Back to basics

The eventual winner (I think) going round one of the hairpins on Boxhill

I’ve always wanted to do the Ballbuster Duathlon. It’s got a very simple format: run a lap of an 12.5 km loop starting at the top of Boxhill in Surrey, then bike it three times and then run it again. The total amount of descent and ascent is about 165m per lap, with the ascent almost all coming in the climb up the zigzag road to the top of the hill at the end of each lap. They run the race twice a year, in the Autumn and in the Spring, but I’d never got it together to do the race before. I have to admit that a few years ago I entered, got up early on the Sunday morning, put on my gear, put the bike in the car and then checked the website to find out exactly where the start was and found out that the race is held on a Saturday.

No such errors this year although my preparation was far from ideal, including a 5km race the previous Saturday, a half marathon the next day and a 20 mile training run during the week, so my legs were pretty tired. Adding almost no bike training for a while (just a few sessions on the trainer) into the mix and my race plan was to go at a reasonable pace on the runs and just take it easy on the bike and try not to fall off. The forecast was for fog and rain, so I packed a variety of gear but decided to go for the “Helly Hansen thermal top with a tri-suit over the top” combination, a timeless fashion classic. Got there in good time, had a coffee from the National Trust café and racked my bike in the fog. Nice to see a bunch of guys from Thames Turbo there.

Quick race briefing and we were off. The loop kicks off with a fairly level but undulating few kms through the village of Boxhill, then downhill to a sharp left, after which it’s mostly downhill, some on small twisty roads without much view of what’s coming towards you until you hit the bottom of the big climb, which is just a matter of slogging all the way back up to the top. The first run was fine, I was through 10ks in about 38 minutes despite my legs being a bit stiff and tired after the previous weeks’ activities. Onto the hill and I just slowed down to a steady pace and ground my way up. Final time for the first lap was 50:50 for an average pace of 4:05 per km, not desperately fast but nothing to worry about.

The bike wasn’t fabulous but wasn’t too bad either. My ****ing saddle came loose again on the first lap and I had to stop to fix it at the top of the hill. The rather technical descents got more troublesome as the race went on and by the third lap it was raining quite hard and I had to slow down because I couldn’t really see too much and it was getting a bit scary. Then onto the hill for the third time up and I just put it in the easiest gear and span my way up. I collected a cyclist who wasn’t part of the race who latched onto my back wheel and stuck there like a leech the whole way up, which was really a bit annoying but obviously I got rid of him when I turned left into transition again. Final time for the bike was 1:27, not exactly fast but not too much to worry about again. There was a short run over some really stony, muddy ground before you could get the the bike racks which was no fun at all in cleats. At least I didn’t take my feet out of the shoes before T2, that would have been an error.

T2 took a bit longer than T1 because my hands were cold but soon enough I was back out running again. Ouch! Curiously I was unable to run as fast as previously and my legs were not in their happy place. Through the fog I could just see another TTTC trisuit in the distance and I slowly reeled John in, finally catching him somewhere in the village. The downhill sections were interesting: my quads were very unhappy and I couldn’t manage to roll downwards like I would on fresher legs. Finally to the bottom of the zigzag climb for the fifth and last time and there weren’t many people around. Once I got on the hill I could see a few people up ahead, one of whom was obviously in trouble and kept stopping to walk. I want past him quickly enough and then got passed by someone else who’d stopped to answer a call of nature. He went past me quite fast but I kept on plodding and came back up to him and passed him on one of the hairpins. He tried to stay with me and I turned the screw a bit and after about half a minute he faded off into the distance. It’s like normal racing but in slow motion because everyone’s totally knackered and running very slowly up a big hill. I overtook a few more runners and was enjoying feeling that I was finishing quite strongly when I realised that someone was closing on me: I had to dig quite deep to put on a bit of a burst but that was enough to get me to the finish, once I’d worked out where the finish line actually was. Final time was 3:18 which was good enough for 51^st place out of 300-odd finisher. The last lap was 5 minutes slower than the first.

Me, suffering in the last few hundred metres of the race.
The person behind in the white top was trying to catch me and
it was a bit of an effort to hold him off.

I have to say, I loved this race. It’s got a combination of complete stupidity (let’s go round and round this really hilly loop) and basic grittiness that I like a lot. No-one does this race who isn’t a serious competitor, no-one (or hardly anyone) is trying to raise money for charity and there aren’t any girls with pompoms, bands, big screens, balloons or carpets in the transition area. There aren’t any big crowds, you don’t even get a finishers’ medal and the athletes are expected to know what they’re doing and be reasonably self-sufficient. More please.

