Accidental Ironman (11 page)

Cornering was a particular challenge for me and I appeared to have the turning circle of a hippo with a javelin through its head. I set about remedying this by riding round and round my patio in a very small circle, which looked like I was training to race on the world’s smallest velodrome, much to the amusement of my neighbours. The bike was called a CLX, which sounded like a brand of piles ointment. I set about doing training rides of 25 miles around the lanes where I live – never more than 25 miles, never on any other roads and never with any variety of pace because doing 25 miles was challenge enough judging by the fact that the first time I tried it I fell asleep in the shower afterwards. I then spent an hour applying chafe cream to my legs, which looked like they’d been set on fire and then put out with a golf shoe. Having sort of learned my lesson from the London Marathon, I also did some actual running outside on roads, and even went to my local pool with my wetsuit on to try and get used to the sensation of swimming with something so tight across my groin that I could have passed for a Bee Gee.

It was around this time that, in a bid to acquire superpowers without extra effort, I started taking vitamin tablets. I’d read somewhere about a cyclist called Lance Armstrong who said he needed to take supplements (and by God did he!) so I started chuffing Sanatogen like it was going out of fashion. One side effect I didn’t know about when I started popping pills was that certain vitamins turn your wee fluorescent yellow, and it was just my luck that the moment of discovery came at half-time of a football match I’d gone to watch. Having jostled my way to the front of the crowded urinal I proceeded to let fly with a glow-in-the-dark jet of water, which came as a surprise not only to me but also to my near neighbours as my Day-Glo pee lazily made its way along the bottom of the communal trough. One by one heads turned to stare at me and I was aware of people steadily inching away. I felt I owed some sort of explanation but saying, ‘I take vitamins’ in this kind of company would be tantamount to saying, ‘I press wild flowers and like Kylie Minogue’ – a swift pummelling would follow, so instead I said, ‘Stay off the lemon vodka,’ and nearly ruptured my diaphragm trying to get it over with before legging it out of the bogs.

Looking back now with the benefit of ten years of triathlon incompetence, er, insight behind me, it is staggering to think that I thought this was going to end in anything but disaster, but as we have learned I have never been one to take much notice of, well, anything really. At that time having a training plan reeked to me of being the equivalent of having life goals, and nothing said, ‘You’re a loser’ more than having a personal motivational phrase about being a winner. Such was my all-encompassing ignorance of triathlon that ten minutes before the race I decided it would be a good idea to buy a bottle cage and a drinks bottle to put on my bike because it was feeling a bit warm – 32° Celsius warm to be precise.

Chucking myself into Royal Victoria Dock didn’t faze me in the slightest, although I have subsequently learned that this is the part of the race most newbies dread, and with memories of my former swimming abilities fresh in my mind I plonked myself at the front of the wave. I suspected I may be slightly out of my league a few minutes into the swim when, as I was in full front crawl flight, I was overtaken by a bloke doing breaststroke. I was, in fact, one of the very last to leave the water and lurch up the dockside gangplank like I had a wooden leg. The transition was inside the Excel Centre, which has all the architectural charm of a loading bay and I was off on the old pile-cream-machine towards the attractive flyovers of Bermondsey. The bike course was a two-lap affair and I remember starting to feel distinctly hot and tired during the second lap, which seemed remarkably free of other cyclists thanks to the pace I was maintaining. I arrived back to a transition area full of bikes and headed out into the now blistering sunshine for a three-lap run.

To my credit, I managed to run the first lap at a pace that would do credit to the swiftest steamroller ever built as I battled to keep my cadence up and my breakfast down. Laps two and three were conducted at a more leisurely pace (I walked) before I found enough dignity to run the final half-a-kilometre over the finish line where I had to be held upright by a skinny old marshal, making it look like I was being carted off by the grim reaper. My finishing time was a whopping 3 hours 20 minutes although the finish line photos suggest I was well pleased with my efforts. This may possibly be because I am the only person ever to pass through Bermondsey wearing a pair of Lycra shorts and live to tell the tale, but more likely because I never dreamed I would do anything like this ever gain.

