Accidental Ironman (6 page)

Our team of four had been going for two hours, starting from Dover just after midnight. Big Andy did the first hour, Robin was just completing the second hour and I was the next in to bat. Both Andy and Robin swam well and looked comfortable, heaping pressure on me not to be crap. Inevitably the klaxon of death went and I jumped in. I was expecting it to be cold and we’d been told the water was a cool but manageable 16 degrees. The water I jumped into felt more like 1.6 degrees. It was so cold I couldn’t swear. Or swim. Or breathe. I just made this gasping noise and started windmilling frantically to get round to the side of the boat where the spotlight was. I don’t know if you have ever swum in the sea, in the dark, but take it from me, it isn’t for the nervous-natured. I’m not usually afraid of the dark, but then I don’t usually encounter quite so much of it. It was above me, ahead of me, behind me and, most importantly, underneath me. I am not afraid to say that I was absolutely cacking myself and I stuck to the spotlight beam like a moth. So began possibly the least pleasant hour of my life, which involved a freezing, pitch-black swim through the saltiest, most seaweed-blanketed water in the world, and I swam as though my life depended on it – which it did. After trying desperately to count the seconds and minutes that make up an hour, I was mightily relieved when a green flashing light on deck signalled that our fourth and final team member, Steve the Iceman, was readying himself for a watery grave. The klaxon went and I was on the boat faster than a Somali pirate.

Much had changed on the Good Ship Lollipop while I was paddling about. Andy was now gripped by seasickness and was retching at ten-second intervals, but I was too busy searching for a towel, dry clothes and some bravery before settling down on the poop deck for a snooze. I was dozing when a sharply worded exchange between ship’s captain Lance and the Iceman awoke me:

Steve is not given to making such announcements lightly. He’s done the Ironman world finals five times, won his age group at Ironman Austria, cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats and he’s done a DOUBLE Ironman. In the Channel, though, he felt the cold more than the rest of us, due to having the same percentage body fat as a paperclip. However, showing true determination he dug in and finished his hour before coming aboard and amusing us all with an impersonation of a man getting changed during an earthquake as he tried to stop shivering long enough to put his pants on. The next four hours were a repeat of the first four except it was now light, which wasn’t all it was cracked up to be because we could now see that we were in the shipping lanes with tankers and ferries all approaching at ramming speed. Seasick Andy did his turn before returning on board to resume his retch-athon and bobbin’ Robin took over, clawing his way through impressive mountains of detergent foam dumped by passing container ships. My turn came and went in a flurry of thrashing arms and salty burping, before the Iceman returned to the frozen deep. After eight hours bobbing along in a sick bucket you’d think we would be starting to get a bit disheartened, or perhaps show the first signs of scurvy. However the third stint turned into our best. The sun came up, our speed went up and on my third hour something wonderful happened – France hove into view on the horizon.

The sight of the coast sparked renewed vigour and even the Iceman forgot his bone-shaking to put in a super-fast hour. There was, of course, another reason why we put on a sudden spurt for French waters. As I mentioned, we weren’t just swimming across the Channel, we were
racing
across the Channel! Starting alongside us was the other boat,
Gallivant
. They had been close behind us from the word go and were now making an attempt to overtake. Seeing them trying to sneak up roused us to action and all of us put in some big turns, none more so than Seasick Andy who struck out for the coast like a man possessed (mostly so he didn’t have to get back on the boat.) Despite the best efforts of the tides to take us off towards, variously, Belgium and Brazil, we all swam to the beach together, dragging ourselves on to the stony French shore in 12 hours 58 minutes. We remained on the beach for all of about three minutes before sprinting back to the boat and rushing over to where
Gallivant
was chugging along to have a hearty laugh as the ‘swimmers’ lugged themselves ashore twenty minutes behind us. After a thoroughly enjoyable gloat our boat turned round, for a three-hour ride home to the merry sound of Andy retching.

