face was the kind of colour you get from smoking sixty Lambert and Butler a day but I was still extremely happy, not only to have some virtual silverware to take home (actually it was a voucher) but also because this was the last stage of my Iron training for Challenge Roth. I could now look forward to that equally blissful and stressful period known as tapering. Greg was magnanimous in victory and said kind things about my futile attempts to catch him, and female winner Emillie was charming about me overtaking her less than 500 metres from the finish. I was neither magnanimous nor charming when I realised I’d beaten my old Worcester mate Dave by just 14 seconds – ha-ha-ha-ha!

So how does a silver medallist celebrate? Normally, what I most want at a finish line these days is a comfy chair and a colossal urn of tea. This time, however, I contented myself with a huge cardboard tub of breadcrumb-coated chicken parts and by heckling my slower clubmates as they toiled through Ragley’s Matto Grosso. Keith came in for some especially rough treatment for losing to me in the swim.

And that was it – my training for Challenge Roth was done, and I’d finished it with my first ever triathlon medal, albeit with a not particularly impressive time of 5 hours 14 minutes. I was tired, and had the nagging feeling that I had done too many races, but I was obviously feeling strong enough over middle distances and had plenty of race practice under my belt. I was also now the holder of two British Masters running titles, a new Half Ironman PB and, best of all, a voucher for 10% off a training camp in France. Who says you can’t earn a living at sport?

The final two weeks before any Iron race are spent ‘tapering’, which is training speak for not doing very much except the odd spin of the legs to make sure your muscles don’t turn into a collection of reef knots. These days I just go for the odd gentle swim and jog with Freddie my springer spaniel. I avoid my bike after what happened to me in the lead-up to Ironman Florida – and not without good reason, either, because in the final few days before the race I still nearly came a cropper when I was cycling to work up a hill and a Range Rover overtook me, with the passenger emptying a Tesco carrier bag full of ice cubes in front of me. I know that my word is not exactly my bond but this is absolutely true, this really happened, and my immediate thoughts were:

a)   Who the hell carries a bag full of ice cubes around with them?

b)   Where they cold on his lap?

c)   Why does the Range Rover cheapskate shop at Tesco?

What I should have thought was, ‘What kind of arsehole sets out to deliberately hurt someone else and then run away?’ I was more baffled than angry, especially because, as criminal masterminds go, the phantom ice cube dispenser wasn’t exactly up there with Professor Moriarty. The ice cubes just bounced all over the tarmac leaving me a clear and untroubled enough path to have the confidence to remove both hands from the handlebars and make the Gareth Hunt Nescafé advert gesture (sorry for those of you too young to get this not-exactly topical reference, but look it up on YouTube and you’ll see what I’m driving at). I’m well used to having a frank exchange of views with car drivers for whom a speed limit of 50 mph seems to represent the very minimum speed they should be driving at, and I find any disagreement I have with them over speeding, the use of mobile phones while driving and the non-existence of ‘road tax’ for cyclists is usually terminated with the use of a short phrase ending in ‘off’. This isn’t even the first time I’ve had stuff chucked at me out of car windows and in the past projectiles have included a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, a can of Carling Black Label and a glass, so with better timing the ice would have come in handy.

As I know to my cost, it pays to minimise risks in the final few days before your big race of the year, so I find it best to avoid the longer rides on my bike, and the main roads on my commute, instead just trying to lie still on the settee eating toast and annoying Nicky by leaving crumbs everywhere – although I’m not entirely sure if that counts as minimising risks!

So here we go then – the training is done, the warm-up racing is done, and the convoluted explanation of my accidental status has been laboured to death. We are now Deutschland bound!

Those of you who have received better educations will recall that there were four of us travelling down to Nuremberg for our own particular trial – me, Mark, Joe and Steve the Indian – and with the levels of organisation for which we have become notorious, we travelled at completely different times. In Steve’s case, this made sense because he now lives in Brighton, while in my, Mark and Joe’s case it was because we are useless at making plans, having once (genuinely) lost each other in a car park before a training ride. The plan was that Mark and I would travel down to Dover in Mark’s enormous and fully gadgeted BMW with bikes laid lovingly in the back, while Joe and his wife Julie would travel separately in Joe’s ever-reliable Volvo, with his bike slung on top of some daughters. Nicky and Mark’s wife, Jane, sensibly opted to avoid travelling down to southern Germany taking up valuable bike space in a car that they would also have to share with two increasingly anxious and snappy pillocks. Instead they decided to leave the day before the race, flying to Munich where we would pick them up.

Mark spends so much time in Europe that he could never be adopted by anyone who votes UKIP. This made him the ideal travelling companion for a lazy tosser like me, content to sit back and let those who know what they are doing get on with it. Mark had sorted the travel arrangements for the Channel tunnel, our hotel in Nuremberg, our route through France and the Low Countries, an overnight stay along the way, an eclectic selection of music for his iPod (a bit too much eighties heavy metal for my liking but passengers can’t be choosers) and a fantastic array of sweets. For my part, I brought my sunny disposition, a beginners guide to German and an iPod full of indie bands you have never heard of.

The
German For Beginners
guide I took was particularly important because wherever I go in the world, people always think I am German. I used to think this was just because of the lazy, stereotypical view Brits abroad have of Germans with blond hair, blue eyes and a slightly stern air about them. However, over the years I have been mistaken for being German by French, Poles, Danes, Yugoslavs and even the awful Dutch. This suggests there must be more to it, and even Germans seem to assume that I am German, which is slightly awkward because I don’t speak any German at all, and have showed no aptitude for learning it after once getting 4 per cent in an exam at school. I have half-remembered a few German phrases from my one term at school, which I have successfully trotted out when approached by British timeshare salespeople on various Mediterranean islands on the assumption that they don’t speak German either – and if they did they may wonder why, when asked if I speak any English, I have replied, ‘Nein, der gummibaum ist im dem topf.’ Roughly translated that means, ‘No, the rubber tree is in the pot.’