Being a reasonable swimmer often means bike legs are a depressing procession of hearing the distant thwack-thwack-thwack of an approaching disc wheel as the bike monsters come past, but on this day it was me doing the overtaking as I passed the mermaid and one of the relay teams, and set about duelling with leading lady (and eventual female winner) Emillie Verroken. Emillie passed me after 22 miles of the course, and then passed me again after 28 miles, having gone off the wrong way, something which she seemed remarkably sanguine about when we briefly chatted as she nailed it past me. I was also to-ing and fro-ing with a relay cyclist and while I asserted my dominance on the climbs, he had more bottle than me on the descents, which led to a fairly even contest, helping me get round the first lap much quicker than I otherwise would have. By this time I had noticed the absence of anyone else from my wave overtaking me, particularly any men in the 45-plus age group, and I was trying to suppress excited thoughts about winning, mixed in with the usual ones about Holly Willoughby’s dress. By now I had caught up with the back markers from the second wave who were on lap one, and there’s nothing like powering past a bunch of slower riders to make you feel like a cycling god with quad muscles the width of the average human head. Mile 50 came and went and no one came past, then mile 55, at which point we turned and re-entered the grounds of Ragley Hall for the final mile of cycling. Then I heard it, thwack-thwack-thwack ... Yes, I’d finally been hunted down inside the last mile, and by my friend and all-round bike monster Greg Ashley, too.
Greg and I spent the dash through transition bickering about the poor sportsmanship of overtaking someone in the last mile of the bike course and he emerged on to the run 100 metres ahead – game on! The run was three laps of Ragley Hall’s grasslands, which are about as flat as a taxi driver’s man boob. If you ever visit the splendid grounds of Ragley Hall then be sure to have a look at the obelisk at the edge of the extensive woodland, and as you huff and puff your way up the hill to reach it, spare a thought that our run course went up there three strength-sapping times. Every yard of it was on the kind of lumpy grass you normally find in fields where cow pats live. Despite the terrain, by the end of lap one I’d closed the gap on Greg to about 20 metres, a cause of some surprise to the race commentator who said ‘There goes Greg Ashley, one of the region’s finest athletes, and … oh?! That’s, er, someone from Cov Tri behind him.’
Greg, however, is no mug, and I am. I had tried too hard, too soon to chase him down, and when he put a burst of pace in at the start of lap two, I had fewer answers than Wayne Rooney on University Challenge. Watching Greg steadily pull away and knowing I couldn’t keep this pace up put me in an interesting position. As the gap soon became more like 500 metres, my chances of victory were gone unless my prayers for Greg’s hamstrings to snap were answered, so I began to worry about hanging on to second. By now there were runners all over the course and it’s hard work trying to figure out how old someone is when they all look like they’ve aged about twenty years since the start line. After spending the last lap pursued by paranoia and a squadron of flies, I finally crossed the line in second place for a silver medal and my first ever podium finish in a triathlon.
My face was the kind of colour you get from smoking sixty Lambert and Butler a day but I was still extremely happy, not only to have some virtual silverware to take home (actually it was a voucher) but also because this was the last stage of my Iron training for Challenge Roth. I could now look forward to that equally blissful and stressful period known as tapering. Greg was magnanimous in victory and said kind things about my futile attempts to catch him, and female winner Emillie was charming about me overtaking her less than 500 metres from the finish. I was neither magnanimous nor charming when I realised I’d beaten my old Worcester mate Dave by just 14 seconds – ha-ha-ha-ha!
So how does a silver medallist celebrate? Normally, what I most want at a finish line these days is a comfy chair and a colossal urn of tea. This time, however, I contented myself with a huge cardboard tub of breadcrumb-coated chicken parts and by heckling my slower clubmates as they toiled through Ragley’s Matto Grosso. Keith came in for some especially rough treatment for losing to me in the swim.
And that was it – my training for Challenge Roth was done, and I’d finished it with my first ever triathlon medal, albeit with a not particularly impressive time of 5 hours 14 minutes. I was tired, and had the nagging feeling that I had done too many races, but I was obviously feeling strong enough over middle distances and had plenty of race practice under my belt. I was also now the holder of two British Masters running titles, a new Half Ironman PB and, best of all, a voucher for 10% off a training camp in France. Who says you can’t earn a living at sport?
The final two weeks before any Iron race are spent ‘tapering’, which is training speak for not doing very much except the odd spin of the legs to make sure your muscles don’t turn into a collection of reef knots. These days I just go for the odd gentle swim and jog with Freddie my springer spaniel. I avoid my bike after what happened to me in the lead-up to Ironman Florida – and not without good reason, either, because in the final few days before the race I still nearly came a cropper when I was cycling to work up a hill and a Range Rover overtook me, with the passenger emptying a Tesco carrier bag full of ice cubes in front of me. I know that my word is not exactly my bond but this is absolutely true, this really happened, and my immediate thoughts were:
a) Who the hell carries a bag full of ice cubes around with them?
b) Where they cold on his lap?
c) Why does the Range Rover cheapskate shop at Tesco?
