Irontwit

Lest you think that Ironman is an individual challenge, consider the sacrifices of family and friends. Since last October Kirsty has had loads of extra lone parenting while I disappeared on my bike for hours on end, Grandma and Grandad have done lots of extra childcare to fit in extra training sessions and everyone has had to put up with bouts of grumpiness and depression when things weren’t going to plan. So before anything else I’d like to record my gratitude to them all for their support without which I would never have reached the startline on August 2nd.

Pre Race

The build up to race day had not been kind to the organisers. The carparks and transition zone had been reduced to a quagmire forcing a closure of the carparks. The resulting logistical nightmare (of which more in a later post) meant that parking was at the Reebok Stadium and we were to be bussed in to the start (about 4 miles away). This threw my schedule a bit and I set the alarm for 2:30 for breakfast. I’m not one for stuffing myself pre race and limited myself to a few brioche rolls with jam and espresso washed down with a glass of fruit juice. It’s a recipe that has worked well for me in the past. My friend Dave and eldest son James were in for the full Ironman experience and accompanied me to the Reebok. We arrived at about 3:30 and were immediately separated as they were only allowing athletes on the buses until later on. Slightly disconcertingly, we were dropped at the bottom of a country lane by the bus leaving us a half-mile walk to transition (as if we didn’t have far enough to go). What any insomniac locals would have made of a bunch of folk in trisuits walking up a Lancashire country lane at stupid o’clock is anybody’s guess. The build up went very smoothly thereafter – I set my bike up with nutrition and drinks, sorted my end of race bag out for picking up later at Bolton town hall, and handed over my iPhone to James who was taking over Twitter responsibilities.

The Swim

There is something slightly surreal about 1200 blue bobbing heads in a reservoir shouting “Oggy, oggy, oggy!” at  six in the morning. Surprisingly I felt calm. I think I’d accepted my fate by this point. In the week building up I’d been stressed, worried and depressed, alternately questioning my sanity and ability to finish. Now, with Kirsty having checked over all my preparations, I was happy that I’d done everything I could and all there was left to do, in that phrase beloved by sports psychologists and hated by me, was to execute.

The water was warm and fairly calm. I’d positioned myself close to the back to avoid the frenetic competition amongst the racers and set off conservatively. By the start of the second lap I thought that I’d set off too conservatively as I was predicting a swim time much slower than planned (I was hoping for just under 1 hour 30 minutes, and ended up with 1 hour 46 minutes). Talking to athletes around the course later on, everybody had experienced something similar, so maybe the swim course was a bit long? The problem for me was that I’d never swum that long in training. I am prone to getting tension in the top of my feet and ankles when swimming and the length and stress of this swim was really causing me problems. I just hoped that the change of discipline to cycling would relieve the tension.

What was great about the swim course was that it was straight up and down between two buoys so you could watch the pros and top swimmers swimming a few metres away in the opposite direction. The guys at the front seemed to be sprinting rather than pacing themselves around the 2.4 miles.

The Bike

I had consciously planned not to rush transition, What with the 400m steep bank to climb out of the reservoir, changing into my bike kit and daintily trying to pick my way through the mudbath to my trusty Principia, it was fully 10 minutes before I set out on the road. A shout from the crowd drew my attention to an old climbing mate, Matt, a Bolton local out supporting the race. It was great to know that there were familiar faces in the crowd.

The obvious feature of the bike course is the ascent of Winter Hill. The two and a half mile ascent is never steep, but it’s long and strength sapping and although I felt fine the first time, I knew that the effort would be much harder by the third ascent. In fact the first lap went very well. It didn’t feel hard, despite the headwind across the top of the course. I was a little bit cold, just wearing a tri top and looking at others in full long sleeve cycling jerseys I wondered if my clothing choice was correct – cold is a significant factor in athletes failing to finish Ironman races. Luckily it warmed up significantly as the day wore on and my lack of backup plan wasn’t exposed. I passed transition at 2:17 for the first lap, which was towards the better end of my bike route estimates and after waving to my growing band of supporters I set off up Winter Hill for a second time.

