Accidental Ironman Read online

  Martyn Brunt writes a monthly column for 220 Triathlon magazine. His obsession led him to sell his Mercedes, give away his expensive suit, chuck in his City job and become, in his father’s words, a ‘god-damned hippy’ (a cycle path designer with a camper van).

  Accidental

  Ironman

  Martyn Brunt

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © Martyn Brunt, 2013

  The right of Martyn Brunt to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47211-105-0 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47211-109-8 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover by Clarkevanmeurs Design

  Chapter 1

  I am standing waist deep in the waters of the Main Donnau Canal near Nuremberg in Germany. I am clad in a neoprene wetsuit, swim hat and goggles, and my face bears the slightly distracted look of someone with an undiagnosed urinary tract infection. As I stare blankly into the middle distance, like a man modelling pants in a catalogue, I am dimly aware that standing around me are people dressed exactly the same way as me – hundreds of them. However, the presence of what looks like the entire cast of March of the Penguins around me is not a cause for joy, because with several hundred swimmers all about to set off at the same time in the same narrow stretch of water, there’s a high chance I’ll get their Happy Feet in my face. My nerves, coupled with having water lapping around my clinkers, have caused me to leak a small amount of wee down my leg, which makes me think:

  1. I wonder how many other dirty bastards have done the same, and

  2. That actually feels quite nice

  Suddenly there is a loud bang, which I assume is the sound of my arse caving in but is, in fact, the start cannon for the ‘wave’ in front of ours. There are so many swimmers in the canal that we are setting off in waves of a few hundred at a time – and mine is next. If you’re reading this in the UK, you’re probably wondering how you fit hundreds of swimmers into a strip of water about as wide as Peter Crouch lengthways, but here in Germany they do things properly and the Main Donnau Canal is wide enough to take ships and, possibly, Peter Crouch sideways. Some of us are standing near the edge on the sloping bank so as not to expend energy treading water and, frankly, drink other people’s piss. Others are bobbing about in the water trying to keep their mouths shut, while others stay sitting on the bank silently listening to the power ballads being pumped out of the massive speakers attached to the bridge behind us. Somewhat stereotypically it sounds a lot like David Hasselhoff, although I am wearing a swim cap and my ears are full of water, which probably makes everything sound like Der Hoff.

  It is now our turn to move forward to the start line, and those of us near the bank glide silently into the water to begin the bunfight for start positions. Thousands of spectators standing on the banks and the bridge cheer as we adopt hard, flinty expressions on our faces in a bid to look windswept and interesting. Starting positions matter, so there is some jockeying to be done. If, like me, you swim front crawl by breathing only to the right-hand side, you want to be on the left-hand side of the starting area so you can see all the buggers around you and reduce the chances of getting clumped about the head by someone swimming on your ‘blind’ side. If, like me, you are a ‘reasonable’ swimmer then you want to be NEAR to the front of the wave so you avoid all the doggy-paddlers, hand-slashers and panickers, but you don’t want to be AT the front where the piranha pack lurks, ready to swim over the top of you and make you feel as though you’ve just emerged from a washing machine. I have carefully selected my favoured position and set about preventing anyone else coming within five feet of it by treading water and surreptitiously booting anyone who comes too close – as well as studying those around me in a bid to clairvoyantly judge their swimming abilities, because you always get some dickhead who puts themselves at the front, sets off like a rocket and then dies on their arse after 200 metres.

