Born to Perform (9 page)

My drive and hunger were coming back; I had reached the light at the end of the tunnel. I was putting the nightmare behind me. It was time to knuckle down again and think about winning back my national title.

12

Back on the Saddle – The 1989 All-Ireland Triathlon

People often ask me how I manage to be so positive and driven. They wonder how it is I seem to be up all the time, so focused and so full of energy. Having positivity and drive may come more naturally to some people than others, but the quality of being positive and driven does not happen by chance. I have to keep working at it, respecting and nurturing it.

A racehorse may have a laid-back disposition, and be slow to get moving and slow to gallop, but when cajoled, when warmed up, he may be able to run faster and further than the rest. Another racehorse may be biting at the bit, frothing at the mouth to get going, but that does not guarantee he is any faster than the laid-back horse. Horses for courses, as they say, but the person with drive, who is positive, who loves what they are doing, will nearly always succeed.

Being positive and driven has to be worked at. Any battery that is constantly on the go has to be recharged. A physical therapist working with highly driven and high-achieving competitive sportspeople has a rewarding career. But it is also highly draining in terms of energy output.

I have to stay positive and upbeat in my job. It is physically challenging working with my hands, but mentally tiring as well. All healing professions demand that the healer is giving of themselves in body, mind and spirit. It does not happen by chance that I am in my clinic at 7.30 a.m., full of drive and positivity. I am doing what I love and using a God-given talent, but it doesn't happen without effort. My lifestyle conditions me to be charged up, positive and driven. It takes planning, discipline and even some sacrifice.

I have a duty of care and a responsibility in my chosen profession, so being full of energy is important. People put their trust in me and depend on me. I recharge my batteries in a planned and methodical fashion. I go to bed early, for a start, and I am fastidious about good nutrition, such as regularly juicing organic vegetables, high in phytonutrients, and drinking two litres of water each day. I avoid negativity – particularly people who are negative or have a moan-and-groan attitude. I don't allow negative media or negative situations to drain my bucket. Taking half an hour down time each day to reflect, to pray, to give thanks and appreciate my talents, and not take for granted that they will last forever, charges up the spiritual batteries and emotional self.

I know all too well the meaning of
anima sana in corpore sano
– a sound mind in a sound body. Physical fitness and mental health go hand in hand. As I am well aware, there is a fine line between being the fittest man in Ireland and being finished as an athlete. Drive and positivity comes from life experience, from knowing how to respect and use your talents when you have them. Most important of all, they come from being truly happy in your own skin.

My friend Moses Kiptanui from Kenya, who has broken numerous world records in middle distance events, once told me, “We come into this world with nothing; we will leave this world taking nothing. Live life to the full every day.” An upbeat positive attitude always wins friends. You make a decision about whether you want to be the man who wakes up and exclaims, “Good morning, God!” or the man who wakes up and exclaims, with a moan, “Good God, morning!”

My focus for 1989 was simple and straightforward: to get back to full fitness by July 23 for the All-Ireland Triathlon Championship; to win the event and bring the trophy back to Limerick. I had won three All-Ireland Triathlons in a row, finished second in one, been too injured to shake a leg the previous year, and now I needed to put the record straight, not just in winning the title, but also in getting back on the international stage.

Tom Heaney had won two titles. He was gunning for the three-in-a-row. Sligo 1989 was going to be a head-on battle of two titans. I had to keep my head down and let Tom take all the hype. When you have been kicked in the teeth, when you suffer a career-threatening injury, when you are left on your own to find a way back, you toughen up fast and you get smart.

There was nothing I wanted to win more than that title. I put a photo of Tom Heaney on the back of my bedroom door and every morning when I got out of bed, I would glance once at the photo and it fired me up to get into peak shape for the head-to-head battle I'd dreamed of. I returned to competition and won two sprint triathlons in the Limerick Triathlon series of events held at St Enda's Sports Complex. The Kilkee Triathlon was set for June 24 – four weeks ahead of the All-Ireland in Sligo.

