Life Without Limits, A (30 page)

I needn’t have worried. I was operated on there and then, with wires inserted into my wrist, and I settled down for a two-night stay.

Now, having won a fair few races, I am often asked for my advice on the various aspects of training and racing, and I willingly give it whenever I can. People should know, though, that if I come across as wise and all-knowing, it conceals the fact that I have often been guilty in the past of all the things I warn people against. One of my favourite subjects to hold forth about nowadays is how to deal with injury, but only after I had broken all the rules myself. I shall now describe how not to deal with injury; I shall now describe what I did in the aftermath of that crash in the Surrey Hills.

As soon as I came round from my op, with my right arm raised in a cast, I was trying to perform strength exercises in my hospital bed. The day after I was released from hospital I was down in the Putney dungeon on the turbo. I went running. I used the elliptical trainer. Within days, I was wrapping a plastic bag round my hand and going for a swim. One day I swam 4km with one arm. The bag leaked. My arm started swelling up, so that it was soon pushing against the inside of the cast. The pain was awful. Back to hospital. Off came the cast. My hand and wrist had blown up like a red balloon. The stitches had become infected. I was put on an antibiotic drip. Another few nights in a hospital bed. They took the wires out and gave me a new cast (this time waterproof), to be worn for another two weeks.

A week after the crash I had received an email from Brett. ‘Just heard about your accident,’ he said. ‘Very very sorry to hear that you broke a few things. Take a tip. Don’t rush it back. You got nothing to prove. A false start will cause you more drama than taking the month off now.’

Right, again. His words were actually a weight off my mind. One of the reasons I had pushed too hard too early in my convalescence was that I had thought this was what Brett would have recommended. In fact, the opposite was the case.

Only after my arm had been reset did I do what I should have done from the outset – relax, and realise that this injury was actually an opportunity to vary my training. Think about what you can do, rather than worry about what you can’t. Swimming, I had to concede, was a bad idea with my wrist in a cast. Instead, I made regular appearances in the dungeon, using a towel to stop the sweat dripping down my arm. I worked furiously on my notoriously weak core, my hamstrings and glutes. The Swiss ball and I became best friends.

Talking of friends, this was an opportunity to see more of them than usual. There may be a temptation to dismiss such activity as frivolous, but I don’t believe so. Often we athletes like to see ourselves as invincible, turning away from help because the idea of it challenges our claims to self-reliance. But when things are tough, particularly mentally (and injury has just as much of a psychological impact as a physical one), those rocks we call family and friends come into their own. Seeing them was a reminder that there is more to me than being an athlete. If that were all I saw myself as, my emotional and physical well-being would be determined only by my sporting performance, with debilitating consequences should that facility be taken away by injury or illness. But to see myself as, say, a daughter, girlfriend, Scrabble champion and
Masterchef
addict, as well as an athlete, is to leave me with other roles, so that my happiness and self-esteem can be main tained when the day job is compromised. It’s a question of balance.

In mid-February, the cast came off. My arm was white, withered and hairy, but it was working again. That longed-for moment would have come sooner had I not rushed off to the pool so quickly with my leaky plastic bag, but I was fit to resume work just in time for some warm-weather training in Spain with Cat Morrison. We headed off to Águilas for around eight weeks. I have made a lot of friends in triathlon, but Cat is probably the closest of these. It was wonderful to spend some quality time with her away from the triathlon Mecca that is Boulder. We shared an apartment and went on rides through lemon and orange groves, often returning to base with our cycle jerseys laden with fruit. Cat is a superb cook, which was another benefit of spending time with her. She makes the best pizzas this side of Naples. Tom also came out for ten days and loved it. By the beginning of April, I was tanned and fit. All thoughts of icy roads and broken wrists might as well have been from another lifetime.

I flew out to Boulder in April for the new season. And it was to be new in a number of ways. First of all, after a semi-official relationship with him in the build-up to Kona the year before, I was now working with Dave Scott as my coach. Second, Tom and I were moving in together. We found an apartment in Gunbarrel, a suburb of Boulder, and so began a new phase of my life – cohabiting with a boyfriend.

