"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.