Kilkee always gave me a yardstick of my fitness, but it was never an event where I faced true competition. It was a little too far to travel for the Northern boys, especially when they had a series of good triathlon competitions in their own province. I put in a big training week leading into Kilkee; and, in fact, the day before the Kilkee Triathlon I trained twice. There was no point in easing down.

On the morning of the Kilkee race, athletes rolled into the Victoria Hotel to check in, and those who had not pre-entered could do so on the day of the event. Tom Heaney, the man I was gunning for, showed up at the check-in; but Kilkee was not where I wanted to meet him head to head. For two frustrating years, I had dreamed of getting back to Sligo and having a duel of a race, this time without a hip injury to determine who was champion. Now I had a dilemma: to pull out of Kilkee, a race that was neither televised nor covered by the national press, or to win the race quietly, without any excitement.

Indeed, I considered pulling out, but I needed a race. Heaney had thrown me off my game plan, for sure. He came out of the 1-mile swim with a 3-minute, 30-second lead, and into the bike-to-run transition 3 minutes up. I knew he'd run like hell to beat me. My weakness was swimming; his was running. The Kilkee running course is three miles out along the famous Dunlicky Coast Road, and three miles back. Tom was averaging six minutes per mile when I strode up to him at the three-mile mark. His game was up, but he was in for a bigger surprise. When I caught him, I shut the pace down and tried to make conversation with him, even suggesting we run in together and keep our racing until Sligo.

He was non-committal. In fact, I didn't even get a nod of his head response. To have kept going for just one mile at the pace I had run the first three miles meant I would have opened up a full minute on him, and could have then run on to win. But, no, my instinct was to amble along beside him. I had seen enough; my yardstick had got a reading. We ran down the promenade side-by-side and, with 100 metres to go, Heaney sprinted. I did not respond, and he crossed the finish line winner of the Kilkee Triathlon and, with that, favourite for the Sligo All-Ireland. This was just what I wanted to make the All-Ireland truly worth fighting for. Later that evening, I ran back out the Dunlicky Road, plotting my strategy for Sligo.

The 1989 All-Ireland Triathlon in Sligo was set for Sunday, July 23. It was irrelevant who else was competing, either from Ireland or abroad. It was penned in the press as the clash between the two titans. On paper, we were neck and neck, as in Kilkee only a couple of seconds had separated us. It was shaping up to be a worthwhile duel.

On the Friday morning before travelling to Sligo, I got up early and pedalled out for a steady two-hour cycle. Approaching home, I jammed my front wheel into a pot hole and heard a snap. My nerves were being tested. The steer tube of my lightweight Raleigh racing bike had cracked. I got off the bike, took off my cycling shoes and hobbled the two miles home, walking on the hard pavement in thin socks.

I drove into town to the bike shop. The steer tube had a three-inch crack; there was no way the bike could be used. Amazingly, in the heat of the moment, it did not faze me. I went home and took out my training bike and travelled on to Sligo. When I arrived in Sligo and went out for a cycle, I found the chain on the training bike was well worn and was slipping on the cogs of my racing wheel. I left the bike into Gary Rooney at his bike shop in Sligo Town to be serviced, and collected it the following afternoon.

By pure coincidence, Tom Heaney and his dad ventured in at one stage and saw my bike sitting inside the shop – they saw my name on the top tube. Tom Heaney enquired: “What's Hartmann's bike doing here?” And when Gary explained that my racing bike was broken and that I'd be using this training bike, which was three pounds heavier, Tom went over, lifted the bike and exclaimed, “Jesus, that's heavier than a gate; there's no way he's racing on that.”

But race on it I had to; I had no other option. It wasn't the first time adversity had shown its face to me and it wasn't going to be the last.

Tom Heaney had a superb start to the day – he was out of the water with a full four minutes' lead. On a superlight triathlon bike, he powered his way around the cycle course. He was clearly a man on a mission. Adrenalin and fear of defeat do strange things to you: Tom had known that I pulled back three minutes on him in three miles in Kilkee and then shut down my engine. His Kilkee win was at a price. He had emptied his bucket, while I had not revealed what I had left in my tank. I paced myself to a calculated measure. I set my stall out to pull back 1 minute on Heaney over the 56-mile bike course, and then run 30 seconds per mile faster than him over the 13-mile run, which I calculated would see me win by over 3 minutes. That was a conservative and cautious estimate, but in a Half Ironman all logistics can go out the window in a matter of moments.

