Accidental Ironman (22 page)

Putting my kit together before the road trip south was the usual whirl of trying to remember everything I could possibly need. The weather in Bavaria was predicted to be sunny and warm, but I have been fooled by forecasts too many times to take any chances so, as well as all the usual items that I take to any long-distance race, I was also cramming my bag with unseasonal items such as arm warmers, base layers, rain jackets, track mitts and buffs. Basically there could have been a flood or an advancing glacier and I would have been ready for it. Despite going abroad for the best part of a week, the everyday clothes that I took could have fitted into my friend Neill’s purse (sorry, I mean ‘Essentials Case’) and consisted of pants, socks, toothbrush, a selection of T-shirts from previous races and, just in case there was a pool at the hotel, a pair of ‘small’ Speedos that were so brief that I needed to visit a scrotal stylist before I could wear them in public.

My kit for Challenge Roth was as follows:

•   Kuota Kredo bike that has ‘Ironman World Champion’ branded on the top tube. This, I presume, refers to someone other than me, unless you get called world champion for regularly finishing just inside the top 1,000.

•   Spinnergy wheels purchased purely because they matched the colour of my bike, causing a massive row in the Brunt household and the revelation from my wife that her mother was right about me.

•   Patriotic GB flag, nicked off a car during the Queen’s Jubilee.

•   Hastily purchased flip-flops to avoid a pre-swim barefoot walk across a gravel path and then stupidly worn for a toe-shredding 20-minute walk to bike racking.

•   Ironman Lanzarote 2008 finisher’s T-shirt, selected, of course, in a pathetic attempt to intimidate fellow competitors with my hardness and experience.

•   A pair of England football shorts chosen with the specific intention of being confrontational but, in the event, only noticed by an Italian who laughed heartily.

•   Brain-boiling sweat bucket, aka Giro aero helmet. One day I’ll be a good enough triathlete to wear this without feeling like a knob.

•   The latest shiny-thing-that-must-be-owned and which is not compatible with the many costly accessories of its former incarnations – aka bike computer.

•   Great Britain skinsuit, mostly selected because my old Coventry Triathletes one was now so old that sections of it had gone see-through, providing anyone cycling behind me with an unwanted view all the way up my backside to the back of my teeth.

•   A pair of sturdy running shoes (stuff lightness and speed, I want cushioning).

•   A pair of compression socks. I have no idea whether these actually make any difference, but I got them as a free gift at a race – by which I mean I probably paid about £80 for them.

•   Lucky pants.

•   Cuddly toy, fondue set, radio alarm clock and a set of his and hers matching luggage.

Having squeezed all of this into Mark’s car we bade our wives farewell, cranked up the Rush CD and headed for Dover. The journey passed quickly and, for two blokes off to do an Iron race, we were remarkably relaxed. Mark is a close friend and there’s an old saying that states that, ‘You should never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on.’ I know that Mark, like myself, would put that tea cosy on his head in a flash. Incidents of note on the journey down included driving out of a motorway services with the roof box still open and our kit in danger of being spread halfway across Kent, and the obligatory humiliation of handing over my passport at the immigration kiosk and watching them stare uncomprehendingly at my face. I have lost a fair bit of weight since my passport photo was taken and my face is considerably thinner than it used to be. It now looks like my old face reflected in the back of a spoon. It is always disconcerting to watch the expressions of people at passport control trying to work out what age I am given that I don’t so much look like I’m pushing 45 as dragging it. They clearly wonder what can possibly have happened to me to cause this transformation from a Miss Piggy lookalike into a scary Morrissey.

Once on the Continent the journey consisted of Mark buying something called a ‘Travel Pussy’ from a dispensing machine in a Belgian toilet that sat in the car window for the rest of the journey. Both of us were fascinated by the self-cleaning, revolving toilet seats in German motorway services, filming them on our phones to post on Facebook and also experimenting to see if we could stay sitting on them while they revolved. Soon our high jinks were at an end and reality began slowly to dawn as we rolled into the outskirts of Nuremberg. As I mentioned earlier, I had left Mark to book our hotel which was in the centre of the city just inside the old town walls. On the map, this looked like the perfect spot to stay, just a few miles away from the Race Headquarters in the small town of Roth, and handy to explore the city of Nuremberg itself, which I was keen to do.