  Swimming fast for 200m is no good in our present circumstances because ahead of us lies a swim of 3.8 kilometres. Actually, what really lies ahead of us is 140.6 miles of racing in what is arguably the hardest mainstream sport in the world. Now that you’ve reached this page in the book I’m going to assume you’re not one of those people who is reading this while standing in WHSmith like it’s some kind of fucking lending library, and I feel safe revealing to you what I’m doing bobbing about in the waters of the Main Donnau Canal. The event that has drawn me here is called an Ironman, an endurance triathlon event made up of a 3.8-kilometre swim, a 112-mile cycle (sorry for jumping between distance measurements, but 112 miles sounds more impressive than 180 kilometres) and a 26.2-mile marathon run (if you want that in kilometres, work it out yourself, I can’t be bothered). Ironman races take place all over the world and attract hundreds of thousands of people to try and get round the various Iron courses under the cut-off time of 17 hours. People from all walks of life attempt them, from sinewy European professionals who finish in about 8 hours, to massively optimistic overweight Americans who stagger over the line looking like they’ve been shagged with a ragman’s trumpet – and, of course, skinny, obsessive amateurs who spend half the year training for this race at the expense of holidays, puddings, a quiet life, advancement at work, lie-ins, an easy atmosphere at home, any kind of social life, pain-free legs and money.

  This particular race is called ‘Challenge Roth’ – Roth being the name of the nearest town, and ‘Challenge’ because, for reasons too tedious to go into, it’s not allowed to be called an ‘official’ Ironman, although it takes place over the standard Iron-distance (it’s something to with ‘Ironman’ being a franchise as well as a distance, ya-di-ya-di-yada). Normally when you cross the finish line of an Ironman, some hospital-DJ type with a microphone bellows ‘You are an IRONMAN’ at you, so I’m wondering what I will have bellowed at me when I finish this race – ‘You are a Challenger’ makes me sound like an unsuccessful space shuttle, while ‘You are a Roth-man’ makes me sound like a packet of fags. This is not my first Ironman – in fact it’s my tenth since 2006, and I have completed them in such dazzling locations as Florida, Canada, Lake Placid, Nevada, Austria, Lanzarote and, er, Nottingham. So far, I have finished every single one in times ranging from 10 hours 20 minutes (Nottingham) up to 12 hours 45 minutes (Lanza-sodding-rote), although this doesn’t make them any less nerve-racking and as we wait for the boom of the starting cannon, my sphincter is going from the size of a five pence piece up to the size of a manhole cover, and back to 5p again.

  What makes them so nerve-racking is that they are hard. Perhaps you’ve done one, in which case you’ll appreciate the kind of mystique that I’m trying to build here that we are some kind of race of superheroes whose tri suits should involve a mask, cape, and some sort of badge for our chests. You don’t just turn up at the start of these races on the off-chance you’ll finish because they will hurt you badly and leave you sagged on
the side of the road looking like a deflated testicle. You have to train for months just to make it to the start line in any sort of shape and, once you get there, then there are a million things that can go wrong during the course of 140.6 miles – punctures, dehydration, crashes, panic attacks, injuries, exhaustion, hypothermia, heatstroke, chafed nipples, cramp, the shits, failing to escape the clutches of Scientology and good old fashioned failure

  Most of us taking part will be in the ‘complete’ rather than ‘compete’ category. The chances are that the race will be won by some professional with a cool name like Faris or Timo or, er, Chrissie, who will finish in 7 hours 59 minutes looking like they’ve just done a 10k, and who baffle the rest of us by being so good while appearing to have the same number of legs as us. Next will come the ex-pros, sponsored athletes and top end ‘age groupers’ (as we amateurs are known) who will be seeking the minor prizes like winning their age group – for your further edification the entrants into triathlons are usually divvied up into five-year age groups, so you end up competing against people of similar levels of tooth decay. This crowd will be looking to finish in less than 10 hours, will look a little more dishevelled than the pros but will quickly recover in order to have a good pose around the finishing area in their calf guards, finisher’s T-shirt and medal. Looking around me in the water, I can spot a few of these types already and make a mental note to try to thump one or two if the opportunity presents itself – why should I be the only one to feel pain today?

  After that will come the phalanx of also-rans whose times range from 10–13 hours and whose bodies range from hefty and muscular to those looking like they need a bloody good dinner, and those of us whose bodies are basically just a collection of fatty deposits and scar tissue. These are the people who have trained hard, executed their race strategy reasonably well, avoided any major catastrophes and for whom the hardest work is yet to come – that of convincing their mates, families and attractive women in pubs that their result was much better than it actually was, using phrases like ‘I finished in the top third of the race’ or ‘I was in the top 50 in my age group.’