Heaney had blown a gasket. He overextended his physiological limit on the bike course, going way too fast in the first 30 miles. I pulled up at the bike park at Rosses Point to see Tom changing into his running shoes. A quick change, a tap on his backside, and I commented to myself, “Now Tom, let's run and see who's champion!” I had waited for this head to head. The last time we had met in Sligo I graciously praised his win, and I declined to tell anyone on the day about my injury. I strode across the beach and onto the country roads with a new lease of life.

Sligo had been won and lost in Kilkee. Mind games in sport have always fascinated me. Tom withdrew from the race at five miles, well back on the road. I danced my way to the finish line – breaking the 4 hours to win in 3 hours, 59 minutes and 38 seconds.

I never spoke to Tom Heaney after the race. Indeed, what's fascinating is that, in the duels we had in triathlons since 1984, I don't recall that we ever spoke to each other at any length. We were two boys from the same island, north and south, with nothing in common with each other except the sport of triathlon and striving to win. Sport can be strange: sometimes it binds us together; sometimes it separates us.

That day in Sligo put the nail in the coffin of Tom Heaney's triathlon career. Competitive sport can be cruel. There are no courtesies, no easy wins, unless handed on a plate because of another's tactic or agenda. Triathlon at the top level is a tough sport, physically and mentally. You put in so many hard miles on the clock, punish your body day after day and extract the last ounce of energy out of yourself to win a race. There has to be a point when your body rebels; it just won't co-operate anymore. When an athlete gets a stuffing in a race on a day when expectations are high, when the going gets tough and the body throws a curve ball at you, it is almost impossible to bounce back and have the same unbridled enthusiasm. A bit of you can die on a day like that, and all it takes is that one bad experience to knock the stuffing out of you and you say, “Never again. I'm done.”

My experience in 1987 of crashing off the bike and being tormented with injury for eighteen months certainly had me analysing where I was going with triathlon, and also what I was doing with my life overall. Yes, I wanted to continue competing and I believed I could be one of the best triathletes in the world. My ultimate goal was to win a medal for Ireland in a European Championship, World Championship or Hawaii Ironman event.

But during that period I was asking myself a deeper rooted question: what was I doing with my “real” life? Sport can tie you up in knots, in a false cocoon. Free bikes, sponsored equipment, paid-for travel and hotels, press conferences, photo shoots, interviews, racing the race of triathlon – but what about the real race of life? What about life without triathlon? Where to? What to?

I dug into my inner heart and began to realise that triathlon was only a sport, only a phase; it was about boys and their toys, and the fancy glitter of being an athlete, being a champion. I was not ready to let go yet, but I was searching. The deeper truth that emerged from delving inwards was the realisation that working in the family jewellery business in Limerick was not what I wanted in life. This was a bigger issue, an issue that tormented me for some time. I understood that I was the only son, that my great-grandfather established the business over 120 years ago. How could I face my parents? How could I do this to them? I would look like a fool and make a laughing stock of myself and my family by walking away from a secure, established business. What could I do? How would I go about it?

It is always best to face the truth sooner rather than later. Discontent festers away in you. My mother always drilled it into us that, if we had a problem, not to bottle it up, not to run from it, but to bring it to her or my dad's attention immediately. No problem is ever too big a problem when there is support. My mother knew, as all mothers do, when a child is not content. She could read me like a book and had been praying that I would get direction. But I had to figure it out on my own and come up with a plan. Only I could decide; it was my life to make a success or a failure of and parents can only do so much for their children. They, too, have a life to live and enjoy.

The runner talks about that unique euphoric state of what's often known as the “runner's high”, when the endorphins are released into the bloodstream and you feel invincible. You have radiance, a glow; maybe you have sore legs, but you also have an increased mental happiness. Sex does the same thing, and that's why it, too, can be addictive. The same goes for drugs.