As ever with these things, there’s more to that Channel swimming lark than meets the eye. You can be the strongest swimmer in the world but time, tide, cold, shipping lanes, swell, wind, dark and fear are all there to stop you succeeding. The tides alone are not to be underestimated. As the crow flies it’s just over 20 miles from England to France, but the tides meant we swam closer to 35 miles. However, the boat pilots are geniuses who know every inch of the ocean and who encourage you to reach certain points at certain times with ancient nautical phrases like ‘get a fucking move on or we’ll miss the tide.’

Back at the pool I have now finished this morning’s session and am having a crafty wee in the pool as a parting gift for the members of the public who are waiting to get in at the end of the lane, hands on hips with impatience, like any of them are going to be any good. This is the point at which the professional triathletes would be whisked away by sedan chair back to their beds, or given a hearty breakfast of muesli or something else that looks like it’s been swept out of a pigeon loft. For me, though, I now have to go straight to work. And how will I get there? Why I’ll cycle of course.

Cycling probably dominates my life more than anything else. ‘What’s that, Martyn?!’ you say. ‘Surely you spend more time coming up with irritating ways to humiliate your friends more than anything else.’ And perhaps you’re right, having just got back from the airport to collect my friend and fellow triathlete Neill Morgan who has returned from his fortnight’s holiday to Lanzarote. Neill is of a non-lofty stature and looks like a normal-sized person who’s been hit by a lift, and was embarrassed but not surprised to be greeted by me at the airport standing among the ranks of taxi drivers holding up a big card with the word ‘Hobbit’ scrawled on it.

On balance, though, I’d say it was cycling because it dominates my work, my travel, my clothes, my holidays, my Sundays, most of my spare time, my medicine cabinet and the majority of my racing. I’m not sure what it is that leaves triathletes so much in thrall to cycling. When triathletes speak of triathlon, it is pretty much always cycling that dominates (when they aren’t playing top-trumps over injuries, comparing excuses and exaggerating achievements). Triathletes always seem so much prouder of being good at cycling than of accomplishments in swimming or running and will happily spend ten times the amount of time training on it even though it’s probably what they are already best at.

This may partly be down to the fact that, although triathlons involve three sports, cycling accounts for about 50 per cent of the race time-wise. This is certainly the case with Ironmans, where you can easily be on the bike for five of the ten hours it takes you to finish (okay, okay, six of the 12 hours then). It’s for this reason that I am frequently up at 5.00 a.m. disappearing out into the misty lanes on my bike with just the rabbits for company, embarking on a 100-plus mile ride that will take most of my Sunday. I could head out later but doing so has in the past incurred the wrath of my wife, Nicky, who may wish me to complete some sort of domestic chore or visit her parents, and she would prefer it if I was not late, reeking like an Arab drain, and falling asleep with my face in a Family Circle biscuit tin. It is similarly hard to visit any of my own elderly relatives on a Sunday afternoon because maintaining consciousness is hard when you are being regaled with fascinating views about how the world was so much nicer in the fifties. Back then, apparently, you could leave your doors unlocked, men doffed their caps to you and all the world’s problems could be solved by a clip round the ear from a friendly policeman or, if that didn’t work, hanging.

Most Sundays I’m up with the lark and out with the returning drunks to get a good training ride in, because the cycling leg of an Ironman is 112 miles long and not to be underestimated. My typical ride will involve doing about an hour on my own through the glorious mine-shafted countryside of north Warwickshire before rolling into a Coventry pub car park to meet up with my clubmates from Coventry Road Club. I’ve been a member of CRC for a few years now and each Sunday the massed ranks of Coventry’s finest roadies assemble to do battle over a circuitous and friendly 50-or-so-mile ride into the countryside to a café, a convivial pot of tea and some baked beans on toast, before setting off home again trying to cut each other’s throats by cranking up the pace to maximum, launching attacks and generally committing more acts of betrayal than Caligula. Once back at the pub car park, assuming I haven’t been dropped or left puking in some roadside ditch, I will then ride another hour back through the lanes home before doing my best to convince a watchful Nicky that my droopy-eyed staggering does not mean that I am about to fall asleep, and that I am not about to suggest that I might leave her to go and visit her brother on her own, thus avoiding watching them engage in an afternoon of unsatisfying, snippy arguments.