  Next will come the over-13-hours finishers. Maybe they’ve had a bad day, maybe it’s their first race, maybe they have overcome some huge personal challenge to complete the race, or maybe they’re just shit. Either way I always like to give anyone who finishes in this sort of time an extra round of applause (assuming I’m not one of them) because 14 or 15 hours is a bloody long time to be on your feet, let alone swimming, pedalling and staggering about for 140 miles. Another positive side to this group of finishers is that at least they will have the grace to look like they have just done the hardest race on earth and will happily shuffle stiffly over the line caked in snot, dead flies, carelessly applied suncream, a warm paste of energy gels, fruit and perhaps some vomit.

  The final group to finish will be those who make it round between 16 and 17 hours. I never know quite how to react to people I see lurching for the line with minutes to spare. Are they celebrating their achievement at becoming an Ironman, or are they crushingly disappointed at their time? Are they smiling, or is that the rictus grin of death brought on by some unspecified pain about their person? Was this what they were expecting, or have they had the worst day since the manager at the Fukushima nuclear plant said ‘Sea looks choppy today’? Do they just want to slink away to their bed or are they happy to be damned with faint praise like ‘Good effort’ or ‘Well tried’ by smug gits who have already finished? This group tend to look hunted, relieved, slightly rueful and in massive agony in parts of their body I don’t want to know about.

  All entrants though, no matter how unrealistic their expectations, have one thing in common. Something has drawn us here. Perhaps it’s the challenge, perhaps it’s the finisher’s medal, perhaps it’s the fact that you will for evermore be known as an ‘Ironman’ (though since Robert Downey Jr. got in on the act it’s hard to describe yourself as such to kids without coming across as a massive tool), perhaps it’s the prize money or perhaps, as in the case of my friend Mark, it’s because he hopes it will make girls want to touch his cock.

  In my case, it’s complicated, which will become apparent throughout this book should you be able to stand to read any further. The title of this book is Accidental Ironman, but I don’t want to conjure up a picture that I’ve just wandered up to the start of this race while I was out fetching a paper. The accident in question is more a reference to the fact that I never meant to start doing any of this. For 35 years of my life I had less interest in sports than Louis Spence has in Nuts magazine and my presence at these races comes as a constant source of bewilderment to me, and to anyone who has known me longer than the past ten years. Having given it some thought for the purposes of financial gain (this book) I’ve realised I partly do it for egotistical reasons, partly to make up for previous sporting failures and partly because I thought I’d get the kind of body that meant that my buttocks would be so firm I’d never need to use a nutcracker again. What I’ve actually ended up with is a body that looks like an anglepoise lamp from Ikea, probably with a name like Tvátt. It is called Accidental Ironman because I just sort of drifted into this sport without ever really stopping to wonder what I was doing. Following the fabulous (four times Ironman World Champion) Chrissie Wellington’s book A Life Without Limits I had contemplated calling it A Life Without Talents. Or it could equally have been called My Struggle, although I was advised it wouldn’t sell so well in Germany. Hopefully, the title does at least go some way to explaining that I don’t really know what I’m doing this for and, more specifically, that I don’t really know what I’m doing here in the Main Donnau Canal, surreptitiously kicking some French bloke who is trying to nick my start place and generally treating the water around me as my own private country with an incredibly strict immigration policy.

