Born to Perform (2 page)

Preface

In November 2010 the great Kilkenny hurler Henry Shefflin looked up at me from the physio table, where I had him pinned down with both thumbs dug deep into the back of his knee, and said: “There's a great book in you. When are you going to write it?”

I answered with the question, “Well, Henry, when are we going to see your book?”

He responded, “I suppose after I've won a few more All-Ireland hurling titles with Kilkenny. Ten would be nice. But, seriously, you've got to do a book, Gerard, you have some great stories to tell.”

Sometimes, all one needs is a nudge from someone who they really respect. Henry's encouragement stayed fresh in my mind and, weeks later, another friend, Kenneth Gasque, the director of La Santa Sports Complex in Lanzarote, hit the same note with the comment, “Gerard, you must write the book on the sport of triathlon in its infancy. You are one of the pioneers of the sport – you must do the book.”

So I promised Kenneth that I would write the book. In fact, I travelled to Lanzarote on my own in February 2011 for eight days, with the sole purpose of spending ten to twelve hours writing each day – by hand, no less. I immersed myself in the project with greater mission and zeal than preparing for any Ironman triathlon. Rather than ending up with sore legs, I sustained writer's cramp and costochondritis (inflammation of the ribs) from being bent over writing for hours on end.

I dialled into my memory bank and creative self, putting my heart and soul into writing this book. In the end, I came away with about 300 A4 pages, all handwritten, and this became the makings of the story of how sport has shaped my life. I gave it my all, in the spirit of the Olympic ethos Higher, Faster, Stronger.

I called my good friend Ian O'Riordan, one of the leading sports writers with the
Irish Times
, and told him that I was over in Lanzarote for eight days writing my book. Ian responded, “Wow, that's a big challenge, Gerard, and a big commitment.” On my return, I showed Ian the handwritten pages, and straightaway he supported and encouraged me.

So what is
Born to Perform
all about?

Well, first, it is my life story, from my young years, when I was suspended from school for being a troublemaker, to six years later getting an athletic scholarship to the US as a runner. It tells of my athletic dreams and drive, and how I became the first Irish person to participate in a triathlon, a new sport at the time. I became seven-time Irish triathlon champion and competed internationally as Ireland's champion of the new sport – until tragedy struck and I broke my hip in a freak cycling accident that terminated my competitive career.

The book tells how, out of depression and despair, I came to reach the top of my profession as a physical therapist. Working with over 60 Olympic medal winners, world champions and some of the best sportspeople in the world has been a unique experience, which I share in this book.

The book also gives some advice on dealing with adversity and with stress, and how to perform and excel in sport and in life. Sport shaped my life and I share what I feel are the reasons for this. I want to inspire people to “fly higher to see more”, to empower people to use and maximise their God-given talents.

I have always followed my star and done the things in life that I wanted to do, not what someone else wanted for me. For the most part, it has been an extremely rewarding, exciting and happy journey.

So many people have guided and helped me through my fifty years of life. I have many friends throughout the world – there are too many to mention. To every one of you I wish to express my sincere thanks and appreciation for you being part of my life.

Thanks to my mother Thecla for being my biggest supporter and my dad Patrick for allowing me the freedom to expand my wings and find my own path in life. To my sisters Leonie, Thecla and Helga – thank you for your love, friendship and support.

To my late grandmother Nora Deasy, who encouraged me to “Keep up that running – it will take you far.” She attended all my All-Ireland Triathlon victories and was waiting at the finish line in sun and rain.

A special heartfelt thank you to my beautiful wife Diane, whose love, encouragement, support, loyalty and belief in me is never-ending. And to Diane's parents, Agnes and Tadg, for being so supportive. My two-and-a-half-year-old son Patrick Hartmann Jnr is the boss of the house – thank you for bringing fun and joy into my life.

I am grateful to Ger Keane, the smiling man from Castleisland, Co. Kerry, my colleague at Hartmann International Sports Injury Clinic. I was lucky to find a kindred spirit to work alongside who has a similar drive and passion to be the very best. Karena O'Brien keeps the office running smoothly and I appreciate her support in making the clinic a dream come true.

To Frank O'Mara, my lifelong friend – thank you for always being there for me and for writing a foreword to the book.