"A life without limits": review.

One hundred and forty words. That’s all it takes for the G-word to appear, in the third sentence of the second paragraph of the foreword of Chrissie Wellington’s new autobiography, “A life without limits”. For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, there is a fundamental law of the universe that states that any coverage of long-distance triathlon in the popular media must, somewhere, use the adjective “gruelling” to describe the event. Multiple Ironman triathlon world champion Chrissie Wellington might be able to defy illness and injury, she might be able to ride her bike like a bolt of lightning through the Hawaiian heat and humidity and then follow it up by running a marathon at sub-2:50 pace, but this is one rule that she dares not break. A good choice, then, to drop it in as close to the beginning of her autobiography as possible, ensuring that the triathlon gods are appeased, and then not to use it again, allowing a focus on more interesting matters.

Wellington has not had anything approaching a normal athletic career, and this is therefore, thankfully, not a normal sportsperson’s autobiography. Following a geography degree at Birmingham University and a masters’ in international development she went on to work for DEFRA, a British government department, where she was involved in development work and in negotiations and drafting policy on overseas aid. Disillusioned by the lack of connection between besuited civil servants jetting around the World to negotiate in luxury hotels and the realities of life for the people that the aid was meant to be helping she took some time out and went to Nepal to work for an NGO in Nepal, trying to improve sanitation in rural parts of the country. While there she took up mountain biking and went on a series of long distance rides with friends. Disillusioned once again by certain aspects of her work she spent some time travelling, and on a whim entered a coast-to-coast running, kayaking and cycling race in New Zealand where she finished a surprised second. Realising that she had the ability to do very well indeed in long multisport events, and fed up with her inability to achieve what she wanted working in development, she walked away from development and into the life of a professional triathlete.

Wellington’s time working in government has thankfully not afflicted her with bureaucratese or MBAspeke and the book is written in an enjoyable and easy to read style, although most of the sentences tend to be quite short making it a bit staccato to read and encouraging the reader to rush through it. Nonetheless it’s several intellectual notches above a great deal of the sports literature: not many footballers use words like “apotheosis”, for example. There is some nice understated dry humour and a running joke about her tendency to hoard everything. Lots of sports autobiographies are ghost written to a greater of lesser extent, and I don’t know whether any of this has been ghosted but I suspect that most or all of it is straight from the World Champion’s desk – as evidence I cite the repeated use of the adjective “suboptimal”, which I also recall her using while speaking the other day (edit: turns out it was ghost written. Oh well.).

The early part of the book unsurprisingly deals with her early years. She talks openly about her problems with body image and easting disorders as a young woman, and interestingly about how sport has helped her to come to terms with these as she has come to regard her body more as a system that enables her to do her job. She characterises herself as a “control freak” and an obsessive hard worker and that she is correct is evident from her achievements in her life before triathlon. At university she was awarded a first class degree and a masters with distinction and from what she says she was rocketing up the ladder in the civil service, writing policy, negotiating with representatives of other governments and on one occasion drinking too many margheritas with the minister. The move into triathlon comes next and for me this is the most interesting part of the book. She began her career being coached by the controversial Australian Brett Sutton, and her relationship with him forms a thread that runs through the rest of the book. He clearly made a massive impact on her and her descriptions of his attitudes, training techniques and personality is fascinating. Sutton demands absolute obedience from his athletes and for an intelligent, free-spirited young woman to go from a high-flying and responsible civil service job to submitting to Sutton’s instructions sounds like a painful process. Some of what she describes would certainly not stand up to feminist analysis, especially the part where he basically tells her that she'll never be complete without a man, but this doesn't seem to have caused offence and Wellington seems to have accepted it as being meant with the best of intentions.

Her dazzling rise to the top of the sport is well known and I’ve watched a lot of coverage of Wellington racing over the years, but it’s still interesting to read about how it felt from her point of view. The description of the first Kona win, when she was a complete unknown and astonished everyone is great to read, especially her description of it as “something that… was going to have major repercussions”, but the most riveting bit for me was the discussion of the 2011 Kona race when she was seriously hurt in a bike crash two weeks before the race and still managed to win despite assorted bruising, missing skin and a torn pectoral. Much of the detail of how badly she was hurt has only come out in bits after the event. Having read the full story I am astounded that she even started, let alone won.

I wasn’t planning to read this book because, as I’ve commented elsewhere, I was a little suspicious of Wellington’s public persona and in particular what I saw as her habit of talking like an aspirational speaker at a corporate event the whole time. I realised my mistake when I saw her speak at a Q&A session a week ago and was greatly impressed, and this book has only reinforced my positive impression. It’s a frank portrait of someone who has done some truly astonishing things, who hasn’t been afraid to make momentous changes to her life and who has worked hard to get where she is today.

