What you look like after doing two IM races in 4 weeks
Rob vs the relay, or how I learnt to stop worrying and love the pain
Way back in the dim and distant (that’ll be 1978) a group of people had an argument in a pub in Hawaii about whether swimmers, cyclists or runners were the fittest. One of them organised a race to decide: he called it by the modest name of the “Ironman” and advertised it with the slogan “Swim 2.4 miles! Bike 112 miles! Run 26.2 miles! Brag for the rest of your life!”. Back to the present and the ironman distance has become the standard long-distance triathlon format, with quite a few thousand people completing one every year. I completed my sixth in August of this year, finishing the Challenge Copenhagen race in a time of 10 hours and 37 minutes, which I was well pleased with. I have had problems in the past with getting injured or sick before races, and I’d put in an entry to another race in Henley on Thames, 5 weeks after the Copenhagen one, just in case I wasn’t able to do the latter, and also, I have to admit, because I wanted to see if I could do two in the space of just over a month.
Not long after the Copenhagen race a bunch of the guys from my club decided they were also going to do the Henley race as a relay (one person swims, one bikes, one runs) to raise funds for a charity called 21 and co which provides support for children with Down’s syndrome and their parents in SW London. One of them, Brian, has a daughter called Blythe who has Downs, and who regularly comes along to our races and gives enthusiastic support. I wanted to help out but I didn’t particularly want to ask people to sponsor me to do something I’d do anyway, even something as dumb as a long-distance triathlon. Thus was born the idea of me versus the relay team: I would race against them, but with me doing all three disciplines myself, and people could predict what they thought the difference between our times would be.
I got my head down and put some hard training in in the weeks between the Copenhagen race and the Henley one. I was feeling good and thought that I had a fair chance of beating them: I’m a faster swimmer than Rich (their swimmer) and a faster runner than Brian (Blythe’s dad and the runner for the relay) and on a good day I can bike with Nigel (their cyclist), plus the hilly bike course should suit my skinny build over Nigel’s more muscular physique. The two questions I didn’t know the answer to were how well I’d recovered from the Copenhagen race and whether an injury to my left quad that I’d picked up a couple of weeks before the race would cause any trouble.
Thus it came to be that at 6.30 AM on Sunday 18th September I was standing in the freezing cold in a field next to the Thames, watching the mist rise from the Thames. The organisers delayed the start by 10 minutes because of the visibility but it didn’t get any better, so they started us anyway. There’s no better way to kick off a day’s long-distance racing than with an open water swim start: take a few hundred nervous testosterone-addled triathletes (including the women) all treading water and then have them suddenly start swimming front crawl and there’s inevitably a period of full contact until everyone gets decently spread out.
The swim was 1900m upstream by the North bank of the river, followed by 1900m back downstream in the middle of the channel. It wasn’t easy, mainly because it was still fairly dark when we started, visibility at the water surface was very poor because of the mist and although there were some buoys marking the course there weren’t many. Eventually we zig-zagged our way to the turnaround buoy, where a group of us stopped briefly to discuss whether it really was the turning point before getting back to the business of swimming into each other and trying to work out which way to go in the mist. Eventually I got to the swim finish. A couple of helpers pulled me out onto the pontoon and I realised how cold I was – I couldn’t even stand up for a few seconds and just lay there flopping like a dying fish. I finally made my way to the transition tent where I put on a long-sleeve jacket and gloves, over to the bike racks, donned my preposterous pointy hat and off on the bike I went. Swim time 1:18 –6 minutes slower than I’d have liked but hey, it’s a long day.
Yup, that's what it was like
The bike course is three laps of a course that goes out of Henley, up a big hill on a dual carriageway, turns around, goes back down the hill, takes a sharp left and then goes up an even bigger hill, along a false flat at the top for a while, then you turn around and ride back down to the bottom again. It’s the equivalent of a medium-hilly Tour de France stage, except that you have to ride it solo – drafting on the bike, which reduces your energy output by 33% or so, isn’t allowed. I spent most of the first lap just warming up, and was feeling pretty good, but somewhere in the second lap I found out the answer to the question of whether I’d recovered from Copenhagen, and it was “no”. My wheels seemed to have been replaced with square ones and I just had to grit my teeth and grind along. I rode, I muttered, I said the occasional rude word. I went up the hills, I went down the hills. I drank sports drink and slurped disgusting carbohydrate gels. I ate a banana. Eventually, on the descent from the first big hill on the third lap, Nigel, the biker from the relay team, came past me like a train. They’d started half an hour after me so I’d obviously lost a lot of time. I said another rude word and chased him. This was on a steep descent and we both dropped out of the sky like sweaty meteors. It was fun. I then overcooked it a little on the bend at the bottom of the hill and had to do some emergency braking to avoid slamming into the crash barriers. Nigel hammered off into the distance, I shrugged and got back to riding, muttering and swearing. Finally, I made the ascent of Pishill for the last time (so called, we decided, because of what you do out of terror on the steep, winding and badly surfaced descent), made it back down without crashing and got my sorry ass back into transition. All that remained was to “run” a marathon. Bike time 6 hours 20 minutes – not good. I did 5.42 in Copenhagen including a stop to fix my bike.
The run course takes you through Henley, over the bridge and then round a big loop on the other side of the river, and you repeat that four times for a marathon. I have rarely been so pleased not to be on my bicycle and the first km or so was just a pleasure. Then things went downhill a bit. I got cramp in my abdominal muscles, and it got steadily worse until I had to stop at about 2kms. I took advantage of the stop to try to take a stone out of my shoe only to realise that there was no stone – what I’d thought was a stone was in fact the feeling returning to my numb cold feet. After I got running again that injury to my left quad started to make itself known. I overtook some people and some people overtook me. I developed a strong dislike of the runners from the relay teams who came skipping past at speed. Things slowly got worse, although the support from the people watching was unbelievable. The organisers had printed our names on the race numbers and every time I thought I couldn’t go on and needed to just lie down someone would leap out and shout “Go on Rob! Keep going! Yeeeeeeeaahhh” and I’d have to keep moving. Damn it was annoying.
On lap three I started seeing double, which was a bit worrying. I made a point of stopping at a drinks station and getting a load of carbohydrates in. I’d promised myself a little walk break after that but damn, one of my friends was there so I had to run. By the last 2kms I was segmenting the run into 200m chunks: just run another 200. Now another. Keep it up. Back over Henley Bridge and I knew I was home, I even managed to find a bit of speed for the last km. Finally over the finish line in 11.58, 181st finisher out of about about 450 (about 600 entered and 500 started) and I was done. I phoned home and gave strict instructions to my wife: If I ever suggest doing two long-distance triathlons in a month you are to use any means necessary, up to and including physical violence, to stop me being so ****ing stupid.
Pleased to be finishing
Overall, the relay team beat me by slightly over 50 minutes, but to preserve my honour I should point out that I was faster than them in both the swim and the run (can’t believe the latter, what was Brian doing?) and they only got that time because of the extra time I had to spend pfaffing around in the transitions and Nigel’s super-fast bike riding. We’ve raised well over £4K between us which will fund the opening of a new social club in SW London for kids between 10 and 18 with Down’s syndrome, which is a real result, and I’d like to thank everyone who contributed.
Right. I see that Ironman Wales 2012 is opening for entries…