Sonia O'Sullivan is almost another sister to me; a friend for life. Thanks, Sonia, for your support for the book and for taking the time and energy to write a foreword. You are Ireland's greatest champion.

Ian O'Riordan encouraged me in the early stages of writing, and was kind enough to give me valuable editorial guidance. He's also written a piece on triathlon in Ireland, which is at the end of the book. So, thank you, Ian, for your belief in me and in the book.

To Gerard O'Connor and Elizabeth Brennan at Orpen Press – thank you both for working with me towards publishing this book. Also, thank you to Pery Square Business College in Limerick, who typed up the original manuscript.

Finally, to all those who are down and struggling in life – I hope you will see opportunity and the world in a far better light after reading this book.

Gerard Hartmann

September 2011

Contents

1. A Hard Fall

2. The Early Days of Triathlon

3. My Decision to Pursue Triathlon

4. The 1985 All-Ireland Triathlon and My Ticket to the Hawaii Ironman

5. Ironman – The Ultimate Test of Endurance

6. A Sponsorship Controversy

7. “To Finish Is to Win and to Win Is to Finish” – Competing in My First Ironman

8. The Magic of Lasse Virén

9. The World Championships in Nice, 1986

10. Reaching the Top of My Game

11. Injury

12. Back on the Saddle – The 1989 All-Ireland Triathlon

13. Life beyond Triathlon?

14. A Life-Changing Day

15. Athletes, Stress and Health

16. Beginning a New Career as a Physical Therapist

17. The Power of Belief in Performance and Healing

18. Overcoming Injury – Kelly Holmes and Seán Óg Ó hAilpín

19. The Rewards of Perseverance – Ronan O'Gara, Séamus Moynihan, Henry Shefflin and John Tennyson

20. The Great African Athletes

21. The Secrets of Success in Sport and in Life

22. Making the Transition from Sport to Life

23. Positivity and Drive in the Face of Adversity

Epilogue

Triathlon – From Sporting Craze to Ireland's Fastest Growing Sport

Photos of Hartmann

About the Book

1

A Hard Fall

I am lying in a hospital bed, bleary-eyed and semi-conscious, drugged to the limit, drifting in and out of this world. I feel suspended in a surreal trance of repeated bad dreams, against the backdrop of one reality: it is all over. My identity has been shattered. I am nothing now, another accident statistic – one of the many people who, in a split second, see their lives changed forever, without any warning.

A few hours earlier I had been cycling along Highway 441, just outside Gainesville, Florida. I had my triathlon time trial bike in top gear and I was speeding along, doing the hard interval training: 1 mile in 2 minutes – that's 30 miles per hour – then coasting for a minute to recover, to allow my heart rate to decrease from 180 beats per minute to 130, and then stomping on the pedals again at full effort for another mile. I would do this ten times.

Two more to go. Out of the saddle at full strength, to power the machine up to over 30 miles per hour, then tucking low onto the handlebars to get aerodynamic to slice through as much wind resistance as possible.

Then, in that moment when I was concentrating so hard on the effort, my front wheel hit an armadillo that was scampering unknowingly across the road. Within the blink of an eye, my bicycle and I were sent flying through the air, totally out of control. All the while, I was sensing cars whizzing past at 70 miles per hour. My first and last bit of fortune was that I fell inwards onto the road's shoulder, rather than out into the busy traffic – and certain death.

I hit the road surface with an unmerciful bang, landing straight down on my right hip, still clipped into my bike pedals. Lying in agony, bloodied and unable to move, shivering and shaking with shock on the melting road in 90°F heat, car after car began to stop and people towered over me as I lay helpless on the road. The impact had sliced my hip and split it cleanly into two pieces.

Dr Phillip Parr, the orthopaedic surgeon who had operated on me for four hours, stopped in to visit the day after my surgery. He was an avid runner who participated in numerous marathons and triathlon events, and in that regard we shared a common bond.

His sporting dream was to participate in the most famous and gruelling of all triathlons, the Hawaii Ironman, although he failed to qualify. I was something of a superstar in his eyes, a world-class triathlete; one of the top fifteen in the world; an athlete who only yesterday was in the prime of his career, yet now lying helpless in a hospital bed.

