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.

Rob vs the relay

NB this is a report I wrote for my departmental newsletter, so it's coming from a different perspective than some of the other stuff here.

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 18^th 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, 181^st 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…

Thames Turbo take on Challenge Copenhagen

The aftermath

This was my 6th ironman distance race and like all the others was a roller-coaster ride of emotion and as always a fight with myself to speed up, slow down or just keep going at all. Do other people fight with themselves as well as with the water, wind and pain? For me the voices started the day before the race, doctor. There was a strong wind in T1 and looking at the dull skies and grey water and the bikes being blown over I was thinking “You don’t have to do this. You could pretend to have a cold, or fake a sprained ankle. No-one would know, and you wouldn’t have to do a stupid triathlon in the cold tomorrow”. This happens every time I’ve got something big to do the next day and I shrugged and went back to the building site formerly known as the Park Inn. Dinner was the special meal the hotel had laid on for us and it was good practice for open water swimming with 40-odd hungry race-ready triathletes all trying to get to the pasta at once. By then my mood had changed: I was shockingly relaxed about the upcoming race and really didn’t have any trouble with pre-race nerves at all.

4.45 the next morning and I crawled out of my pit. The hotel’s breakfast was available from 5, and I went down at about 5.10 to find it buzzing. I joined in with the final carbo-load, then it was off to the race. I walked over to T1 by myself, but as I walked down the racks it seemed that every second bike had someone in a red-white-and-blue top who would stop pumping their tyres or arranging their helmet and shout out a greeting. Thames Turbo had 36 people doing the full distance and another four or so relay teams and we really were all over the race like an embarrassing rash. It was lovely and all of a sudden I was grinning all over my face. I sorted my gear out, lubed all the bits that needed lubing, then it was wetsuit on and here we go. Lining up with everyone I was straying into the land of the really stupidly happy: race on! The pros went off at 7 AM and we were all in the next wave at 7.05. Lots of manly handshakes as we lined up wearing our manly pink hats: this was officially the ladies’ wave to which they’d added team turbo, and they’d allocated hat colour by wave on the basis of some crude sexual stereotyping. The start was on the shore and I got a telling off when I disobeyed a marshal who was determined that everyone should start the race dry by stepping forward and rinsing out my goggles.

Yours truly smiling (in the background with the pink swim hat: Mal James is the cameraman and Kim Rowe is the happy looking fellow without the latex headgear.

My crackingly good mood lasted until about 1 minute into the swim. The water was cold and because I hadn’t had a chance to get used to it before the start I was having trouble getting my face down and my breathing was way too hard. I also got a fair old ice-cream headache to make me more cross but I just kept going. Round the first turn buoy and then… where? My state of extreme pre-race relaxation meant that I had been very casual over things like working out where the swim went. I had a rough idea of the course layout but when viewing it the previous day I’d assumed they’d put a few more buoys in to mark it but no, I think there were a total of three on the course as a whole. I did the mental equivalent of a shrug and just followed everyone else, but I wasn’t happy without much to sight on. Still, I got on some feet for a while until the first turnaround, which was marked by a big white pointy buoy with people on it, I think they call those ones “boats”. For the long straight back under the three bridges I was in a loose pack of swimmers that churned around a fair bit, plus the occasional faster swimmer from the next wave moving through us. Round the turnaround buoy in the canal and then back to the swim finish. Why do those last legs of open water swims always seem to take as long as the whole rest of the swim?

I wasn’t wearing a watch and as I got to the swim exit I looked for a clock to get a split from, but there was nothing, or at least nothing that I could see, and I had no idea how long I’d been swimming for. Judging by the number of blue swim hats from the next wave I thought I’d been quite slow and I was a bit dispirited. In fact my split was 1:14, slow for some but for me towards the faster end of my target times, but I only found that out after the race. T1 was fine but delayed by a minute or two by a stop in a portaloo then out on the bike. That felt a lot better and I whizzed through the twisty bits heading out of Copenhagen and then onto the coast road heading North. This road is a time-triallist’s dream: silky smooth surface, mostly flat but with the occasional bump to break things up and just to make it even nicer a bit of a tailwind. I settled down in the aerobars and kept my heart rate on or below 140 and tried to enjoy it. Something was wrong though. My shoulders were hurting just keeping me on the bars and I kept doing the “Contador shuffle”, sliding forward on the saddle and having to push myself back up it. To start with this wasn’t really a bother but after about an hour my triceps and shoulders were really painful and I was forced to get out of the aero position regularly because of the discomfort. I finally worked out what it was: at the Antwerp race a few weeks before my saddle had shifted a bit going over a speed bump and perhaps I hadn’t got it level enough when I put it back afterwards. I’d ridden the bike since but I hadn’t spent an extended time in the aero position. What to do? By the time I got to the aid station at 50km I knew that I absolutely had to stop and adjust it. That and a second quick visit to the portaloo took about 6 minutes in total. There’s nothing more demoralising than standing by the road trying to sort out your tools while listening to the whooooosh of bikes flying past. Bah.