I was very anxious. When I’d first met Tom, just over a year earlier, and been swept away by it all, I was fearful of losing control of my life and my independence. The idea of compromise, I realised, would sooner or later be introduced. Now the time had come. Our first year together had passed like a dream, but we had been living, for the most part, on different continents. This was jumping in at the deep end. Not only were we moving in together, we were doing so thousands of miles from home. It was a totally alien experience for me. And Tom was embarking on a new career as a professional triathlete, having had the operation that finally cleared up his knee injury. He was coming out to Boulder to be with me, yes, but also to train full-time. There was a lot at stake. I wasn’t sure what would happen if it didn’t work out. And then there were all the other concerns that I’d harboured when we first started seeing each other, but that had remained theoretical because we were living so far apart. These were about to become very real issues. All those questions of compromise that, I guess, are familiar to any couple, but were new to me. What would it be like going to the supermarket and having to choose for two? How would my beloved routines be affected? My obsession with control? I’m very set in my ways – could I continue to be? I was worried about dinner, and whether we would agree on what to eat. I was worried about bedtimes. Most of all, I was worried about my career. I was committed to Tom – I’d known that from the very start – but how would living with him affect my training?

Within a day or two, I knew I’d been worrying about nothing. We dovetailed perfectly. As readers will know by now, I can be feisty and obsessive; Tom is calm and considerate. Nothing is too much trouble for him – ‘yes’ features far more in his vocabulary than ‘no’. Not only did our living together not impinge upon my training, or even my life, it actually enhanced it. I found his relaxed outlook rubbing off on me. The little things that I’d built up as issues turned out not to be issues at all. We went to bed at the same time; we ate the same things. He’s a little tidier than I am (that’s the army for you). I tend not to fold my clothes with a set square. Mine are thrown into a cupboard. Brett used to say that the state of your wardrobe, like the state of your bike, is a window into your soul – perhaps I still have work to do!

Our training meshed, as well. We both swam at Flatirons Athletic Club, and we did a lot of biking together. Or, rather, warming up on the bike. The minute any effort was introduced he was off down the road, and I laboured to catch him. Haven’t managed it so far. Indeed, I now judge my fitness at any given time by the distance between me and him at the end of one of our intervals. On the bike, Tom followed my programme, pretty much, but because he’s from a run back ground he had his own programme for running. We would see to it that our run sessions coincided with each other, but they would be independent.

My life in Boulder was now everything I would have wanted it to be. After the initial problems the previous year with Simon Lessing and the goldfish-bowl phenomenon, the set-up I had found for myself was really paying off. I had finally discovered, in Dave, the right coach to build on the work I had done with Brett. Dave is a legend of ironman, having won at Kona six times in the 1980s. As such, he is a very busy man. This was a problem for me early on, because I didn’t feel I was getting enough of his time. But I came to accept that that was the way it was. Most of all, I just trusted him from the start.

After my experiences with Simon the year before, I was also wary of being coached by a former athlete, but Dave has long been out of the sport. He is still very competitive, like Simon. He cranks out hard swim sets in the pool, and he’ll come back from a bike ride saying, ‘I averaged 36kmph over four hours out there!’ And I’ll reply: ‘Dave. I couldn’t care less.’ But the main problem with Simon was that he would join in with my training sessions, so it felt like a competition. Dave doesn’t do that. He watches some of my sessions, but mostly it is a case of me reporting back to him about each one. And where Brett was authoritarian, telling you to do something and expecting you to do it without discussion, Dave is keen to explain the rationale behind everything. He comes from a sports-science background, and is a strong believer in strength and conditioning and the right nutrition.