As we drove up to the hotel doors I noticed a couple of bars opposite with blacked-out windows, coloured strips hanging from the doors and, lurking within, a couple of scantily clad ladies of advancing years or, as we in Britain call them, old slags. Yes, surprise surprise, Mark had booked us a hotel slap bang in the middle of Nuremberg’s red light area. He protested his innocence, but the fact that he is a renowned perv meant none of us really believed him. As we were checking in, Joe arrived having done the journey in one go and subjected his family to sleeping in a lay-by en route rather than stopping at a hotel. Julie gave us both a warm welcome, pointedly ignored Joe and then went straight to the bar, while we broke the news to Joe’s daughter that she was not likely to be the only one around this part of Nuremberg showing off her cleavage.

Having spent thirty minutes in my hotel room lovingly attending to my bike, I shoved a bit of deodorant up my armpits and also went to the bar, where Julie broke the news to us that the seedy bars opposite were only the starters. The main course was just around the corner where Nuremberg’s biggest knocking-shop could be found. After two quick pints of Erdinger, Mark and I decided to go and have a shufty in the interests of scientific research. Now I like to think of myself as a cosmopolitan, experienced man of the world but I can honestly say this was the first time I had ever seen a half-a-mile-long, five-storey-high block of buildings with a semi-naked woman at every window, all calling me ‘Shatsi’ and beckoning me to engage them in conversation. As expected, our scrawny Ironman physiques and rabbit-in-headlights expressions attracted the attention of the many friendly ladies standing at their windows and we received numerous offers of sports massages, although they seemed to have a funny idea about where my hamstrings were. Being both married and British I spent most of the next five minutes staring at my shoes and mumbling, ‘Nicht sprechen Deutsch,’ as we walked past at the same speed I normally reserve for a five-kilometre run. We knew that our friends back at home would never believe us, so we spent a good deal of time trying to snatch a hurried photo through the windows of one of the sex-toy covered walls before we were collared by some pimp and carried off wriggling into the darkness.

The next morning we drove to Munich to collect Nicky and Jane from the airport, and Nicky appeared at arrivals clutching a copy of
Fifty Shades of Grey
with a glint in her eye, which was all I needed. We then headed straight to race registration – at which point everything suddenly started becoming quite real. It was, as expected, superbly well organised and took place in a huge village full of stalls packed to the rafters with lovely carbon bikes, energy products and all sorts of weird and wonderful contraptions designed to make you a significantly better athlete for just a few thousand euros. Having entered the registration tent, signed a piece of paper that increasingly felt like my death warrant, and collected a wheelie bin full of instructions, timing chips, bike stickers, kitbags and race numbers, the next port of call was obviously the official Challenge Roth shop. It is very bad luck indeed to buy any item of clothing that has the race name on it before you have finished the race, and even worse form to wear it, but it’s good to have a poke around and see if there is anything that you can buy with a clear conscience, so I opted for a bright red Roth towel and a pair of socks with the German flag on them, which should nicely confuse any timeshare sellers even more.

It was then back to the hotel for the favourite triathlete pastime of faffing, and I was able to pay forensic attention to all my kit, spreading it out on the bed and going through it piece by piece to make sure everything was in the correct bag, before unpacking it all and doing it again, then making up my energy drinks, putting the requisite number of gels in my bike and run bags, applying stickers to everything and adding my numbers to my race belt – before unpacking it all yet again and starting over. Nicky wisely goes out whenever I am doing this because I become the world’s most narky tit, and no matter how many times I do a big race I never, ever get any nicer to be around at this time. Once it is done, my mood improves slightly, but to watch me at these moments you’d think I was a scientist feverishly working on some new breakthrough for the benefit of all humanity instead of some middle-aged also ran about to do a race he’s not going to win.

