Life Without Limits, A (18 page)

The prize was a cool $20,000 and a place, if I wanted it, at the World Ironman Championships in Kona, Hawaii, the daddy of all ironman races. It was seven weeks away, in October. I phoned Brett on the finish line and told him I’d won.

‘Good job, kid.’

‘They’ve offered me a place at Kona. Should I take it?’

‘Why not? At least we’ll have it if we want it.’

‘It costs $500.’

‘Take it.’

The next day the customary post-race party took place in the Lotte Hotel on Jeju – yes, Hotel Erupting Volcano. It was kind of cathartic to be back, this time not wearing a suit and carrying UK Government policy documents, but competing in an ironman and sleeping on the floor of a cheap-as-chips apartment with two other team-mates. I was happier with things this way.

I was happier, full stop. I had shared the apartment in Jeju with Luke Dragstra and Vinnie Santana. Luke, in particular, was a hardened pro, and I think he expected me to be worried and nervous before my first ironman, asking endless questions and generally being a royal pain in the arse. But I wasn’t any of those. He and I started to get on a lot better on that trip. I later heard from Brett that I had surprised Luke with how calm, confident and well prepared I’d been. That made me happy. It was a breakthrough in my relations with the team. And that weekend, among the ironman brethren, I felt as if I belonged at last.

Brett was happy too. He sent me an email the following week. Here it is:

It suddenly dawned on me how much pressure he’d been under, sending me to Korea. It could have gone horribly wrong. He was taking a punt, almost as much as I was. No ironman training, I didn’t even have the basic equipment – I was racing on a road bike with drop handlebars and training wheels. I’d borrowed kit off my team-mates and worn an old black vest – not great in the heat – onto which I’d ironed the team logo. And then there was the coccyx injury he’d told me to ignore. He was going on little more than a hunch that I could ‘stay all day’. It was all wild, anti-textbook stuff.

As was his next trick – to insist that I went the very next weekend to Singapore to compete in a half-ironman. This was ripping up the textbook and pissing on it. No other coach would have endorsed the programme I was on. I’d done two long-course triathlons, Alpe d’Huez, an ironman and now a half-ironman in the space of a few weeks – and six weeks later I was meant to be doing Hawaii. In anyone else’s book, that’s over-racing; it’s too much travel and not enough rest.

In the case of Singapore, they might have been right. There was pressure to race, because this was a big promotion for the team in one of the world’s largest financial centres. During that race I came the closest I ever have to bonking, as we say, which others might describe as hitting the wall. I ran like a tin woman – it was really painful. Belinda Granger, another team-mate, won that day, and I came third.

But it was out of the way, and I returned to camp in Thailand with six weeks to prepare for the biggest race of my life.

They rewarded me with a proper time-trial bike after Singapore, complete with race wheels! Brett had taught me not to care about having the latest equipment. He felt that far too many people spent too much time worrying about expensive, aerodynamic gear and not enough about the engine that drives it. All the same, now that I was going to Hawaii he agreed that a time-trial bike was a prerequisite. I spent much of the following six weeks learning to ride it. A time-trial bike requires a totally new cycling position.

As the big day approached, the other team members who had qualified in Hawaii left for Kona. But Brett told me to stay behind in Thailand for a few more days. He didn’t want me to get caught up in the hype out there – Hawaii-itis, he called it. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was quite happy to stay behind. Although relations were thawing between me and the boys on the team, I still felt very much like a high-school geek shunned by the prom queens when it came to some of the girls. Now that I had a few races under my belt, I’d thought I might become more accepted, but jealousy seemed to be the latest issue for us to get past. I just couldn’t win – or, rather, I could, but it wasn’t helping matters.

Before they’d left, Brett had made the others do a mini-race simulation, and two days before I was due to fly out it was my turn. The session was a 3km swim, a two-hour bike ride and twelve 800m on the track. It was pissing down, monsoon-style. I remember running round the track with the rain coming down, splashing through the puddles, with only Brett and a couple of rabid dogs looking on at me. I nailed that session. Brett didn’t say anything, other than his customary, ‘Good job, kid’, before he walked off. But I knew how the others had done in their test sets, and I know that the times I did in that session got back to the girls in Hawaii.

When Brett saw me off in early October, nine days before the race, he gave me a scrap of paper torn from his notebook (still got it) on which he had written, almost illegibly, his final words of wisdom. He told me to keep my head down and stay well away from the hype. This was just another event. And, most importantly, he told me not to defer to anyone.

It was only when I arrived at the airport in Hawaii that I began to get an inkling of what he meant by the hype. It was a complete circus. There are not too many places to train, so you end up going up and down the same roads. Everywhere you turn there are people training. Everybody’s looking at everybody else – it’s like a catwalk show.

The media are out in force, conducting interviews with all the well-known pros. People descend on the huge sponsor expo, buying their last-minute pieces of equipment, or lining up under the midday sun to get an autograph from ironman champions. And those that want to relax go to the nearby coffee shops watching others go past and gossiping about who has raced where, who is fast, slow, injured or on form and predicting the top ten finishers. I know I wouldn’t have featured in any of their conversations.

It was a relief to be able to slip under the radar. Nobody knew who I was. I’d struggled even to find some accommodation. By the time we knew I was going to race, everywhere was booked. I managed to find a room – actually, it was a bed within a room – in a little apartment that I shared with two guys I’d never met before, Scott Neyedli, a British pro, and Eneko Elosegui, a Spanish age-grouper. It turned out the apartment was five miles out of Kona, halfway up the mountain, reached via an incline with a 20 per cent gradient. That meant a torturous bike ride just to get home after each session. I remember lugging my shopping up the hill on my bike, wondering if this was how everyone else was preparing.

