Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 129, April 2020 | Page 39

MULTISPORT
The Build-up
The previous week, life had been peachy. Warm
conditions prevailed as I went for my first 5km
of garden and driveway running, testing various
route permutations as well as the accuracy of the
assortment of GPS devices in our household. I
concluded my upper body strength work by lugging
the exercise bike to the patio – it had been gathering
dust in a backroom – and knocked out a 6km ride (the
first action the bike had seen in close on a decade),
and then finished up with a few lengths of the pool,
dodging dive-bombing daughters and the tentacles of
the Kreepy Krauly.
The pool had been celebrating St Patrick’s Day a few
weeks beforehand, but I had managed to bring it back
from luminescent green to a murky blue. It was still
difficult to see the sides through the cloudy water,
though, so I focussed much of my pre-race attention
on getting the water a clear as possible.
Such was my naivety at this point that I had got
several things wrong. The originally announced start
time was 6am – I figured an early start gave me
a decent chance of finishing before my kids were
asleep. However, my wife pointed out that the sun
only rises around 6:30am in April, and not wanting
to add a dark start to the equation, I moved the start
time to 7am, which is also the traditional Ironman
starting time.
I’d also got the distances slightly wrong. Garrin
Lambley, editor of Sport24.co.za, gleefully told me I’d
have to add a few lengths to my planned swim, as the
swimming distance was actually 3.86 kilometres, and
not 3.8 kilometres as I’d been led to believe. I’d also
made a rounding error on the bike and would have to
add a further 250 metres of pedalling.
the pool… mainly to check just how cold the water
temperature had become during the cold front. I
regularly do an alternate day pull-up and push-up
regime, but noticed that my shoulders became a little
tired during my 20-length “long swim” and therefore
dropped all strength and core body exercises five
days before the event. I also tried to limit my intake of
beer, but was less successful on that score.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I manged to
chat to Tom Barlow and Charlotte Raubenheimer,
who’d both completed a Home Ironman on the
original Ironman South Africa date the previous
Sunday. Both were amazingly supportive and gave me
some great tips on how to approach my attempt.
Without fail, every ultra-marathon runner you speak
to who’s done Comrades and Ironman tells you,
“Ironman is much harder to train for, but Comrades is
much tougher on the day.” If you work in corporate,
you can’t get away from talk of “disruptors.” These
are companies like Uber and Airbnb that change a
stable landscape radically by challenging conventional
wisdom, thereby reinventing an existing market. Well,
if training for Ironman was truly the hardest aspect of
the event and the Ironman was indeed much easier
than Comrades, I figured that I would try to cause
my own minor disruption by reinventing conventional
stupidity and attempt a full Ironman without doing any
training. The sum total of my Home Ironman training
consisted of 30 lengths of my 11-metre pool, six
kilometres of stationary biking, 241 marathons and
two shirts (because I figured you can’t do an Ironman
without having done any actual ironing).
Diving Right In
Mental Preparation
With just a week to prepare for my first triathlon,
I (naturally) immediately entered a period of hard
tapering. I hoped that the famous Fordyce mantra of
“Rather start Comrades overweight and undertrained”
would apply to endurance triathlons as well. I was
worried how many kilometres the bike would handle,
so other than oiling a squeaky peddle, I left it totally
alone until the big day.
My daughter pestered me into joining her for a few
short driveway jogs, and after one of them I finished
off my swimming training with two more lengths of
With the luxury of not having to battle traffic or worry
about long toilet queues, I gave myself an hour to get
ready and set the alarm for 6am, with the instruction
to wake up the rest of the family (and bring my wife,
Kathy, a cup of tea) at 6:30am. I followed my normal
marathon morning “Triple T” routine. This consists of
tea (two cups), toast (peanut butter and honey) and
toilet (as many trips as possible – especially on this
occasion, as I was lacking the added buoyancy of a
wetsuit and wanted to avoid swimming with rocks in
my pocket).
I got going just after 7am with a simple “Ready,
steady, go!” from my wife and the firing of a Nerf gun
by my youngest daughter. After a short trot over the
lawn, I faced the pool. “1, 2, 3, bungee” went through
my mind and I took the plunge. As soon as my chest
hit the frigid water I gasped for breath and tried to
get my hyperventilating breathing under control
over the first 10 lengths. I was facing 351 lengths
of my 11 metre pool to make up the 3.86 kilometre
Ironman distance, and just focussed on getting the
first 40 lengths done, as this would be just over 10%
complete. This was also more than the total amount
of training I had done, so like a little clownfish called
Nemo, I was now swimming beyond the reef and into
the unknown…
I had tried without luck to get my watch to count
lengths and distance, so instead relied on my support
team’s mathematical prowess – and my eldest
daughter prepared a white board with the swim
broken up into 10-length chunks. After about 50
lengths I got into a good rhythm and would try knock
off 20 lengths at a time, then check that my count
was in line with that of the official scorekeepers, and
push off again. I did try the odd tumble turn, but gave
up that idea after a few attempts, mainly because I
was overhydrating with heavily chlorinated pool water
though my nose.
I had planned to inject some fun into the traditional
Ironman and therefore pre-placed an order for a
poolside cup of tea after breaching 200 lengths. By
this stage my face was so cold and numb that I could
not control the sipping motion and had to spit out
the first mouthful after taking too big a sip. The tea
was fantastic though – it warmed me up and gave me
renewed energy, providing credence to my clearwater
revival.
Conditions deteriorated towards the end of
the swim and I could feel the rain pelting down
against my back over the last 100 lengths. I was
also starting to shiver uncontrollably whenever
I had a brief stop, so I counteracted this by not
stopping. 351 lengths (plus one for good luck to
get back to the steps) and 1 hour 10 minutes later
I emerged a little pinker, shivering uncontrollably,
and gratefully grabbed the towel. One down two
to go.
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