Not sure when this was taken on the bike

By this time we were off the coast road and heading through windy narrow back roads through rural Zealand. I got back to business and rode on, eventually coming to the stretch on the highway heading South that makes up the last section of the loop. This would normally be a great road to ride on but with the tailwind from earlier now being a fairly strong headwind it was just a case of grinding it out into the wind. Eventually I came to the big hill with the food station on it, crowded with supporters and spectators including a vocal group of Turbos who lifted my spirits. Thanks for staying at the bottom of the hill guys, that meant that I could zip past at speed looking as though I knew what I was doing. If you’d been near the top of the hill, well let’s just say we’d have had more time for a chat. Over the section of pave after the highway and back onto the coast road for the second loop. Up to now I’d been riding well and my average speed was something like 33 kph, but now I started to feel really bad. I had no energy and was finding it hard to stay aero. My cadence was dropping to below 80 and I was not a happy camper. I think the problems with my saddle earlier and my attempts to stay down on the bars despite the pain had made my shoulders quite sore and now they’d stiffened up, but I’m not sure why I was feeling so flat aside from that. I ground my way back up the coast and once I turned West again I had a bit of an assessment of my position. OK, I’m feeling really bad and I can’t get aero. I’ll sit up for this section until I get to the highway, ride comfortably and eat as much as I can. Forget about times, this is just a training ride.

The highway and the big (for Denmark) hill. This photo was taken in 2010 but it was the same in 2011, but with many more supporters there.

For the next 30km or so, therefore, I was that guy. The one you pass on the bike at 120km or so into an ironman, riding a flash carbon fibre bike, wearing an aero helmet, sitting up and looking miserable. I always feel a smidgen of schadenfreude when I pass them, so perhaps this was payback time. That little voice was there again “What do you think you’re doing here? You haven’t done anywhere near enough training, you don’t have the discipline to do this properly, why do you waste your time pretending to be some sort of triathlete? Your swim was rubbish, you’ve got a long way to go on the bike and then you’ve got to run, you’re going to have a really bad day because you’re already knackered”. Muttering words I won’t repeat I ground along, making a point of getting as much nutrition in as I could stomach. I was tucking my used gel wrappers into my shorts leg so as not to litter and I wasn’t doing too good a job of slurping the contents out of some of them so I now had sticky pink yuk running down my right leg to add to my grumpiness. Bah.

Of course, and just as I had been telling people the previous day when I was doing my “experienced ironman veteran” act, bad patches come and eventually bad patches go. By the time I got on the highway again I was feeling a bit better, and the wind had changed a bit so it wasn't so much of a horrible grind as before. Once over the teeth-chattering pave and onto the road heading back to the city I was fine again. My speed was back to something acceptable and the closer I got to town the better I felt. Into T2 for a final bike split of 5.42 which was far better than I was expecting an hour before and I was feeling perky again. Hat off, shoes on, bit of banter with the other guys in transition and then out the tent. I handed my bag to the volunteer and she helpfully pointed out that I was deficient in the small matter of my race number. I just dumped out the contents of the bag on the floor, number on and off I trotted while the very pleasant and helpful volunteer re-packed the bag. I felt as good as you can having just biked 180km and had to make a big effort to slow down. The run course was quite twisty and there were lots of buildings so the Garmin was not much help in pacing, plus the distance markers were placed at apparently completely random distances and at least some of them were in the wrong place. Still, after a couple of kms I knew that I was doing around 4.45 to 4.50 a km and feeling nicely relaxed. Just keep tapping it out, don’t overdo it and don’t stop. As always the psychological games about the marathon have to be played. The thought of running 42.2 kms is too frightening, so you have to just focus on the smaller things. I told myself to just get the first lap done and concentrate on that as a goal.

Coming into transition right in the middle of Copenhagen.

I caught David Spencer and we had a bit of a chat, then Mr Crews who told me the tale of the idiot who’d run into his back wheel and broken three spokes. After about 6km I came across the Little Mermaid. I’m going to be here 3 more times, I thought… I wonder how I’ll feel.

Keep it going, keep the pace steady. The run course was clogged up with people doing the ironman shuffle and I spent a fair amount of time weaving in and out of them. My clubmates were everywhere and most of them seemed to be in front of me and going fast. Don’t chase them, just keep to the same pace and they’ll come back to you. At the turnaround at the far end of the run was one of the pros on the deck next to an ambulance and with an IV in his arm. Keep the fluids coming in, you don’t want to end up like that. Tap, tap tap. The 1st 10k went by in about 47 minutes: I’ll take that. Now I was starting to think about finish times, but I wasn’t sure how I was doing because I didn’t know my swim split or how long I’d spent in T1. The run course went by the finish at the end of each lap, I can look at the clock there and see how I’m doing. Got to the bit nearest the finish and no clock in sight. Oh well.

The number of people out supporting or just generally spectating was astonishing. The end of the run lap nearest the finish in particular was just rammed full of people, four or five deep by the course and then sitting on bridges and overpasses. The organisers say there were 125,000 people there and I can believe it. Of the 125,000 the noisiest and most welcome were the endlessly enthusiastic turbo supporters who always brought a smile to my face and gave my tired legs a boost. It was really great having you there everyone and thanks for everything.

Lap two and now it’s getting into the grimmer part of the run. The first 10km are great because you’re so pleased not to have to cycle anymore, and if you survive intact to the last 10km you know you’re heading home, but 10-30 kms is just a slog, especially on multi-lap courses where you’ve seen it all before. Head down and keep it going. Through 20kms and I was just about holding pace but the 4:45s were tending towards 5:00s and I’d started walking through some of the aid stations. I needed to answer a call of nature and ducked into a portaloo. It was so nice to just sit down, locked away from everything in my little blue box. I seriously considered just staying there for an hour or so. Maybe a little nap. No! Get back out there and finish it off.

I still don’t know what time I’m looking at. With a 5.42 bike I should be looking at being well under 11 hours so long as I keep up a reasonable pace, but it would be nice to have a better idea of what I’m looking at. I suddenly remember that I can get the time of day simply by pressing a button on my Garmin. Durr. The time is 4:11 PM. We started at 7:05 so 11 hours is 6:05 PM so I’m going to be well under it. But is that time Copenhagen time or UK time? I haven’t reset the Garmin to local time, and if it’s UK time then it’s really 5:11, is that possible? I have to force my exhausted brain to do the sums, which takes me a while, and I conclude that either I took over two hours for the swim, which is not likely, or it must have set itself to local time automatically. Back to business.

From 25 to about 35 kms is just nasty hard work. I overtake a lot of people even though my pace has dropped to between 5:00 and 5:15 per km. I can keep going but my legs are now really painful and I am feeling horrible. My main struggle is with that inner voice which has popped up again. I’m going to be nearer 10:40 than 11:00, and my target for this race was just to go under 11 hours. I could just stop and take a good long walk and still make it in under 11 hours. No-one would know that I was slacking off,and it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Or you could just walk for longer at the aid stations. Just walk for a minute at this one. Aaaaaargh shutup. I keep going, one thing that helps is the thought that the 10 or so clubmates I’ve passed in the last 15kms would overtake me again if I started walking.

I catch Mark B at about 35 kms. He’s been looking good every time I saw him on the run course but he’s just slowed down a bit more than I have. We run together for a while, then he tells me to just go because he’s really slowing down. He tells me that Straggler’s just ahead. I know that John (Straggler) is a bit ahead of us on the course but he’s surely a lap behind us? Having left Mark at about 38 kms I know it’s in the bag and I don’t have to hold back anymore. Time to run it in and leave it all on the course. I put the hammer down as far as it’ll go and I’m heading home. I can only manage about 4:30 a km but by comparison with most people on the course I’m flying. Finishing an ironman strong is a great feeling. I blow past Jennie and Brian at a drinks station then I’m about 2m behind Mr Taylor as we turn into the finish chute. Since the finish isn’t clearly marked and I still believe that John must be a lap behind me I become confused and stop to check with a marshal whether this is indeed the finish. Yes it is. OK, back to the running as fast as I can. I pass John about 15m from the line and finish in 10:37.

What a great result, for me at least. I’ve known for a while that with the stars in the right place I can go well under 11 hours for an ironman and this time I managed to combine a reasonable bike split with a good run and there it was. I’m particularly pleased given the ‘flu that I caught in December which meant that couldn’t do anything for the whole of January and February and when I managed to get back into training in March I really had to start from the very beginning.  Overall training was sparse as always for me with an average of about 6 hours per week not including the time out at the start of the year: with my job and my family I do as much as I can and I try to make as much of it count as possible, so probably a lot more in the way of hard runs and short, nasty turbo sessions than some. This year I managed to avoid injury and for the first time for 3 years neither of my Achilles tendons was causing trouble, probably accounting for my good run.

A final word about my clubmates. You could easily put together a buzzword-riddled management consultancy seminar about the Thames Turbo group that went to Copenhagen. I think what gives the quality of the team away is the casual acceptance of the extraordinary by the end of the weekend, from the numbers of people finishing in eye-popping times, to stories like those of Jon Crews and Nigel who both had bad crashes on the bike and finished strong all the way to the people who had a hard time but who toughed it out on the run and still made it in. Probably the best triathlon club in the World.