He thought it important to address the weaknesses in my core, glutes and hamstrings. When I broke my wrist he agreed that I should have two Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) injections to treat my chronic hamstring tendinopathy. This is a new technique, whereby healthy blood is taken from your arm and injected immediately into a damaged tendon, helping it to regenerate. The injections were followed by five days’ total rest, then a programme of eccentric loading exercises, which means lengthening and shortening the tendon. I was really diligent with those during my convalescence and have been ever since. The hamstring pain that had plagued me for two years finally disappeared. My running started to improve significantly from that point on.

If Brett was the perfect man to whip me into shape and turn a nobody into a champion, Dave was the man to refine me. He adopted a reciprocal approach. I was free to choose when and where I raced, and he was happy to incorporate the parts of Brett’s programme that I liked. He has since made changes gradually, almost without my noticing, so he is subtle. He knows I baulk at any change to my routine, and he has handled that very cleverly.

One morning in early May I came in from a run, and the red light was blinking on the answer machine. The message was from my mum, asking that I ring home. She sounded emotional, so I rang her immediately.

‘Are you sitting down?’ she said.

I wasn’t. ‘Yes,’ I replied.

My mother then summoned her best posh accent and started reading from a letter. ‘Dear Madam, The Prime Minister has asked me to inform you, in strict confidence . . .’

I started screaming. Then I fell to the floor in tears. Tom came rushing in. He hesitated as he tried to work out how serious things were. Laughter broke out, and then gave way to tears.

I was to be made an MBE – a Member of the Order of the British Empire. Or at least, the Prime Minister was going to recommend ‘that Her Majesty may be graciously pleased to approve that you be appointed’ as one, in the Birthday Honours List.

‘Before doing so, the Prime Minister would be glad to know that this would be agreeable to you.’ I laughed again. I’ll say!

We were all crying. ‘How proud would Nanna and Grandad have been,’ was the first thing I said to Mum. Dad’s parents, Harry and Romey, in particular, were staunch monarchists.

How proud was I. At last, what I was doing was to be recognised not just outside triathlon but outside sport. This was not quite the first time I had received recognition beyond triathlon. After my first win at Kona I had been named the Toughest Sportswoman of the Year at the Square Mile Awards, where I met and befriended James Cracknell. And after my third win, just a few months earlier, I had been named
Sunday Times
Sportswoman of the Year, which was a huge honour, beating off competition from the likes of Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton. There was a feeling then that our sport might be on the verge of breaking into the British mainstream, and here was another step towards that goal.

I’d often been introduced as Chrissie Wellington, triple World Champion, sometimes even by myself, but I’d never really thought about what it meant. Now that the establishment was recognising me, it started to sink in. The Prime Minister had been made aware of what I had achieved, and soon the Queen would be. That meant I must have achieved something special.

The hardest part, for me anyway, was that I couldn’t breathe a word of it to anyone until the list had been published. That was to be more than a month away on 12 June. By then my season had finally got under way, when I returned to Lawrence to win Kansas 70.3.

But, because of the broken arm, my first ironman of the season wasn’t until Challenge Roth in the middle of July. The unique atmosphere in Bavaria, the support from the race organisers and my world record the year before made returning to this great event a no-brainer. I have described the atmosphere at Roth already – 2010 served merely to demonstrate that 2009 was not a one-off. The German passion for triathlon knows no bounds.

I hope I gave them something to celebrate in 2010. I smashed my own world record from the year before by nearly thirteen minutes, coming home in 8hr 19min 13 sec. My marathon was nearly nine minutes faster at 2hr 48min 54 sec. But it wasn’t just the run – everything came together. I described it afterwards as my perfect race. That doesn’t mean that there was no pain or discomfort; it simply means I overcame the pain and discomfort perfectly. And the finish time was significant. I’d broken my own world record by a lot, which was great, but I’d bettered the previous world record, Yvonne van Vlerken’s mark over the same course in 2008, by nearly twenty-seven minutes. Bek Keat, whose time the year before had also beaten Yvonne’s record, came in second again, but this time nearly thirty-three minutes behind me.