Life Without Limits, A (27 page)

Very quickly, I started adding and removing things from my programme. I started forging relationships with other people. The British Olympian Julie Dibens was one pro I bonded with especially quickly. She coached herself, and that sowed some seeds in my mind. I started going to places and people other than the ones Simon told me to go to – new bike fitters, Dave Scott’s swim sessions.

The upshot of it all was that I drifted apart from Simon. By the end of March, barely a month after I had moved out there, our relationship was strained and uneasy. When I flew to Sydney for the defence of my Ironman Australia title, it was with relief to be getting away.

I love flying into Sydney. The Opera House, the Harbour Bridge – it’s a beautiful, beautiful city, and it reminds me of so many happy times. It was not at its best then, though. It was pouring with rain. Pouring when I got there, pouring when I got to Port Macquarie, pouring all week. There was doubt over whether the race could go ahead at all, but there was a real possibility of its becoming a duathlon, with the swim dropped. The water at an ironman has to satisfy certain standards of quality, and the swim for Ironman Australia takes place in an estuary. All kinds of things had been washed down from the farmlands and hills into the water. Not knowing about the swim made the week’s preparation hard to handle, mentally.

They had put me up in the same place as the year before, The Observatory, a beautiful apartment block, even when the rain is lashing non-stop against the french windows onto your balcony over the ocean. Also staying there were Nicole and Tim DeBoom. Tim has won at Kona twice. I had never met them, but they are fantastic people. I shared with them my fears about whether I could live up to expectations at the race. My confidence was not overflowing, just because I knew Brett didn’t have my back. I was in the enemy camp now, and, what’s more, the girl to beat was Bek Keat, whose generosity with the gas canister had saved my bacon in Kona. She had just changed coaches, too. You guessed it: she was with Brett now. I knew he would have revised a plan for her. It was unnerving.

We ended up racing the full triathlon, which I am particularly glad about, because it was the strength of my swim that set me up for what followed. The water might have passed the tests, but it was brown, warm and full of debris – weeds, logs and if rumours are to be believed there might have been a cow in there somewhere. I didn’t feel I was going particularly fast (who would, wading through all of that?), but I came out of the water first, neck and neck with Bek.

On the bike I started to pull away. The rain was torrential at times, and I developed a niggle in my leg, which started to concern me. Would I be able to run? All you can do is block it out and believe that it will go away.

The roads were lined with umbrellas and waterproofs – not that the Aussie spirit was ever dampened. At no other ironman do the spectators offer you beer at regular intervals. At no other ironman have I been offered seven proposals of marriage, as I was on that race, two of them from women! And I think the flasher in the raincoat who appeared out of a bush towards the end of the bike leg was offering me something as well.

It all served to keep the adrenaline pumping, and by the time I was out on the run I was feeling comfortable. The niggle, whatever it was, had gone, and the miles fell away to the sound of crashing waves, cheers and the offers of alcohol. I finished in under nine hours, for only the second time, and I had my sixth ironman win out of six, twenty-four minutes ahead of Bek in second.

I have read Brett say somewhere that it was my complete race. It was certainly an important one. Brett was gone, and to win my first race without him as comfortably as I did was a huge boost to my confidence. For him to acknowledge that I was racing better than ever felt strangely as if I had his blessing.

It did a lot for my confidence, which meant it didn’t do much to help my relationship with Simon. When I returned to Boulder, I pretty much developed my own programme. Mentally, I had all but left him, even if our professional relationship would run for another few months yet.

My next ironman was to be Challenge Roth in July. Before then, I had a short-course race in Columbia, Maryland. This ended up being a defining race for me. I had entered it almost as a training exercise, to break me out of my long-course comfort zone and to work on my speed. It was also important to me as a means of supporting the Blazeman Foundation, the nominated charity. But I didn’t respect the race, I didn’t prepare properly and I simply didn’t perform. I came sixth. It felt as if my world had caved in.

It was not the first time I hadn’t won a race, and certainly not the first time I hadn’t won a short-course race. But this was my biggest flop relative to expectations. I had come twenty-second in Tongyeong the season before as a world champion, but that had been only three weeks after Ironman Australia and against a top-class field of Olympic-distance athletes. In this race, however, I really should have made it onto the podium, at least.