Then there was the apartment itself. It had two bedrooms. Scott took the main one, since he’d rented the house, and Eneko and I shared the other. It had a desk, a fan and two single beds, each of which sagged in the middle like a trampoline. The kitchen was outside, under an awning. Next door there lived a couple with a barking dog, a screaming baby and a propensity to scream at each other just as much. It was all decidedly suboptimal.

As were my levels of organisation. I had no kit, other than the second-hand shorts Rebecca had lent me for Korea (still got them). So I bought a race suit and shoes that week. How did I make my choice? Simple. Whatever was cheapest. I couldn’t believe some of the prices for a top. I ironed on the team logos. If only I’d had any sponsors of my own to advertise. Then one of my pedals broke. I was so tight, I fixed them with industrial glue.

On the Monday before the big day, Eneko and I were out on our bikes and we bumped into Belinda, Hillary and Rebecca. Team-mates we may have been, but we’d had no contact that week. I was sure they didn’t want to spend time with me, and anyway, I had been told to stay away from everything and everyone and to concentrate on the race. Eneko and I were on a four-hour bike ride, and it was at the turnaround, after two hours, that we met them. You could practically hear the claws being sharpened – Eneko didn’t know where to look.

We started cycling back together, but almost immediately Belinda shot off ahead. That gentleman’s agreement about staying in line with your training partners had gone out of the window. There was no malice in it, though. I understood it was her way of putting down a marker before the big race, and it’s the sort of psychological ploy I’ve probably used myself since. It had the desired effect, too, because I remember thinking then that she was so much stronger than me on the bike.

Come the day itself, I do believe I had a major advantage in my anonymity and ignorance. So many people know everything there is to know about the race, the terrain, the conditions and the competitors, but I knew nothing and no one knew me. I didn’t think. I just raced.

And there were definite benefits to staying in our ramshackle apartment, which looked down on Kona, well away from the circus. Not that the night before helped at all. Next door were in good voice, even by their standards, and when the police turned up at one in the morning with the sirens wailing and the baby screaming and the dog barking I lay on my saggy bed in the single room that I shared with a man I barely knew and thought: ‘I’ve got the biggest race of my life tomorrow, and I haven’t had any sleep.’

I eventually dozed off at about 2.30 a.m., which meant I had two hours’ sleep before I had to get up. At 4.30 a.m., the alarm went off, and the three of us went about our preparations, bleary eyed. Three English muffins, honey, a banana and a cup of tea was my race breakfast of choice. Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is my pre-race reading material, without fail.

Scott’s mum and dad picked us up and drove us down to the start at 5.30 a.m. We performed last-minute checks on our bikes, and I headed down to the swim start to prepare. World Championships or not, I just didn’t feel nervous. I hadn’t the same respect – or fear – for the race as everyone else. I was simply very excited. There are so many people there, around 1,600 competitors, and thousands of spectators lining the shoreline and streets.

I entered the water at around 6.30 a.m., warmed up and then muscled my way into a good position on the start line where we skull on our front until the cannon fires into the morning air. It is one of the most awe-inspiring sights. The sun has risen over the volcano; the ocean is calm and crystal-clear. I watched the fish in the water below, and beyond them were the scuba divers with their cameras trained on us as we hovered, waiting for the start.

The 150 pros head off at 6.45 a.m., a quarter of an hour before everyone else. My target was a top-ten finish. During my two-hour sleep I’d dreamed that I’d come fourth, and I’d been overjoyed with that.

The cannon fired, and we were off. I didn’t have a great swim. It was like a washing machine, a complete free-for-all. But there’s energy to be taken from the fish and the coral beneath us – more so, at any rate, than is to be had from the endless straight black lines in the training pool. Belinda and I swam side by side. She breathes to the left, and I breathe to the right, so we kept looking at each other throughout that swim, and we exited the water together. It was a strange way for our relationship to start improving.

As we entered transition one, I was about six minutes off the leaders, which is quite a lot at that stage. For the first twenty-five miles of the bike leg, I felt really lethargic. The frustration built as it looked as if I wasn’t going to be able to do myself justice. But I plugged away, overtook a few people and started to feel a lot better. I overtook Hillary and felt better still, and then came the climb to Hawi, a small town on a headland on the northernmost point of the island and the turnaround point on the bike. It is a steady climb into a headwind, which means I was in my element – I’m at my best on the climbs, and a headwind only magnifies that. I overtook a lot of people on that twenty-mile stretch. As I approached Hawi, I passed a group of women coming down the other way with motorbikes and cameras trailing them. I knew then that I was gaining on the lead group, although I didn’t know at that point that there were actually two more women ahead of them. They would have passed by a little earlier, but it’s not always easy to tell the sex of the athletes coming the other way when you’re cycling at 25 miles an hour.

I realised then that if I just kept going at my current pace I would probably catch them. On the way back from Hawi, there’s a small town called Kawaihae just before you return to the Queen Kaahumanu Highway. A few minutes on, the road bends to the left, and there were the girls a little further ahead. I had a decision to make. Either I had to sit at the back of the group, or I had to overtake the whole lot of them, because they were too close together for me to slot in somewhere in between.

So I overtook them. I acknowledged Belinda as I went past, and I now know that another athlete, Sam McGlone, asked her who I was. Belinda replied: ‘That’s the winner of the race.’

There’s a motorbike that carries a board with the split times on it, and I could see my race number was in ninth, although you don’t know how up to date it is and I didn’t know who the other numbers represented. It turned out I was actually in third, with two more girls ahead of me, Dede Griesbauer and Leanda Cave. With about fifteen miles of the bike to go I’d overtaken them both, each on an incline. And I still felt strong. I was having a whale of a time.