Dr Parr stood by my bedside and explained that, had I not been airlifted by helicopter to the North Florida Regional Medical Center and undergone emergency surgery, avascular necrosis would have set in. The blood supply to my hip would have been cut off within hours and I would have lost my leg. “Gerard,” he said, “you are one lucky man. I have put a Richardson compression screw, a fixation plate and four screws into your leg. The good news is that we saved it; the bad news is that you will probably never run again.”

Ten days earlier in Sligo, on Sunday, August 18, 1991, I won a seventh National Triathlon title. I covered the Half Ironman event – that's a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride and 13.1-mile run – in 4 hours and 28 seconds, and it was the closest I'd ever come to feeling like poetry in motion.

I exited the water in first place and ran up the beach at Rosses Point, leaving my so-called weakest event (swimming) behind, along with over 400 fellow competitors. It was their last chance that day to see my back.

I stormed around the 56-mile bike course in 2 hours 17 minutes, over 7 minutes quicker than the next fastest triathlete. Cormac McCann from Belfast, an Olympic cyclist, recorded the fastest time for the bike leg of the relay, only having to do the cycle. He rode fully equipped with a specialist time trial bike, complete with rear disc wheel, and yet he was two minutes slower than my time.

I faced the 13.1-mile run after dismounting the bike with such a lead that all I had to do was treat the run like a training jaunt. Professional cyclists hone their fitness to a peak to achieve that unique feeling of body and machine being in unison. That day, my composite Kestrel bike and I breezed around the roads of Sligo and Leitrim as if together we had been turbocharged – an unstoppable force of body and machine.

To have experienced that feeling just once was worth all the hard training and sacrifices. Often sportspeople will not win any major event, but an experience like that brings an inner satisfaction far more meaningful and worthy than any medal or trophy.

After the Sligo victory, and the day before returning to Florida, where three months earlier I had qualified as a physical therapist, I was in a fancy French restaurant in Dublin being interviewed over dinner by the sports journalist Paul Kimmage.

I was to be the subject of his big feature for the
Sunday Tribune
. Paul was a former Irish champion and Tour de France cyclist, and understood human performance both in the dedicated purist sense and also the trained but chemically enhanced sense, which he himself had been familiar with. He “spat in the soup” and broke his secret and silence in his book
Rough Ride
.

Paul invited me to Dublin – and the
Sunday Tribune
flew me up from Shannon Airport. I knew very little about Paul except that he was a retired professional cyclist, good enough in his day to race with Seán Kelly, Stephen Roche and Martin Earley, and was now one of the top sports feature writers in the country. I reasoned that being invited by Paul Kimmage to Dublin was evidence that the press were finally following triathlon and taking my status on the international stage seriously. Paul apologised during our conversation for not travelling to Limerick to do the interview, explaining that he had just got in a couple of hours earlier from Lucerne in Switzerland where he was covering Niall O'Toole competing in the Single Scull event at the World Rowing Championships.

Every 30 minutes, Paul would flick out the tape from his old-style tape recorder on the dining table, turn the tape around to the other side or insert a new tape, and continue the interview. Towards the end of a long and amiable interview, a serious frown and sternness suddenly covered Paul's face. I straightaway sensed he had something he wanted to address. He looked uncomfortable.

For almost three hours I had spilled out my heart to Paul. I shared my passion for triathlon to a fellow sportsman and shown him my personal training diaries which documented my training, day after day, week after week, with few if any recovery days, sometimes doing four training sessions in a single day. Paul looked me in the eye, and the fellow athlete who I so easily identified with was now wearing only one cap – that of a journalist looking for the kill.

Maybe this guy Hartmann is like I was, he must have thought, selling a big lie and performing on the juice. Getting straight to the point, he stated, “I'm not going to believe for one moment that you are training and competing at that level in this most demanding sport without taking drugs.”