  Now you’ve got this far into the book and I can be absolutely certain you’re not some commuter killing time by leafing through the sports books section of the station newsagents (or have I been categorised in comedy – or perhaps ‘Bargain Bin’?) we can relax a little and get to know each other some more. Not that this will lead to any lessening of writing standards by the way, oh no, I’m determined you shall have value for your money and if you feel at all short-changed by the quality of words and punctuation I’ve used please feel free to write to me at: M Brunt, A Yacht, Somewhere, the Bahamas. Anyway, now that we can be free with each other, I am happy to tell you that I’m here because I’m told this particular race is a fast one, and I am thus likely to come away with a very impressive time, always assuming I don’t cock it up. I’ve trained quite hard for this race and my coach Dave, a man about whom you shall hear more, has terrified me with tales of what future training regimes he will put me through should I not return victorious. A couple of years ago the all-conquering Chrissie Wellington set a new record for this course, which made all sorts of people like me put aside our usual below-par work ethic and think ‘Hmmmm, I could crack that race out with the usual level of effort and get a much faster time than usual.’ Right? We’ll see …

  I’m also here because I have a bunch of mates who have also been drawn here by the prospect of turning up and knocking out a fast time with the minimum of effort, and the time has come to introduce them to you:

  1. Mark Stewart, a gadget-obsessed sex pest whom I’ve known for ten years and who has become one my closest friends, despite him continually, narrowly defeating me in races. Physically he is the tall, sinewy type: if Andy Murray ever went missing for 30 years and the police released one of those e-fits that tried to show him as he’d look at that age, Mark would get rounded up sharpish. He’s actually a very good athlete who has the ability to hit his peak fitness for races at exactly the right moment, and a complete inability to complete any race without having to stop at some point to do a massive dump. Mark is starting in one of the waves behind me and is currently flapping about in transition (the area where bikes and kit are stored) trying to
sort out a puncture he seems to have acquired on his bike’s front tyre (actually the way I’ve written that ‘seems to’ implies I am to blame in some kind of Dick Dastardly, race-nobbling act of vandalism, but I swear I was nowhere near his bike your Honour). Mark’s least favourite part of the race is the swim and he has been crapping himself all morning about the prospect of being stuck in a canal with a load of neoprene clad knees and elbows, and I have been soothing his nerves by saying things like ‘Not much room is there?’ and ‘Looks punchy to me.’

  2. Joe Reynolds, a man who, on paper, is the most exciting human being in the world given that he is already an Ironman, he works in Formula One racing, and he once appeared in a band on Top of the Pops – and a really cool band too; he was the saxophone player for eighties ska legends The Selecter, playing on their classic anthem ‘Three-Minute-Hero’, which already gives him masses more credibility than Dustbin Bieber or anyone who’s ever slithered into our realm via The X Factor. On top of all this, Joe has five daughters – yes, five – all of whom range from loud to absolutely deafening. Joe tends to be at the slower end of the field and is expecting to finish somewhere around the 14–15 hour mark but, to be fair, if you had five gobby daughters you’d want to stay out on the course and get a bit of peace and quiet, too. Physically Joe is the short, sinewy type and in terms of what he looks like, picture if you can a slightly bewildered looking Ferrero Rocher. Joe is currently swimming for his life because he is in one of the waves in front of me, and he too likes the swim part of the race least of all. I have been soothing his nerves all morning by saying things like ‘I wonder how long it will take me to catch you and swim over the top of you?’

  3. Steve McMenamin, a gristle-kneed former-rugby-player-turned-swimmer who hails from that well known part of Ireland known as Coventry. Steve is someone I seem to have known all my life, although I can’t actually remember when I met him. As well as being one of the funniest people on the planet he constantly baffles me with how he managed to persuade his wife, Kay, to marry him, given how nice she is. Steve now lives in Brighton and once persuaded me to swim the Channel with him (more on that later). He’s also the only Olympic Torchbearer I know, having carried it through Sussex for a mile, trying desperately to ignore the mobile phone constantly going off in his pocket with texts from me, Mark and his other mates urging him to be the first person to trip over, drop it or set fire to the next runner. Steve is an extremely good swimmer and is also out there somewhere ahead of me, ploughing through the field and any unfortunate flounderers in his way, and is probably relieved to be under way to escape the jokes about being India’s number-one triathlete. Before leaving home he ordered some Irish flags for his family to wave, only to open them in Germany and discover that he’d been sent Indian flags by mistake, so as far as we were concerned he is the subcontinent’s sole representative in the race and he has endured four solid days of curry-based piss-taking.