I could bore you with all the reasons why I didn’t, but there are no excuses. The controllables were not controlled. Something, I am ashamed to say, approaching arrogance was the root problem. I did not shut myself away in the build-up, as I would have done for an ironman. My days were spent meeting people and eating out irresponsibly – heavy meals I would never have dreamed of eating before an ironman. There were other things I couldn’t have controlled, such as the fire alarm that went off at my hotel the night before and wouldn’t stop, and, possibly related, the wild party in the room next door. I kept telling them to turn it down, but of course that only made it worse. They were very definitely not controllable.

When I woke up in no state to race I had only myself to blame. I just couldn’t get my body to cooperate. This can happen. It happens in training, it happens in the ebb and flow of even an ironman, when the body is screaming at the mind; but it usually passes. Here, it stayed throughout the race. And when it does happen there’s a good reason for it, and it’s usually to be found in some inadequacy in your preparation. As a control freak, failing to control the controllables is something I cannot accept, because it means I have left myself open to failure through malpractice. I was incredibly hard on myself after Columbia. For a week I was in turmoil, utterly despondent. Simon got it in the neck. He, perfectly sensibly, told me to bank it and move on. I found myself pinning yet more blame on him, which in this case was totally unfair as I had stopped following his programme. I was in tears on the phone to Tom.

It made me draw lessons, certainly. Most of them about the importance of preparation.

But it also made me question the concept of winning and losing. I hadn’t won; therefore I had lost. But what did losing mean to me? Surely, I had visited a part of the world I had wanted to come to. Maryland is beautiful, very like home, with rolling farmland and deciduous forest. I had supported the Blazeman Foundation. I had met some amazing people, including the race organiser, Robert Vigorito, who remains a friend to this day. I’d stayed at the finish line and hung medals round the necks of all the other age-groupers. In so many ways, even if less tangible, the trip had been a success and so worthwhile. It forced me to learn to accept so-called defeat. There’s still a lot for me to learn on that front, but the importance, which Brett was so keen to impress upon me, of being able to separate out what happens in the race from those other things that might enrich me is brought home when I reflect on Columbia.

Things went better in June, when I won a half-ironman in Lawrence, Kansas. I hadn’t been able to resist the chance to race in the state of
The Wizard of Oz
. As a child, my Scarecrow had taken the Feltwell Fête by storm, so this was a special pilgrimage for me. I stayed with the race organiser, Ryan Robinson, in his beautiful house. He and his wife, Jenni, and their boys, Hunter, Hayden and Hudson, looked after me royally. Hudson, who was three, was in fancy dress at the finish line, alongside Dorothy, Scarecrow (a rival version), Tin Man and the (not so) Cowardly Lion. Hand in hand, he and I ran down the Yellow Brick Road to the finish line. What a thing, to marry victory with such iconography from a girl’s childhood!

As usual, we partied at the finish till the last competitor had made it home. It was a wonderful weekend, but one of the highlights would have to be my chance to meet an institution of Lawrence, the legendary Red Dog. He is a guy in his seventies, who reminded me of Frank Horwill. Since 1984 he has led community workouts, called Dog Days. The set-up is basically Red Dog (or Don Gardner, as he was more boringly named), a megaphone and a field of as many as a thousand locals. He and his wife Beverley run three of these gatherings, every day in the summer, at six in the morning, midday and six in the evening, and twice weekly in the winter. They use the city’s sports stadium, entry is free, and the assembled masses include people of all ages and all standards. Red Dog belts out the instructions for his off-the-cuff routines, and hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes follow his lead.

I was truly inspired. Every community around the world would benefit from this sort of activity. It reaffirmed for me the power of one individual to effect change, and the power of sport to unite people. There were two-year-old children taking part, eighty-year-old grannies and everything in between. In these fragmented times, when people go to the gym, stick an iPod in their ear and work out alone, this simple model represented a heroic counter-revolution. It left me buzzing with excitement.

Back at Boulder, I was now, by early July, to all intents and purposes my own boss. I was doing bike sessions with a few pros, including Julie. I attended the swim sessions at Flatirons run by Dave Scott and others. I drew heavily on Brett’s programme, with a few ideas from Simon thrown in. The goldfish-bowl aspect of living in Boulder was getting easier to handle, and I found it actually had much to commend it – a world away from the isolated, claustrophobic bubble of life on Team TBB.

The next event on my schedule now was Challenge Roth. This is one of the oldest and most famous races on the circuit. It used to host Ironman Europe, but it is no longer part of the WTC series of official ‘Ironman’ races. It is run by a family company headed by the passionate Felix Walchshofer, who inherited the organisation from his late father, Herbert. The politics that led to their split with the WTC in 2001 are complicated, but they have grown their race in Roth, a town in Bavaria, into a series of races around the world, called the Challenge series. It is a rival to the Ironman series, which means that the latter do not recognise the records of the former. This is a shame, because Roth is and always has been a fast course, and the fastest times over ironman distance have been recorded there. The men’s world record of 7hr 50min 27sec had been set there in 1997 by Luc van Lierde, which was OK because that was pre-split. The women’s world record, however, was not officially recognised by the WTC, because that had been set at Roth only the year before by Yvonne van Klerken, in other words post-split.

It’s all a bit of a shame. Nevertheless, there was a lot of speculation before the race over whether I would break the women’s world record, unofficial or otherwise. I couldn’t wait to try. Roth was one of the first ironman races I had known about. When I turned pro, I remember Belinda raving about it. She had raced it five times and regularly used to wax lyrical about the atmosphere, the organisation and the race itself. The year before, I had found Ironman Germany in Frankfurt incredibly special. I could only guess at what an event this must be. And, yes, maybe I could become the fastest female ironman (note the lower case!) athlete of all time. At least this time I knew what the record was.

I felt in great shape, but about ten days before the race I was overtaken by a strange condition. I was in Boulder when I developed an odd sensation in my right upper arm. It was somewhere between an itch and somebody stabbing me. I thought I’d just been bitten by something.

It didn’t go away; in fact, it started to get worse and was keeping me awake at night. I did a Google, and all the symptoms indicated it was shingles. Ice was the only thing that alleviated the pain. A week before the race I was running round getting blood tests, seeing neurologists and my sports doctor. Nothing came up in the blood tests, but they put me on anti-viral tablets anyway. On the plane over to Germany I was beside myself with discomfort. Not for the first time, I was wondering how I was going to race. I didn’t feel ill or particularly run down, but I wasn’t getting any sleep, and I was just so tired.

Kathrin Walchshofer, Felix’s sister, met me at the airport and was my first introduction to the unparalleled care and support that Challenge provide for their athletes. She dropped me at my apartment, and as it was Sunday and all the shops were shut she brought me a basket of goodies to tide me over. I confided in her about my condition, imploring her not to tell anyone, not even her brother. To my knowledge she kept her word, and she did everything she could to help me seek treatment.

We went down the natural-remedy route. It turns out that for shingles, which all of the medics were assuming it was, there are three. I spent the week munching chillies, drinking vinegar and crushing leeks with a pestle and mortar, then rubbing them into my upper arm. I stank. I told Tom and Ben about it and spoke to my mum, who had suffered from shingles. Oddly, I wasn’t getting the rash that commonly goes with it; just this awful stabbing sensation in my arm.

But let’s leave me there, stinking from a cocktail of vinegar, chilli and leek, my mouth burning, my skin seething; let’s focus on Roth. It is a picturesque town in typical Bavarian style, about 25km south of Nuremberg, surrounded by equally picturesque Bavarian villages, through which the race wends its way. Around 4,500 competitors take part, cheered on by around 120,000 spectators. The Germans are incredibly passionate about the sport. In places, the support is like that at the Tour de France. The Solarer Berg climb is unlike anything else on the ironman circuit. Crowds five deep on either side roar you on up the incline. In places they close up to leave a passage only a few feet across, and a motorbike has to carve a way through them. Spectators play chicken with the riders as they lean forward to cheer them on, then pull away as they pass, precipitating a kind of Mexican wave as each rider runs the gauntlet. The noise of their rattles, whistles and cheers is non-stop. Then there is the Beer Mile at Eckersmuhlen, where tables and benches line the route, at which spectators sit down to watch and drink beer from seven in the morning. And, yes, the temptation just to stop and join them is almost unbearable.