I tried to assure Paul that I never doped, that the pharmaceutical company that distributed Pharmaton in Ireland supplied me with a one-a-day multi-vitamin, in fact gave me a year's supply, and, other than wholesome food, that was all that fuelled my engine. Paul was not convinced, and I knew it. I knew it by his body language, by the lack of sincerity in his handshake when we said goodbye. Maybe he was tormented by his own drug taking and wanted another dream to be spoiled. But my dream was real. Everything I had ever achieved in triathlon was achieved by desire, passion, perseverance, enthusiasm and a work ethic which ultimately far outweighed whatever physical talents I had been blessed with.

Yet, here I now was, in a hospital bed in Florida, pumped up with drugs alright but for all the wrong reasons. I had a catheter in my right arm and was receiving an infusion of Demerol and Phenergan through a drip, to kill the pain and protect against post-surgery infection. Every six hours, I would receive two injections into my backside and also take an oral stool softener because all the medication was clogging up my digestive system.

I needed to speak to Paul Kimmage. He was running his big interview that coming Sunday and I needed to put a stop to it. My competitive sporting career was over.

I was going to be in hospital for two weeks and on crutches for a further sixteen, and after that I would have to learn how to walk again. Back in Ireland, the best sports journalist was penning a 5,000-word article on my athletic exploits, but I was not an athlete at this point in time. I couldn't even piss straight and had to piddle into a jar next to the bed. It was five days after the accident before the physical therapist showed me how to get out of bed and use a Zimmer frame to walk six steps to the toilet.

I did not want the whole country to know about my career ending in tragedy, not just yet anyway. It was too sudden, too raw. I needed to get my head around it and I had nobody to talk to. I knew if Paul Kimmage's feature article was printed, and only after that word got out that I was half crippled in hospital, the fall would be even harder. I needed time to figure out what I was going to do, and how.

I phoned Paul from my hospital bed.

“Paul, Gerard Hartmann here. I want you to pull the feature you are writing on me for this weekend.”

Silence at the end of the line – and then: “It's written; it's going to press on Sunday. Why, is there a problem?”

“No, no, not really, but I'm asking you not to print it as I've decided to take a break from triathlon…I'm not sure if my body can take all the hard training anymore.”

Silence again. I'm not sure who put down the phone first.

I imagined Paul on his phone back home, saying, “Bollocks…I knew the prick was on drugs. He's probably in trouble now. Guilt has set in and he wants a way out.”

I sank back into my bed and started to cry. Suddenly I started to question everything, all the whys – why I couldn't even tell the truth to Paul Kimmage. But it was too early. A part of me knew it was over, and yet another part of my mind had already dialled back into planning training strategies for next season's triathlons.

I had won seven National Triathlon titles – and my mind was still in that racing mode. Get the leg sorted, rehabilitate and drive on for three more seasons. Make it ten All-Ireland titles!

Triathlon was my life. I was addicted alright, because it was my drug. It was what I lived for, dreamed of, and what I ate and slept. Deep down a part of me knew this was all over now, but still it was going to take time and healing to sort out how to deal with it, and how to present it to the world, to my family, to my friends and to Paul Kimmage. More pressing would be its effect on me internally, how I would deal with the death of my life as an international athlete, and saving myself from depression and despair.

All I knew at that point was that triathlon would have to be replaced with something meaningful that I was just as passionate about – and replaced fast. At the time, I could not figure out why triathlon meant everything to me – but over the years I have come to understand. In the 21 years in my profession as a physical therapist, I have met many sportspeople from so many different sports, from GAA footballers and hurlers to rugby players, tennis players, cyclists, runners, swimmers and triathletes, and seen how sport is also the thing that defines their lives, their identity.

Tipperary hurling legend Johnny Leahy, who I worked with rehabilitating him through his second anterior cruciate ligament injury, captured the very heart and soul of sport when he said, after Tipperary won the All-Ireland Hurling final in 1991:

It's a great honour to put on that county jersey. I don't think money can buy it. It's where you come from, where you were born. It's what you've grown up with. To wear that jersey you are very lucky. To run on the field representing your people is an incredible feeling. To win something is unreal. To play and win something for your county is phenomenal.

At even the most basic level, human beings want to succeed, to be part of something unique and special. The fellowship of sport is a universal language that binds people and gives their lives meaning and purpose. One of the end results is that sport can become the person's life, their all or nothing, and perhaps we should never even question why. The answer is to just enjoy it, because tomorrow may never come.