‘Club runs’, as they are known, are a vital part of my training for Ironmans. Many triathletes train alone in the mistaken belief that as you have to ride alone during the race, you need to train alone to get used to it. However, this doesn’t take account of the improved bike handling skills you get from riding with others, the pearls of wisdom about ways to save energy and ride efficiently that come from experienced cyclists, and the fact that they will spend a significant portion of the ride trying to drop you, leaving you pedalling alone in the middle of the countryside where they don’t like outsiders, and where they don’t bushwhack you like normal people in cities do but instead they shag you, and then eat you. There’s certainly no better way to get faster on a bike than the prospect of being left behind by the group and I have gained strength and speed through chewing the bar-tape on my handlebars with the effort of trying to keep up. The club-runs at CRC usually divide into three – the family group that is heading out for 50 to 60 miles at a nice steady pace with the aim of keeping everyone together, the ‘vets’ group that will do about 60 to 75 miles at a slightly faster pace depending on who is out and will mostly stick together, and the ‘training group’ who will do 80 to 90 miles and will ride hard on the way out to the café before being scattered to the four winds on the way back when it’s every man for himself and hang on if you can.

If I’m going well I’ll head out with the training group, and if I’m feeling tired, lazy or a bit scared of the route we are doing that day, then I’ll be lurking in the middle of the vets group hoping that my coach Dave Watson doesn’t spot me and yell at me to get over there with the fast boys. Dave rides with the training group and is often the chief architect of cranking up the pace to the point where I’m sweating spinal fluid. Fair enough really, because he is an awesome cyclist who is a frequent winner of local road races and time trials, has ridden in the national road race and time trial championships having rubbed shoulders with Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish et al, and can knock out 100 miles in less than four hours. He’s been coaching me for about five years now and has been responsible for a massive improvement in my athletic abilities, mostly due to the fact that I fear him more than I fear death itself. Like all good coaches he is friendly and approachable, yet with the blank, dead-eyed stare of a mass murderer whenever you try to explain what went wrong in your race or why you didn’t complete your training schedule.

As an example, me and my mate Phil Richmond, who was also coached by Dave, turned up to a weight training session once along with a third lad called Lee, a notorious training dodger. Dave, who was already there slamming a medicine ball around in an agitated state, fixed me with his Gestapo stare and said, ‘What training have you done this week?’ I stammered out all the things I had done that were on the plan he’d given me, as did Phil when it was his turn for the anglepoise lamp in the face. When it was Lee’s turn, however, the real reason for this impromptu grilling emerged – Dave knew full well Lee hadn’t trained and he watched silently while Lee lied through his soon-to-be-missing teeth. At this point Phil and I edged our way slowly back out of the room, bravely abandoning Lee to what was coming, and began our warm-up outside on the running track. We left it a safe period before returning to the gym and an atmosphere you could cut with a cricket stump. Dave was hefting a massive kettlebell in one corner, Lee was tearfully packing up his kit in the other and me and Phil, anxious not to provoke further ire, utterly ignored Lee when he slunk away never to be seen again. It was some minutes before Dave spoke, merely to offer the word ‘Twat’ before putting us all through the session from hell. Thanks, Lee.

Another area of my life that cycling dominates is my evenings because being coached by Dave has led to me taking up time trials. If you are unfamiliar with what time trials are then let me enlighten you. TTs are basically bike races against the clock that take place most spring and summer weekday evenings across the UK. Although principally for cyclists, a growing number of triathletes have started taking them up because of the many training benefits that can be gained from being hunched over a low-pro bike on a blustery dual carriageway while adopting an expression that looks like a frowny face someone has drawn on to their scrotum. Time trials used to be the preserve of monosyllabic old men with knees that looked like haggis made of knuckles, who would nevertheless come flying past you once the race started. These days, however, time trials are the second most popular activity in lay-bys across the country, and innocent triathletes are constantly trying to decipher course codes and entry forms that look as though they can only be solved with an Enigma machine. For example the K10/10K, to use an example local to me, is a code for a particular ten mile course that harks back to a time when time triallists had to hide their illegal racing activities from the police lest they be given a clip round the ear by the local bobby or, for courses near London, kettled and then shot. Time trials are very different from triathlons in a number of ways: