It starts

The idea of racing in a triathlon formed in my head a few years ago. I was chatting to a bloke who had just signed up to the Great North Swim- a one mile open water swim across Lake Windermere in Cumbria.

I’ve never been a strong swimmer. I had lessons, once-upon-a-time, but never really got beyond the ‘don’t actually drown’ stage. The idea of this swim seemed incredibly tough to me, a real challenge. Though I’ve never done a marathon or cycled a hundred miles in a day I am a confident enough runner and cyclist to believe that I could do those things if I really wanted. Swimming on the other hand seemed like an entirely different prospect, and I looked at the chap and was genuinely impressed.

It appealed to my sense of adventure: open water was a complete unknown to me. This planted a seed in my head, though it was another couple of years before the shoots really came to the surface.

I could technically do breast stroke, back stroke, and freestyle, and had swam up to 1km before, but my stroke was incredibly inefficient. Swimming always felt like hard work- I would watch the most non-athletic looking people surging past me in the pool looking entirely relaxed. It was depressing.

In my last year at university I spent some time in the pool trying to refine my technique, and made some progress with both the strokes, and with confidence in the water, but rarely pushing myself beyond the first stage of fatigue- breathing properly in stroke. My ‘coach’ was videos on youtube, not ideal!

A year or so later I was in Thailand scuba diving and two of my friends doing their Divemaster qualification had to swim back from the dive boat, which was about 800m out. In tropical 29 degree sea water and with fins, that’s not a particularly tough challenge, but nevertheless, when they emerged at the other end I was impressed.

A few days later we were at a dive site a good few miles off the coast, and after the dive someone made up a challenge to climb out of the water up the side of the (rather large) boat. Without thinking I dived straight in — I’m a sucker for a challenge. After surfacing, it became apparent I was on my own in the middle of the sea. There was no prospect of putting my feet down at any point. It was swim, or drown.

My immediate response was fear, but quickly I came to the realization it was fine — I can swim perfectly adequately. I swam back to the boat, clambered up the side of the boat, and all was well.

I don’t know if it was this split second experience, some other self-reflection, or just the fact that by late 2011 I wasn’t doing any organized exercise for the first time in my life, but on January 1 2012 something made me go onto the Great Swim website and sign up for the one mile swim across Windermere. This gave me about 6 months to train: surely enough.

At the same time, I put my name down for a 10 km running race in Richmond park in March. This was to be the first individual competitive sporting event I had done since being a child. Though I have spent a lot of time playing sport in my life, it had mainly been team sports like Rugby. Latterly I’d been practicing mixed martial arts, but I had never competed.

The idea of a triathlon started to crystalize at this point, as I realized I was going to be racing both swimming and running events, with just cycling to add (which I considered ‘easy’).

The same day I went for a 6 mile run. I was in pain within the first mile, had to walk one and off after the third, and averaged over 11 minutes a mile. Maybe the triathlon would have to wait…

I trained fairly consistently for the run, doing 4 mile runs around Paddington and Notting Hill a couple of times a week with Nike+ as my training partner. Getting a constant update on my distance and pace, and having an online record of my training was really motivating. I was racing against myself with the voice of Paula Radcliffe to congratulate me on breaking personal bests!

Race day came, and I ran a time of 45:09. That’s just over 7 minutes 30 seconds a mile. A considerable improvement from the beginning of the year.

In hindsight I went off far too fast, with the pack. I think the first mile was something like 6:14 which was completely unsustainable for me, and I was totally out of breath for the second and third miles. Eventually I recovered to a reasonable pace and finished fairly strongly. I finished third in my age category and twenty third overall (it was a small race!). The race was a success, and it felt like it, but with lessons learned.

The Open Water Swim

I was training with reasonable frequency at my local gym in their 20 m pool, but looking back, the training was not appropriate. I would rest to catch my breath after most lengths and rarely did more than 20. Though just getting in the pool often was important, I didn’t do either the focussed technique training or the volume required for muscle memory to develop.

Every now and again I would stay with my parents and go to their local pool, the Mountbatten center in Portsmouth. This is a modern, cool, 2 m deep Olympic sized pool. The first time I swam there, I nearly abandoned the trip at the end of the first length. It was so different to the tiny, shallow, heated pool I was used to, and my technique was still so bad, that I barely made it through the 400 m or so that I had intended for the session. Each length felt like a marathon, and at the end of each one I clung to the rail to catch my breath.

Rather than take this as a wake up call that my training needed to step up a gear, I was intimidated. I stopped going to my local pool for a while.

At some point I decided it was time to buy a wetsuit. When it arrived, I was in Portsmouth and decided it would be a good idea to find out what it was like to wear one, and how it would affect my swimming. I dived into the sea near Clarence Pier, to be greeted by a strong current, large waves, and eleven degree water. I didn’t have a swimming cap on and my head immediately felt like it was being crushed by the cold. I swam maybe 150 m before jumping out the water, a shivering mess. My mental state at this point was… not positive.

I signed up to another swim coming earlier in the summer, the Great London Swim, which is a mile around Royal Victoria Dock just off the Thames. I thought it would be good training for Windermere- being slightly closer to home it would be less stressful, and probably warmer!

As the event drew closer, I stayed in Portsmouth more often, ramping up to doing a mile without too much pain (it was always unpleasant). I was improving my distances through brute force and determination though rather than by improving my technique and becoming a better swimmer.

Before I knew it race day arrived, and given my training experience, I was fairly nervous. My parents came up to London to support me, and it was the sunniest day of the year up to that point. With gritted teeth I donned the wetsuit and dipped tentatively into the acclimatization section.

At eighteen degrees, the water was almost warm, and really calm; nothing like the sea a few weeks previous. Feeling better, I emerged and went through the group warmup and the pre swim hype. The Great Swim organizers are great at generating hype before the start! My wave was made up of 500 people, all starting via a ramp as opposed to an in-water start

Though I knew not to rush off or burn out early, when the horn sounded, I bustled forward to enter the water around 100 people or so into the wave. My first 10 strokes were great. I felt smooth, fast, in control. The 50 or so people immediately around me, the feet, the flailing arms and the splashing didn’t bother me at all. Then I remembered it was necessary to breath.

Fuck.

It turns out, in the middle of a lake, there is nowhere to put your feet down and no rail to grab on to. Once you miss a breath, it’s hard to get it back. With 400 people behind you, you can’t stop, and even slowing down means an endless stream of tumultuous water, kicks and elbows in the face. The obvious way out is down. It was a true shock to be in that position of seemingly no escape.

I didn’t go downward though. I slowed to an embarrassing lax pace, doing head-out-of-the water breaststroke, like an older lady who doesn’t want to get her hair wet combined with a panting dog. I felt sorry for the hordes of angry swimmers behind me, but I could do nothing to get out of their way.

The first 400 m was genuinely one of the hardest things I had ever done to that point in my life. My chest felt so tight and tiny. Every breath was a huge effort, and each as felt as useless as the last. Eventually though, after 800 m or so, I had relaxed enough to swim in relative comfort, albeit slowly, and finished in a total of 39 minutes. When I got out the water, my legs were like jelly, and I struggled to walk up the finish ramp to collect my finishers medal.

As I staggered out of the water, I called my number to the woman counting us out the water, and jokingly asked her “where’s the bike?”

That was when triathlon really started for me: though it had been an amazingly testing 40 minutes, I had completed a mile in the open water, and was ready for more.

The Great North Swim turned out to be a much more pleasant experience. I spent a few days in the run up to the event in the Lake District with my parents, cycling and doing other outdoor activities and approached it in a relaxed manner.

The water was colder at around 14 degrees, and I’d not trained much since the London swim, but I was confident I could finish now. I knew to start slowly this time.

I didn’t panic in the same way at the start, and though at no point during the swim did I feel actual enjoyment, I didn’t have any of those moments where you wish you could just abandon the whole idea. I finished in 36 minutes, a nice improvement over my first swim.

Autumn and winter came, but somehow I fell out of a routine of regular exercise. I was talking to people about doing a triathlon now, but doing nothing about it.

Even as I had been training for the swims and runs, and even more-so now, I was putting on weight. The combination of sitting at a desk all day with an unlimited supply of cake and chocolate biscuits, large carby lunches (I am partial to a loaf of bread or two), working late most nights, and lessening schedule of regular exercise meant I was struggling to get into my trousers. I was regularly looking at myself in the mirror wondering whether this was it, whether I had already reached my physical peak and was on the way down.

Every time I saw myself there was a feeling of guilt, of regret, almost a sadness that I was letting myself go.

The Turning Point

The next 6 months were a blur. On 1st January I signed a “goal coaching” agreement with Nicole, of LifeLessBullshit.com fame, and set some fairly aggressive physical activity goals.

Most of them were concerned with getting back into mixed martial arts- starting both Brazillian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai training, whilst also running and rock climbing regularly. My goal was to do an amateur MMA fight, something I had been interested in for a long time.

I trained between three and seven times most weeks, sometimes going nine or ten days without a true rest day. As with many things, the more of something you do, the more you want to do it, and my motivation for exercise had never been higher. That is saying something- in my first year at university I played a full season with both the Rugby League team and the American Football team, split my time between teams in the gym, team training sessions and matches.

Similar to back then, there were some logistical issues with that volume of training. Just dealing with the amount of washing it produces is a challenge! You need to be very organized and keep a tight schedule to make it to that many sessions successfully with the right kit. Unlike my time at university I wasn’t as obligated to find time for going out to clubs and making fancy dress outfits, but now I had a full time job, my own social life, as well as some other big goals I wanted to achieve. Once I’d got back into the swing of the sustained physical effort level (which didn’t happen overnight), organizing my life around it was one of the biggest challenges.

Unfortunately there is no magic formula and we all have to live within the bounds of a 24 hour day. One small tip which really helped was putting all the sessions into my calendar on a Sunday night. This made it much easier to say no to other events and invitations which would come up- I could quickly see that there would be no other time that week to ‘catch up’ with my training schedule.

During the six month coaching period, Portsmouth City Council decided to host a new triathlon event. My mother saw this and encouraged me to enter, again, because she wanted someone to support. Because of the volume of training I was doing, I felt confident that a sprint triathlon would be no problem whatsoever. A 750 m swim was easily conquerable after the previous year, a 20km cycle was nothing, and a 5km run: how hard could that be!?

At that point I was doing a Yoga course, playing in a squash league, running during my lunch break, going to the gym for resistance training, on top of Muay Thai and BJJ classes. There wasn’t much time for additional Triathlon specific training specific sessions. I started swimming slightly more often though, around a couple of times a month, and did a couple of ‘Olympic triathlon days’, doing the combination of swim, cycle and run distances, though without transitions.

Nutrition

I did a half marathon training run one afternoon and had my first ever ‘bonking’ experience which was a learning experience. I’d already swam a mile and played badminton that day, and when I went out to run, I wasn’t really planning on doing the 13.1 miles. I didn’t take a drink with me or prepare at all. Eight miles in, after having felt really comfortable running at about 7:20 pace the whole way, my legs stopped functioning. I didn’t know what was going on. Suddenly I was struggling to keep up a ten minute mile pace.

I finished the distance, but those last few miles were a huge effort. When I got back and did some research I realized I’d experienced a very common physiological effect for aerobic activity- the result of body running out of glycogen and carbohydrate to burn as fuel.

By way of cycle training, I entered my first sportive event. This went quite badly! I followed the wrong colored arrows, going the wrong way for 30 miles. Though I’d gone the wrong way, I now felt comfortable that I could cycle a long distance and push myself relatively hard for 4 hours.

An hour into this ride I got a weird feeling of disassociation. It was as if I was just watching my body perform, converting carbohydrate into kinetic energy through my legs to the pedals. This, combined with the bonk a couple of weeks previously, meant I was starting to understand what the effect of proper nutrition was on aerobic performance.

I felt a little late to the party- I’ve been doing aerobic exercise in one form or another since I was 7 and had never felt this connected to my body. I studied Biology to a reasonable level, and have read a lot about sport science — I understand the concepts behind nutrition and performance, but I’d never experienced the effects so clearly.

The Build Up

The day before the triathlon I made the trip down to Portsmouth. I’d just bought the new Boards Of Canada album and had it on repeat. Their moody, atmospheric electronica struck a chord with my emotions,

In the evening I decided to walk along the sea front to take a look at the location of the swim the next morning. The sun was setting behind a cloudy sky and the wind was blowing a 25mph gale. It was high tide so the waves were crashing against the sea wall and throwing up salty spray across the promenade. As the haunting electronic sounds in my ears built up to a crescendo, the wind pushed and pulled me around. As the sea moved in and out over the rocks below, my thoughts were scattered like the breaking waves.

Although I’d known that the sea swim would be the most challenging part of the triathlon for me, I hadn’t imagined the sea to be anything like this. It was angry, spiteful and enormous.

I remember feeling fearful: genuine, sincere, apprehension about the prospect of getting in, let alone competing. I can’t remember anything previously invoking that kind of emotion in me. I was never worried about rugby matches, or exams, or anything else I’d ever done, perhaps with the exception of the Great London Swim months before. And this was at least double as scary as that.

Over the course an hour I forced myself to focus. I talked through my feelings and apprehension to myself, and imagined how the first stages of the swim would be. I knew I would plunge into the freezing water, surrounded by a corps of other athletes, and immediately start a fight for breath, for core body temperature, and for position. I knew it would be painful and that I would want to quit, and I knew I would say no and carry on.

I visualised myself getting to the line and staggering out whilst ripping off my wetsuit and scrambling onto the bike. I knew once I was back on dry land I would be fine.

For maximum dramatic effect, I spoke all of this out loud to myself over the top of the music, in a similar style to Edward Norton during the film Fight Club.

I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. Then I ran some more.

Race Day

I woke on the morning of the triathlon at 6am, and felt great. I was nervous but ready to just get on with it. I cycled the mile or two down to the starting point and went to registration to collect my numbers.

When I returned to the bike, I noticed the back tyre was completely flat. I immediately started to change the tube, my blood pressure rising.

In the process of using a hand pump to re-inflate the tyre, I used too much pressure, and snapped the valve stem of my only replacement inner tube. I had a puncture repair kit with me to repair the original one, but that is not what you want to be doing an hour before a race.

I managed to find a mechanic with a spare tube, who kindly fitted it for me and made a repair to the wheel which had caused the puncture.

I had half expected a puncture. In the preceding week I had been hit by a van at low speed and had to buy a replacement wheel. I forgot to buy rim tape and when putting the new wheel on, I didn’t have time to get any. Instead I improvised and cut up an old inner tube to use as rim tape. It didn’t seat well, and this caused the inner tube to pinch and puncture.

With the wheel repaired, I was now rushed. I hastily laid out my kit in transition and before I knew it I was entering the water to acclimatize. It was 14 degrees- not too cold, and certainly warmer than I expected from my observation the night before. I was in the first wave of the day, made up of only 25 people, and after a few seconds we all got out and lined up for the start.

As the Lord Mayor sounded the starting horn we rushed back into the water and set off. It turned out I should have acclimatised for longer. The cold water hit me in the chest, and the combination of nerves, lack of proper warm up, and change in temperature left me breathless in a similar way to my first open water swimming experience.

For the first 200 m I was seriously considering turning onto my back, raising an arm, and quitting the race. I looked enviously at the safety marshals in kayaks and could think of nothing other than getting over to them and hanging on.

Somehow, through a combination of breaststroke, backstroke and sheer determination, I managed to get myself a bit more relaxed. By the 400 m turning point, it was back to my grind-it-out swimming style rather than feeling like I was fighting for my life. The last 350 m was against a light current, which made progress to the buoy demoralisingly slow. I did feel in the groove by this point and started making a bit of ground back on other swimmers who were still in the water. My swim time was 23 minutes, which was far slower than my open water mile PB, and it felt like it too!

Still, as I emerged from the water, it felt like the weight was off my shoulders. I sat down to remove my wetsuit in transition, allowing myself a split second thought of “I could just stay here.”

The transition wasn’t exactly speedy, but I got off without too much trouble. I made the mistake of not buying a number belt. This meant I had to put a top on after the swim with my race numbers pinned to it.

I chose a micro-fleece top and it was very hard to get on when wet. It was slightly too warm during the next two stages. The cycle felt great, and thankfully I didn’t get any further punctures. It was a flat course with a good surface. Four laps of the seafront. A reasonable wind meant pedalling in one direction was fairly tough work. I made up some places in this stage, and I finished in 44 minutes, 66th fastest out of 153 starters.

I made sure to keep sipping electrolyte throughout and consumed an energy gel I’d taped to the handle bars. That seemed to give me all the energy I needed for the cycle and run. The last transition was straight forward, just a change of shoes. My legs felt surprisingly fresh as I set off down the coast for the last time. I was definitely heavier on my feet than on a normal run, but my legs didn’t resemble Bambi’s as I’d been warned!

I enjoyed the run along the coast, past the small crowd to the finishing line. Looking back I feel that I didn’t push myself as hard as I should have done. Another mistake is that I didn’t have a watch or any way of pacing myself. I did the run in 22:38 which is a way off what I should be doing. The main thing that was going through my mind by that point in the race was to finish what had probably been the toughest challenge I’d ever faced.

As I crossed the finish line it was a real mixture of emotions. Joy that I had completed the race in a time and manner I was happy with. Relief from the nervousness that had been building. Curiously also, a sort of regret. Regret that it had taken so long from the initial idea for me to get around to doing this.

Lessons Learned

• If you want to do something, commit. Just put your name down and worry about it later.
• Find what type of training works best for you. For me group fitness sessions push me far
• harder than when I train alone.
• If you stop making progress towards you goal, it can be helpful to shift focus for a while to something else, maybe with some overlap.
• Be ruthlessly organised, it helps with both motivation and commitment as well as giving the obvious benefits.
• Don’t get obsessed with the gear. You just need a serviceable bike, some running shoes, and a wetsuit, it shouldn’t break the bank first time around (see my kit list for ideas, I think I bought very basic items). You can also look at hiring a wetsuit and/or bike.
• At the same time, don’t be scared to spend money to help you achieve your goal. Don’t cut out training sessions because they cost money or because you are missing some piece of equipment: spend less on other things you prioritise less than your goal.
• Don’t forget to buy rim tape.
• Don’t forget to breathe.