What I should have thought was, ‘What kind of arsehole sets out to deliberately hurt someone else and then run away?’ I was more baffled than angry, especially because, as criminal masterminds go, the phantom ice cube dispenser wasn’t exactly up there with Professor Moriarty. The ice cubes just bounced all over the tarmac leaving me a clear and untroubled enough path to have the confidence to remove both hands from the handlebars and make the Gareth Hunt Nescafé advert gesture (sorry for those of you too young to get this not-exactly topical reference, but look it up on YouTube and you’ll see what I’m driving at). I’m well used to having a frank exchange of views with car drivers for whom a speed limit of 50 mph seems to represent the very minimum speed they should be driving at, and I find any disagreement I have with them over speeding, the use of mobile phones while driving and the non-existence of ‘road tax’ for cyclists is usually terminated with the use of a short phrase ending in ‘off’. This isn’t even the first time I’ve had stuff chucked at me out of car windows and in the past projectiles have included a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, a can of Carling Black Label and a glass, so with better timing the ice would have come in handy.
As I know to my cost, it pays to minimise risks in the final few days before your big race of the year, so I find it best to avoid the longer rides on my bike, and the main roads on my commute, instead just trying to lie still on the settee eating toast and annoying Nicky by leaving crumbs everywhere – although I’m not entirely sure if that counts as minimising risks!
Chapter 12
So here we go then – the training is done, the warm-up racing is done, and the convoluted explanation of my accidental status has been laboured to death. We are now Deutschland bound!
Those of you who have received better educations will recall that there were four of us travelling down to Nuremberg for our own particular trial – me, Mark, Joe and Steve the Indian – and with the levels of organisation for which we have become notorious, we travelled at completely different times. In Steve’s case, this made sense because he now lives in Brighton, while in my, Mark and Joe’s case it was because we are useless at making plans, having once (genuinely) lost each other in a car park before a training ride. The plan was that Mark and I would travel down to Dover in Mark’s enormous and fully gadgeted BMW with bikes laid lovingly in the back, while Joe and his wife Julie would travel separately in Joe’s ever-reliable Volvo, with
his bike slung on top of some daughters. Nicky and Mark’s wife, Jane, sensibly opted to avoid travelling down to southern Germany taking up valuable bike space in a car that they would also have to share with two increasingly anxious and snappy pillocks. Instead they decided to leave the day before the race, flying to Munich where we would pick them up.
Mark spends so much time in Europe that he could never be adopted by anyone who votes UKIP. This made him the ideal travelling companion for a lazy tosser like me, content to sit back and let those who know what they are doing get on with it. Mark had sorted the travel arrangements for the Channel tunnel, our hotel in Nuremberg, our route through France and the Low Countries, an overnight stay along the way, an eclectic selection of music for his iPod (a bit too much eighties heavy metal for my liking but passengers can’t be choosers) and a fantastic array of sweets. For my part, I brought my sunny disposition, a beginners guide to German and an iPod full of indie bands you have never heard of.
The German For Beginners guide I took was particularly important because wherever I go in the world, people always think I am German. I used to think this was just because of the lazy, stereotypical view Brits abroad have of Germans with blond hair, blue eyes and a slightly stern air about them. However, over the years I have been mistaken for being German by French, Poles, Danes, Yugoslavs and even the awful Dutch. This suggests there must be more to it, and even Germans seem to assume that I am German, which is slightly awkward because I don’t speak any German at all, and have showed no aptitude for learning it after once getting 4 per cent in an exam at school. I have half-remembered a few German phrases from my one term at school, which I have successfully trotted out when approached by British timeshare salespeople on various Mediterranean islands on the assumption that they don’t speak German either – and if they did they may wonder why, when asked if I speak any English, I have replied, ‘Nein, der gummibaum ist im dem topf.’ Roughly translated that means, ‘No, the rubber tree is in the pot.’
Putting my kit together before the road trip south was the usual whirl of trying to remember everything I could possibly need. The weather in Bavaria was predicted to be sunny and warm, but I have been fooled by forecasts too many times to take any chances so, as well as all the usual items that I take to any long-distance race, I was also cramming my bag with unseasonal items such as arm warmers, base layers, rain jackets, track mitts and buffs. Basically there could have been a flood or an advancing glacier and I would have been ready for it. Despite going abroad for the best part of a week, the everyday clothes that I took could have fitted into my friend Neill’s purse (sorry, I mean ‘Essentials Case’) and consisted of pants, socks, toothbrush, a selection of T-shirts from previous races and, just in case there was a pool at the hotel, a pair of ‘small’ Speedos that were so brief that I needed to visit a scrotal stylist before I could wear them in public.