I still felt really strong and was overhauling lots of riders (Dave estimated I passed 160 riders on the bike leg). The trouble started towards the halfway point in the bike leg. Until that point my nutrition was going exactly according to plan which was to consume about 2,500 calories on the bike leg. That equated to a cereal bar every 20 minutes washed down with a combination of Gatorade and water. Most books recommend a slightly higher calorific input, but being quite small and having a slow metabolism I felt pretty comfortable with the plan I’d worked out. I had tried it out on some tough sportives and it had worked well, so I was surprised to start experiencing stomach cramps. More worryingly I was getting pain in the tops of my knees. This was unusual for me as I almost never get knee problems caused by cycling. I concluded that they were brought on by the extra tough swim I’d done, but the result was that I dropped into a lower gear and slowed down. I also made a loo stop which temporarily relieved the stomach cramps. The second lap was done in 2:32 – about ten minutes of which was accounted for with the unscheduled stop. Thereafter, I abandoned the Gatorade, stuck to water and tried to keep eating cereal bars, but was probably down to one every half hour.

The third lap was a real struggle, the knees were really hurting, and I was beginning to wonder if I could even set out on the forthcoming marathon; the stomach cramps returned forcing another stop. I was pinning my hopes on the fact that changing discipline would work as it had at the end of the swim. Low gear twiddling and chatting to other riders got me through to the finish in just over 2:40 giving me a total for the bike of  7:33 – just 3 minutes outside my “comfortable” target time.

The Run

In transition 2 I added an extra layer to my clothing, although it had got considerably warmer, I was concerned that as the race moved into evening it would cool considerably. I also took an Immodium Melt to relieve the stomach cramps (bunged me up very effectively, but didn’t stop the cramps). To my immense relief the knee pain magically disappeared as I stepped out on the marathon course. This point was always going to be the key for me. One of the primary reasons I had prevaricated about Ironman was my inability to get around the mental block of doing a marathon after a 112 mile bike ride. However, I felt surprisingly good and my target of running the first 2 hours before resorting to walk/run strategies seemed more than attainable.

Far from being a flat course, the route was always either gently rising or falling with a few very nasty steep hills thrown in. The first of these came at around 9 miles, and this was the first point that I walked. So my second strategy came into play: walk the hills and run everything else.

Apart from the gradients there were two mentally tough features of the Bolton Marathon course. The first was the complete lack of any distance markers making it very hard to judge progress in such a tired state. The second was the fact that the second loop of the course took you back right out to Horwich, each step taking you further (geographically) away from the finish and knowing you had to repeat it all again. As I approached the turnaround point in Horwich I was really starting to find the going tough. By now I was walking much more, I was still having to visit the toilet regularly (4 times on the run) and each time I started to run it was becoming slower and more painful. I set myself 15 minutes of running targets before walking and this worked, as did chatting to fellow strugglers. The course had started to get much quieter as the evening began to draw in and most of the field had finished, but that didn’t deter the support of loads of locals who sat outside their houses giving loads of encouragement support and drinks to the back markers. Dave met me and ran along for a bit as did Matt from earlier. As I got towards the finish I was really pleased to see another Matt, my brother-in-law who had inspired me to choose the Behcet’s Syndrome Society as my charity for the event.

As I ran in to the town centre I was totally unprepared for the scene that awaited. There was still a large crowd making an incredible noise cheering in each athlete, bright lights, pumping music and a massive video screen displaying each finisher. I spotted Kirsty with Luke on her shoulders – it was well passed his bedtime but he was well in to the swing of things. As I speeded up to run down the finish tunnel I looked out for the rest of my family, but the noise, lights and emotions of finishing an Ironman were totally disorienting and I missed them. Luckily, they all caught up with me straight after the finish in a welter of hugs, handshakes and a few tears.

The Stats

Swim:  1:46:52

Transition 1:  0:10:15

Bike:  7:32:53

Transition 2:  12:06

Run:  5:23:22

Total time:  15:05:26

Position: 1112 out of  1378 starters and 1263 finishers