Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 129, April 2020 | Page 41

MULTISPORT
Meanwhile, under the ruse of “getting me to speed
up,” my daughters had hatched a plan to torture me
with forced viewings of the My Little Pony movie and
Justin Bieber music videos. Fortunately, they forgot
about this evil plot in all the excitement of the day. My
youngest did, however, ask whether I could read her
a chapter of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
I said that I was willing to give it a go, warned the
live stream about spoiler alerts, and then set about
reading a chapter. I did struggle to keep my cadence
up whilst reading, but Potter kept me distracted as I
tackled the last quarter of the ride.
Deliberately lagging behind so as not to
hear my daughter’s taunts of “I’m faster
than The Running Mann!”
Getting Ready to Run
Although I did start to get a little uncomfortable
towards the end of the ride, it was far less painful than
I was expecting – perhaps the long hours of sitting and
writing blog articles is the best way to get buns of steel
before an Ironman. Still, my legs started to run out of
steam over the last 15km and I worked hard to keep
the average pace above 30km/h. In an effort to emulate
the champagne-sipping Champs-Élysées final stage in
the Tour de France, I had promised myself the reward
of a beer towards the end of the ride. I scoffed a final
ham roll and enjoyed that beer immensely!
I enjoyed the bike a lot more than I thought I would,
and the final time of 5:20 was a lot quicker than I had
estimated. In fact, the day was going far better than
I could ever have hoped for, so maybe this Home
Ironman challenge wasn’t going to be so tough after
all? I duly got busy ironing my second shirt of the day
during transition two. It happened to be the shirt from
the Ottosdal Nite Marathon – which would prove to be
prophetic. However, right now the day was still young,
and I fancied my chances of finishing in the daylight.
A well-earned
lockdown beer
at the end of the
bike leg
“At least now I know what I’m doing” was the thought
that went through my mind whilst I changed into my
running kit, plastered my nipples and swallowed the
one energy gel that formed part of my race nutrition
plan. The Facebook live stream only lasts eight hours,
so I’d killed it once the T2 shirt had been ironed. After
some technical difficulties, we got the stream going
again for the run, and my legs looked forward to the
freedom of the open driveway. that the phone GPS was much more accurate than
the watch GPS on short, twisty laps. The watch gives
you a ‘distance discount’ of between 20-30%, but that
said, I think the phone still cheats one out of mileage
as well, but the loss is significantly less. Anyway, the
counting worked pretty well, since fatigue forgetfulness
meant I always deferred to the lowest lap count when
I was unsure, resulting in it actually being 25 to 30 laps
between distance checks.
As I was winding up the cycle, messages started
coming through along the lines of “Just the easy part to
come.” Somehow, I knew that this would not be case.
Marathon running is hard, and I knew what I was in
for, already expecting those 324 laps up and down the
driveway to be physical and mental torture. I also felt a
bit of performance anxiety… What if I got this far only
to suffer the ironic ignominy of the marathon tripping
me up? I’d been warned about the difficulty of running
directly after getting off the bike, but mitigated this risk
with a 20-minute transition. Thankfully, I was already
well into my stride by the time I had reached the gate
on the first lap, and the first 5km were fantastic. I was now taking significantly more strain on the laps,
but looked forward to seeing my distance counter
over the 14km mark. Imagine the horror when I
switched my phone screen back on and saw that the
distance counter had not moved from 11.5km. A great
deal of the run is a blur, but that specific moment is
frozen in time and still sends a chill down my spine
just thinking about it.
Mathematical
Incongruency
It had stopped raining, but I could hear the lightning
alarms sounding from the golf course in the distance
and knew it was just a matter of time before the
weather made another onslaught. My plan was to run
in roughly 5km segments until the half marathon mark,
taking a short nutrition break after each ‘parkrun.’
This meant I’d break the back of the run without too
much time-wasting and stuffing around, and could
then alleviate the inevitable fatigue with some walking,
braaiing and beer-drinking on the back half of the run.
Losing at least 2.6km (and probably well over 3km)
resulted in a minor mental meltdown. I am not sure
whether my body could have handled two additional
kilometres, but my brain definitely could not. Luckily I
was too tired to slam my phone into the ground, and
was still lucid enough to make the sensible call to
run until my phone showed 40 kilometres. Whilst this
would not make for as nice a screen grab after the
event, it would ensure that I definitely covered the full
marathon distance.
The rain started bucketing down again, but I ignored
the elements and pushed out a 6km segment to take
the distance past the 11km mark. I rewarded myself
with a decent break, enjoying a well-balanced diet of
Coke, jelly beans, Doritos, Marie biscuits and potatoes.
I was starting to feel my stamina dipping, but life was
still good.
During a normal road marathon, you can zone out and
knock off a couple of kilometres no matter how tired
you are. There is no such luxury when running driveway
loops. Therefore, I had been countering the monotony
by counting off 20 laps (approximately 2.6km) in
between looking at the distance on my phone. (I found
A brief period of
sunshine during
the run leg
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