Further evidence of the fact that I have become an Ironman by accident comes from what happened next. Despite a time so slow that I had to buy a mobile phone with a longer screen so I didn’t have to scroll down so far on the results page to see my finishing position, I had sort of enjoyed myself and was consequently feeling more conflicted than Anakin Skywalker about whether to do anything like this ever again. A week or so later I was over in Birmingham shopping and, to kill some time while Nicky was in Next looking at some bloody thing or other, I bought a copy of
220 Triathlon
magazine, the one I would end up writing for. I was standing outside Next leafing through it and staring with wonder at the shiny carbon items contained within when I became aware of a couple staring at me. After checking my flies to make sure that wasn’t the reason, I smiled weakly whereupon they asked, ‘Are you a triathlete?’ It turns out that both of them were triathletes. The chap’s name was Paul Kingscott, one of the stalwarts of the Black Country Tri club. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were clubs that did this sort of thing, but Paul informed me that there was even one on my doorstep known as Coventry Triathletes.

Clearly, it was meant to be that I should become a triathlete, what with the chain of coincidences at work and even out shopping, which conspired to pitch me headlong into the sport. I’m not one to fight fate, so I decided I’d get in touch with the Coventry club and find out more. The first person I spoke to was none other than Mark Stewart, now my fellow would-be Roth-man, er Challenger etc, who invited me to the club’s weekly swimming session. A week later I duly turned up to meet Mark. The second person I met was Steve Howes, the Iceman from our channel swim and someone of whom you will hear more later in this book. I remember being massively intimidated by the race T-shirts everyone was wearing – such intimidation being an important skill in the triathlon world – and feeling distinctly out of place as a Zeppelin-sized laughing stock who couldn’t have looked less fit if I’d been smoking 40 fags a day through an asbestos cigarette holder. I’d always assumed cyclists were the kind of weirdy-beardies who owned Dido CDs and recycled jumper fluff but here was a bunch of very sinewy men and women who couldn’t have swum faster if they’d been fired out of a U-boat, particularly a man called Mike McGillion who said he was an expert in inflation, which turned out to mean he sold party balloons.

It was inevitable that, upon mixing with this company, I would be lured down the slippery slope from doing a triathlon to being a triathlete and within nine months of joining them I had done not one but TWO Half Ironmans. I’d also returned to the London Triathlon and taken an hour off my previous finishing time. Not only that, but the gut that pressed against my belt like a balloon full of mud had vanished to be replaced with the musclebound Adonis you see before you to this day, if you have conjunctivitis. No longer did I look like a flabby-faced toff about to steal the chips off your plate when your back was turned. The catalyst for this transformation was simply that I had found a group of people I liked, who were willing to allow some hapless cock-end to train with them, and who opened up the arcane world of triathlons to me, showing me where the races were, and how to enter in that nanosecond between online race entries opening and the red banner arriving that says ‘Race Full’.

These days I am so experienced that I am handing out words of wisdom to newbies myself, constantly stunned at how my elevation to a kind of triathlon-idiot-savant could possibly have happened. This was apparent recently at a race put on by my club – still Coventry Triathletes – when I was asked to give a talk to people who were doing the race for the first time, advising them about what to expect. One glance at my shambling semi-existence should have revealed to them that I can’t even be trusted to give advice about how to sit the right way round on a toilet, but this didn’t stop people listening rapt with attentiveness as I bullshitted massively about what I had achieved in the sport. Watching the newbies race while I was marshalling out on the bike course of that race was also instructive for me because I learned that I am not alone when it comes to some of the weirder habits I have picked up from doing triathlons.

For example, sometimes I talk to the weather. I realise this makes me sound as sane as the secret lovechild of Josef Fritzl and Glenn Hoddle, but while cycling I regularly shout at the wind, which stays in my face whichever way I turn, bellowing ‘Is that all you’ve got!’, or stare up at the rainclouds saying, ‘You just couldn’t hold off for half a fucking hour could you?’ I’m barely suppressing an all-encompassing rage equal to football’s greatest nark merchants. I’d always assumed this was just my steady descent into bumbling senility but no, it seems I am not alone and that other triathletes are weather-talkers, too. In fact, m’lud, I put it to you that triathletes not only talk to the elements but they also talk to their bikes, to cars, to potholes, to junctions, to their legs and to themselves.