One thing that I thought was missing was any real discussion of what it is that makes her such a phenomenal athlete. She is not simply much better than all the other women in her sport, she is far, far better than them and could probably make a decent career as a professional male triathlete. I would love to know her thoughts on why this should be: how much is the consequence of physiology and how much psychology? From some of the things she writes about the mental aspect of racing I suspect that she might well be familiar with Tim Noakes’ central governor theory of performance, which is the idea that our brains are the ultimate limiters of performance because they are programmed to stop us pushing our bodies to the point where we damage them. It’s a shame that she didn’t expand on that further, but you can't have everything.

A final question that I was left with is how well she is going to achieve her ultimate aim: she has always said that she is fundamentally motivated by a desire to make the World a better place. For someone disillusioned with government and NGO aid for developing nations, the narcissistic and individualistic world of Triathlon, populated by over-achievers from socio-economic group A is not an obvious destination. The plan seems to be to use her fame to publicise causes that matter to her, and she’s certainly been doing this to a certain extent with work with the Blazeman foundation and the Jane Tomlinson Appeal, but I suspect she has much bigger plans. I’ll be interested to find out what comes next, especially given her plans to take a sabbatical from racing for a year. 

TCR show

I had a few hours spare today and I spent them at the annual TCR (Triathlon, Cycling, Running) show at Sandown park, which is fortunately only a 10 minute drive from my house. This is a big triathlon exhibition, with lots of trade stands and also various things going on: a 10k race, swim analysis in some endless pools and seminars upstairs. To be honest, I found the trade stands depressing. There seemed to be an endless number of people all producing one of about three different products (nutrition, wetsuits, compression tights) and all making more and more ridiculous claims to differentiate themselves from the competition. The worst of these come from the sports nutrition companies. Sports nutrition is not, really, a complicated business for most people, so because these firms all produce essentially the same products they all use as much "sciencey" jargon as possible to make their products sound better than they are. Gu carbohydrate gels, for example, contain amino acids for faster recovery and an immune system boost. Really? Ingesting a small amount of protein during an event helps the immune system? I must admit, I'm not aware of any science that would demonstrate that... and part of my research is on effects of diet on immune responses.

There were also lots of companies trying to extract money from people by providing services of questionable value. I can understand why swim coaching is big business, but run technique coaching? Most people would benefit much more from a decent structured training schedule that they can get easily from a book or from a club coach (again, it's not complicated) than from someone poncing around with their technique. The world of triathlon seems to be full of people looking to exchange money for speed without doing any hard work, which is not really something that I have a lot of time for. I'd rather get free speed without spending any money or doing any hard work, and the only way I can think of for that is to go back in time and select my parents a little bit better (not that there's anything wrong with my current set of genes but a little tweaking wouldn't hurt).

On the bright side, I went to two seminars which were both excellent. Paul Newsome from Swimsmooth gave a really good talk about swimming (unsurprisingly) and made some really good points: the best stroke for open water swimming is not necessarily the same as the best stroke for pool swimming, and different strokes work for different folks. This was all illustrated with a great series of videos of different swimmers above and below water - the contrast between, for example, Rebecca Adlington, middle distance pool supremo and multiple Olympic gold medallist and Jodie Swallow, one of the best open water swimmers in triathlon was a real eye-opener. That there isn't a single perfect stroke is really refreshing to hear and I got the impression that the Swimsmooth guys know their stuff and do a lot of very good thinking about it as well.

Chrissie Wellington was someone that I was sort of looking forward to and sort of not - my impression of her up until now was that she only spoke in MBA approved aspirational phrases, so while I'm the first to acknowledge that she is a mind-blowing athlete and undoubtedly as hard as nails I was a bit concerned that the talk would be a bit too much hyperbole and not enough detail or insight. I'm pleased to say that I couldn't have been more wrong. I was seriously impressed: she's honest, self-effacing, fair and obviously very intelligent. Yes, there's a lot of phrases like "never give up", "self-empowerment", "mind training" and so on but it quickly becomes clear ***when you hear the whole story and not just the soundbites*** that in her case these are not just empty words. She means it and what's more in her case they're correct. I guess I've been driven to cynicism by overexposure to university management who are possibly the Chrissie W anti-particle: the bullshiton to her honeston. It's possible that by bringing them together we could produce enough clean energy to power the world for decades, but given that she's spent time in the civil service I expect that similar experiments have already been tried. The story of how badly injured she was before the IM World Champs in Hawaii last year and how she raced through the pain and won has to be one of the great stories of our sport. Great answers to all the questions: I asked the only dumb one which was why she never wears an aero helmet - there's always some idiot sounding off on Slowtwitch or Tritalk about how she must be a bit of a thicky because she wears a road helmet so I thought I'd get the answer straight from the World Champion's mouth. I got the impression she's been asked this before but really, just a simple "my head gets too hot" would have been fine.

