Triathlons? There's one a minute. JOHN BUTLERsets off on his first tomorrow
TRIATHLETES REFER TO it as a “brick” – whenever one leg of exercise is followed immediately by another, say for example a run immediately after a cycle. Having run a six-kilometre circuit of Hyde Park this morning, I am now lost on my bicycle, in the labyrinthine Elephant and Castle district of London, on a June day of muggy, cloying heat. I can think of another word for it.
I'm trapped in Escher's Relativity(that mind-bending painting in which the stairwells of an elegant multi-storey building continue folding into each other), only the roundabout in Elephant and Castle is the optical illusion, and every time I think "right, I've cracked it", and sprint down a road that I think will guide me away from this gritty, car-dominated neck of London, I find myself approaching the same roundabout again. The word is torture. Special torture.
It’s the first day of bike training for the 2009 Focus Ireland sprint triathlon, an event for which I appear to have registered. The Great Sacrifice is taking place on August 2nd in Dublin, beginning with a 750m swim in a body of water that one can’t help but imagine so teeming with effluent and rats that the chances of getting Weil’s disease must be close to even money. A 20k bike ride follows the swim around the Grand Canal Basin, before the final leg, a five-kilometre run up and down the quays.
Allow me to lay out the reasons for my participation in this event in no particular order: I’m 37 years old, but won’t be 37 forever. Two friends are doing it and I thought it would be fun. I am having a mid-life crisis, and I am scared of dying, but fear that training for a marathon would only make things worse. Oh – and it’s for charity.
As evidenced by my Dante-esque morning on the bike in south London, triathlon training can be hell, but when you’re talking about intense, masochistic punishment in gradually widening circles, it’s hard to fathom how it could be seen any other way. And hell is relative. The first ever swim-bike-run combination event was held in San Diego in 1974, but the most famous triathlon is the Hawaiian Ironman, which comprises a two-and-a-half mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26-mile run, and that’s a goddamn marathon at the end.
People have scoffed at the relatively minor statistics of my effort. Maybe they feel I should be attempting the Ironman, in which case I thank them for their confidence. But you know what? Let them scoff when I’m airlifted to an emergency room after my attempt at the meagre sprint version, dangling from the helicopter like a spent, weeping man-baby in the stork’s bundle. After all, on Day One I ended up exceeding the cycling leg distance by less than 10 miles, only to be woken later by a concerned warden in Hyde Park, one half of my face sun burned and the other stuck to the grass, having collapsed in front of a Dixieland jazz band three hours earlier on my way home. I am determined to do this.
Day Two of training occurs once I have recovered from the bike ride (four days later), and involves a five-kilometre run with a friend around west London’s Holland Park. He is fitter than me, and when I arrive, he’s pre-hydrated and resplendent in co-ordinated running gear. We punch in a greeting like proper athletes might, and he performs an impressively deep and painful-looking leg stretch before straightening up and pointing at my iPod Nano accusingly.
“The hell is that?”
“They’re called iPods.”
I need motivation to run any distance in excess of a yard – a brightly coloured ball, say, or some music in my ears. I have carefully programmed a running mix from the golden decade of house music, four-to-the-floor bangers mixed with percussive fist-pumping stadium rock that only increases in intensity the more wasted I feel.
“Funny stuff. You know those bad boys are banned on race-day, yeah?”
He jogs off and leaves me with the news, the full awfulness of which takes a moment to sink in. Are people so entranced by the music that they sprint into walls? Whatever the reason, I will have to contemplate running without music. No live version of Rez, no tribal house bangers, and no New Order. And worst of all, the prospect of having to talk while running with my friend – an absurd practice I have witnessed before but can scarcely credit exists.
I needn’t have worried. After catching up with him, within 50 yards my friend is once again showing me an expensively branded pair of clean heels and now I’m left with my thoughts, and my own laboured breathing. I find myself recalling my only athletic achievement to date – second place in a three-legged race in the 1980 school sports day with John Byrne as my partner. To be frank, I think John carried me a little that day. If we hadn’t been tied together at the ankle I’m sure he’d have shrugged me off and sprinted into first place. I haven’t seen him since school – I wonder is John available on triathlon day?
A day later, the third leg of the training regimen awaits, and I find that the lanes at my public swimming pool are divided according to speed. In addition to those set aside for gadding about and splashing each other (I always found the notion of splashing someone already in the water with you a fantastically useless pursuit), there are training lanes for lap swimmers, entitled “slow”, “getting fast”, and “fast and furious”.
I happen to enjoy swimming, and am getting up quite a clip in “fast and furious” when an ample woman with a flowery swim cap lowers herself into the lane, steps out in front of us and begins walking up the pool, her arms spread wide, as if she is about to be baptised in the waters of Galilee. There’s an instant logjam of sleek, furious men in budgie smugglers, at the back of which I find myself slapping the ankles of the guy in front, and then I stand, my goggles steaming up like a car windscreen on a teenage first date.
Forced to stop after 37 continuous laps (38 being the length of the swimming leg in the sprint triathlon), I am literally blind with rage. A hard body screams at the Caribbean woman, pointing furiously at the sign, and when she sees how she has erred, she just smiles and continues walking for a full further length before calmly ducking under the rope and into the splashy lane to continue her journey towards salvation. So that’s why they call this one “fast and furious”.
As I crawl from the pool and hit the showers, the significance of this day is not lost on me. I have achieved all three legs, with only three recovery days between each. There are many obstacles on the Homeric odyssey towards fitness and the sleekly Spartan physique that is the exclusive domain of the triathlete. My personal best time for the sprint triathlon now stands at nine days, which is pretty damn impressive, I have to say. Between now and race day, all I have to do is shave eight of those days off.
The 2009 Focus Ireland Triathlon starts at 9am at Grand Canal Square on Sunday, August 2nd. See also www.triathlonireland.com