My particular job on my club’s race day was to stand on a traffic island in a rectangular yellow bib that made me look like SpongeBob SquarePants, pointing at approaching cyclists and shouting, ‘TURN LEFT!’ This gave me an excellent vantage point to secretly sneer at people’s cornering skills and to clearly hear what they were muttering to themselves as they rode past. I should point out that the weather was about as pleasant as being kicked in the shin by David Nalbandian, and the poor novices racing had to negotiate puddles you could breaststroke in and rain so heavy I was contemplating building an ark. As a result, people had plenty to moan about and I was delighted to hear people chuntering away to themselves. The most popular mutters appeared to be ‘Come on legs’ when people stood up on the pedals to ride away from the roundabout, ‘Piss off rain’ as they approached the roundabout, and ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ when they had to stop for a car coming round the roundabout. Any clunking of gears was immediately reacted to by the rider looking down at their bike and saying, ‘Get in, you bastard’ while any cars that were slowly driving just ahead of the riders were treated to a strange Buddhist-like incantation that grew slowly in volume and went, ‘Go-on-go-on-go-ON-GO-ON!!’

As an aside, this was my first experience of being a race marshal, and it mostly involved sitting around doing nothing – and in my case the devil makes work for idle hands. Some of my mates were racing, so I thought I would lift their spirits by holding up a large card with a certain four-letter word that rhymes with my surname scrawled on it as they rode by. I’m pleased to say that it did the trick and not only distracted them from the rain, it almost caused them to crash. As well as abusing triathletes, my duties also involved justifying my presence to passing motorists and explaining the legalities of racing on roads to outraged hypocrites and the exceptionally slow-witted. Mostly, I had drivers shaking their head at me if they were delayed by a nanosecond by a rider at the roundabout, and handily I had my hand-drawn sign to hold up to them. One lady wound down her window to demand, ‘Who gave you permission for this!’, to which I replied, ‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ which is always an answer that gets you left alone. Although many racers were busy chatting to themselves, quite a few did shout a ‘thanks marshal’ as they went by, and that was genuinely lovely because sitting on a roundabout in the pouring rain, watching melanin-deprived triathletes wearing expressions that made them look like a face trapped in a haunted mirror, is slightly less pleasant than a piss-bomb exploding in a skip full of rusty forks. If ever asked to marshal again I will claim that the date clashes with the opportunity to go to Twycross Zoo, coat my clinkers in honey and dangle them over the bear enclosure.

After competing in triathlons for a few years the whole thing can occasionally seem somewhat routine and a typical Olympic distance race for me these days goes roughly thus:

4.00 a.m. – My alarm goes off. My instant thought is ‘sod the race’ and I go back to sleep until I remember I’ve paid a £60 entry fee. I doze until five past, then 10 past, then quarter past – what is it about getting up that means you will only do it when the time ends in a five or a zero?

4.15 a.m. – A double espresso in the morning really jolts you awake – especially if you have it as an enema.

4.20 a.m. – I spend ten minutes deciding which T-shirt to wear so I can show off while I’m racking my bike. Do I wear an Ironman shirt or, because it’s an Olympic distance race, should I wear a GB team shirt – or would wearing an international shirt to a local race make people think I’m a knob? I opt for a 2004 Olympic finisher’s T-shirt to imply I’m experienced, but which just means that I probably have fillings older than most of the other competitors.

4.30 a.m. – I stare at the kit I’ve unpacked from my bag because of the nagging feeling I’ve forgotten something due to the lack of sleep making my brain so dense that light actually bends round it. I physically enact the process of putting kit on in T1 and T2 while muttering a strange incantation that goes ‘sock, sock, shoe, shoe, race belt, sunglasses, helmet, gel, GO’ so it looks like I’m doing some kind of weird t’ai chi exercise.

4.31 a.m. – I make up my energy drinks. How many scoops of powder is it per bottle? I can’t remember. God, I’m useless, I hate me, I think I’ll put ten scoops in, which should at least take the edge off my failure.