The day before the race was spent having a very slow wander around Nuremberg in search of bratwurst mit kartoffelsalat – not too far or too fast in case we tired our little legs out with all that arduous strolling – and racking our bikes. If registration was where the coming challenge felt real, the act of putting my beloved bike into the transition area was where it started to feel very, very real indeed. This is also the first time you are exposed to the full enormity of what you are about to do, with thousands of other athletes all racking their bikes at the same time as you, proving that this is not just some solitary occupation but one you are about to share with a legion of others. All of those others, of course, have been training as hard as you have, if not harder. Bike racking took place a few miles from Roth next to the Main Donnau canal and involved leaving my pride and joy in its allotted space, staring at it for five minutes as though I expected it suddenly to race off of its own accord, letting the tyres down a bit so they didn’t expand in the heat and blow up, and then standing staring at my bike for another five minutes like I’d been hynotised by a boa constrictor. Once I had torn my gaze away from my bike, I began wandering around looking for where the entrance and exit were and counting the number of racks of bikes from the kit changing tent so I could find my bike when my ears were full of water and my mind full of dread. Roth has a split transition, which means that bikes and running kit are stored in different places, so it was then all back to Mark’s car to drive back to Roth to leave my bag full of running clobber, stare at it like a village idiot, wander round looking for the run exit etc, etc.

Once all this was completed, it was time for the biggest dose of reality of all – the race briefing. This took place in a huge tent in the athletes’ village, and was conducted in several languages at different times. The briefing in English was packed, mostly with Germans it has to be said, and it was where the race organisers highlight any information about the course that they think you should know, such as the right way to go, and the various crimes you can commit, which will result in punishments ranging from a two-minute penalty all the way up to being shot by firing squad. There are myriad different ways you can cop for a penalty in triathlons, including drafting (riding your bike in someone else’s slipstream thus gaining an advantage by avoiding air resistance), littering, undertaking while cycling, riding on the wrong side of the road (British athletes take note!), verbally abusing marshals and not having the front of your tri suit zipped all the way up to the top, thus running the risk of inflaming the passions of spectators by showing them an inch of your bare chest. Phwoooar indeed!

It was at the race briefing that we finally bumped into Steve Mac, whose hotel was bloody miles away in the opposite direction to ours. Steve gave us his own briefing about his preparations for this race, all the training he had done and, specifically, how much he was looking forward to ‘spanking’ me, a clear indication he had spent too much time living in Brighton. Once the race briefing finished, I had the usual feeling of being a condemned man. The admin had all been done, my bike had been racked, I wasn’t going to have time to do any more training and now we had been fully briefed, so we couldn’t claim any kind of ignorance. The race was coming like the Cuban missile crisis, except it was not going to be averted.

All that was left to do now was to slink away with the thousands of others and try to get a decent night’s sleep, which is easier said than done when you know what’s coming in the morning. Firstly, there is the sense of impending doom to dog your sleeping steps, then there is the fact that you are full of food, having been carbo-loading for three days, and finally there is the fact that you are trying to get to sleep at about 7.00 p.m. while the rest of the world is out there living their everyday lives without knowing or giving a monkey’s about what you are up to the next day. The good people of Nuremberg were going about their Saturday night business and saw no particular reason to do it any more quietly than normal. Dropping off to sleep while I could hear people laughing and joking in a foreign language was about as easy on my ears as Jedward singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – or indeed any song in the entire history of music. As I lay there listening to the sounds of happy people, I really, really envied them. They were not facing what I was facing, because they had the good sense not to put themselves in this stupid, stupid predicament. Eventually, I fell asleep somewhere between 9.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m., 11.15 p.m., midnight, 2.00 a.m. and 3.15 a.m. I always sleep fitfully before a big race and this time was no different. There was nothing in particular waking me up except my own mind doing mental cartwheels, and each time I awoke and saw that it wasn’t yet 4.00 a.m., I went back to sleep with a sense of enormous relief that my impending execution had been stayed. Until, of course, the moment when the clock flicked over to 4.00 a.m. and the alarm didn’t go off – which didn’t matter in the slightest as I’d been awake and staring at the thing since 3.35. Race day had arrived.