Knackered of Tunbridge Wells

The Tunbridge Wells half is a tough, hilly half marathon that takes place in late February. Way back in the early noughties I ran it three times, each time as prep for a spring marathon, with times between 1:22 and 1:27 and a 23rd place when I managed that 1:22. This year I'm entered for the Barcelona marathon in late March, and so I found myself lining up for my first proper running road race since 2005. Because I missed a few weeks with an injury I trained right up to the race and foolishly ran an 18:20 5km in Bushy Park the previous morning so I was a bit tired to start with: coupled with not having done something like this for a while I had no idea what sort of time I was likely to do.

I got there in good time, mooched over to the start to get a coffee and realised that I had no cash at all apart form a few foreign notes that were kicking around in my wallet. Fortunately the man selling the coffees was willing to exchange a double espresso for a five euro note so I managed to get my fix. A little bit of stretching and I lined up at the front of the 2100 competitors and some bloke started talking to the assembled runners, including a strangely convoluted description of the course as something like "challenging, hilly yet reasonably fast" - you can't have your cake and eat it mate, it's either hilly or it's fast, and this course is hilly. The race was started by none other than local Olympic golden girl Kelly Holmes and as a sign of the times the start was slightly delayed while she took a picture for twitter. Here it is: I'm about 4 rows back wearing my bad-taste orange Oakleys.

After the twitter-fest we were off. Tunbridge Wells is on the Weald of Kent, a series of low hills, and the river Medway forms a valley next to it. The race heads Northwest out of town, drops into the valley after about 5km and then climbs back up in the second half, so it can be divided up into a series of distinct sections.

The first 4km or so are in rolling hills, with some fast downhills and some short sharp climbs. There is then a series of long downhills from about 5km to 9km, followed by the two big climbs, the first, in Penshurst, being shorter than Spring Hill, the second, which is hard and a couple of kms long, topped off with a long false flat. From 14km to 19 or so there is a series of false flats and rolling hills that are quite tough to maintain pace on, then the last couple of kms into town are mostly slightly downhill and a bit faster.

I didn't really have a plan, since I didn't have much feeling for what sort of shape I was in, but I had what you could call a vague feeling that the best thing to do would be to try to gain plenty of time in the first 10km because the second half was going to be hard. For the first km I just ran at a comfortable speed and was surprised to split it in 3:38 (downhill). The next one had some significant uphills and that went in 4:01, and then it was all comfortably under 4 minutes a km until km 10, including one at 3:34 which included a steep 11% downhill grade. I was through 10km in 38 minutes and some change, then it was onto the completely different second half which is mostly just a case of suffering through. The km splits grew and going up spring Hill I managed km 12 in the miserable time of 5:24. Not many people overtook me, though and I guess most people were in the same boat. My expensive sunglasses kept on fogging up but I didn't really mind because I didn't really want to see what was coming.

Finally over the top of the big hill and things were hurting a bit and I was not sure if I could keep a reasonable pace to the finish. I just kept on plugging away and managed to keep things at somewhere near 4 minute per km pace for the stretch from 13 to 20 mms, with a few deviations when it all got a bit much. Two little girls were counting the runners at about 15kms and seemingly having a great time (is this the solution to the nations numeracy problems?) and I found out that I was in 49th place, which was better than I expected. The last few kms were than just a matter of holding it together and I managed to dig up some speed from somewhere for the last stretch into town, then into the finish, didn't trip over any of the speed bumps and finish in 1:25:44, 53rd place. Kelly H gave me my medal: I wanted to tell her how her 800m race in Athens is one of my all-time favourite sports moments but I couldn't because I had no breath left. I did notice that she's a bit shorter than I would have expected - for some reason I expect all olympic medallists to be at least seven feet tall, rather than about five eight.

Overall not a bad race for me at all, I think, especially given the complete lack of any sort of taper. Obviously I had a big positive split with the second half several minutes slower than the first but that's mostly a consequence of the terrain and I was still running well at the end, although it was pretty tough for the last 5kms or so. The last time I did this race it was OK but nothing special in terms of organisation, but they've made some big improvements and it's got a good "big race" feel with bands applying along the route, great traffic management and everything running smoothly. Next up the Ballbuster Duathlon.