My kit for Challenge Roth was as follows:
• Kuota Kredo bike that has ‘Ironman World Champion’ branded on the top tube. This, I presume, refers to someone other than me, unless you get called world champion for regularly finishing just inside the top 1,000.
• Spinnergy wheels purchased purely because they matched the colour of my bike, causing a massive row in the Brunt household and the revelation from my wife that her mother was right about me.
• Patriotic GB flag, nicked off a car during the Queen’s Jubilee.
• Hastily purchased flip-flops to avoid a pre-swim barefoot walk across a gravel path and then stupidly worn for a toe-shredding 20-minute walk to bike racking.
• Ironman Lanzarote 2008 finisher’s T-shirt, selected, of course, in a pathetic attempt to intimidate fellow competitors with my hardness and experience.
• A pair of England football shorts chosen with the specific intention of being confrontational but, in the event, only noticed by an Italian who laughed heartily.
• Brain-boiling sweat bucket, aka Giro aero helmet. One day I’ll be a good enough triathlete to wear this without feeling like a knob.
• The latest shiny-thing-that-must-be-owned and which is not compatible with the many costly accessories of its former incarnations – aka bike computer.
• Great Britain skinsuit, mostly selected because my old Coventry Triathletes one was now so old that sections of it had gone see-through, providing anyone cycling behind me with an unwanted view all the way up my backside to the back of my teeth.
• A pair of sturdy running shoes (stuff lightness and speed, I want cushioning).
• A pair of compression socks. I have no idea whether these actually make any difference, but I got them as a free gift at a race – by which I mean I probably paid about £80 for them.
• Lucky pants.
• Cuddly toy, fondue set, radio alarm clock and a set of his and hers matching luggage.
Having squeezed all of this into Mark’s car we bade our wives farewell, cranked up the Rush CD and headed for Dover. The journey passed quickly and, for two blokes off to do an Iron race, we were remarkably relaxed. Mark is a close friend and there’s an old saying that states that, ‘You should never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on.’ I know that Mark, like myself, would put that tea cosy on his head in a flash. Incidents of note on the journey down included driving out of a motorway services with the roof box still open and our kit in danger of being spread halfway across Kent, and the obligatory humiliation of handing over my passport at the immigration kiosk and watching them stare uncomprehendingly at my face. I have lost a fair bit of weight since my passport photo was taken and my face is considerably thinner than it used to be. It now looks like my old face reflected in the back of a spoon. It is always disconcerting to watch the expressions of people at passport control trying to work out what age I am given that I don’t so much look like I’m pushing 45 as dragging it. They clearly wonder what can possibly have happened to me to cause this transformation from a Miss Piggy lookalike into a scary Morrissey.
Once on the Continent the journey consisted of Mark buying something called a ‘Travel Pussy’ from a dispensing machine in a Belgian toilet that sat in the car window for the rest of the journey. Both of us were fascinated by the self-cleaning, revolving toilet seats in German motorway services, filming them on our phones to post on Facebook and also experimenting to see if we could stay sitting on them while they revolved. Soon our high jinks were at an end and reality began slowly to dawn as we rolled into the outskirts of Nuremberg. As I mentioned earlier, I had left Mark to book our hotel which was in the centre of the city just inside the old town walls. On the map, this looked like the perfect spot to stay, just a few miles away from the Race Headquarters in the small town of Roth, and handy to explore the city of Nuremberg itself, which I was keen to do.
As we drove up to the hotel doors I noticed a couple of bars opposite with blacked-out windows, coloured strips hanging from the doors and, lurking within, a couple of scantily clad ladies of advancing years or, as we in Britain call them, old slags. Yes, surprise surprise, Mark had booked us a hotel slap bang in the middle of Nuremberg’s red light area. He protested his innocence, but the fact that he is a renowned perv meant none of us really believed him. As we were checking in, Joe arrived having done the journey in one go and subjected his family to sleeping in a lay-by en route rather than stopping at a hotel. Julie gave us both a warm welcome, pointedly ignored Joe and then went straight to the bar, while we broke the news to Joe’s daughter that she was not likely to be the only one around this part of Nuremberg showing off her cleavage.
Having spent thirty minutes in my hotel room lovingly attending to my bike, I shoved a bit of deodorant up my armpits and also went to the bar, where Julie broke the news to us that the seedy bars opposite were only the starters. The main course was just around the corner where Nuremberg’s biggest knocking-shop could be found. After two quick pints of Erdinger, Mark and I decided to go and have a shufty in the interests of scientific research. Now
I like to think of myself as a cosmopolitan, experienced man of the world but I can honestly say this was the first time I had ever seen a half-a-mile-long, five-storey-high block of buildings with a semi-naked woman at every window, all calling me ‘Shatsi’ and beckoning me to engage them in conversation. As expected, our scrawny Ironman physiques and rabbit-in-headlights expressions attracted the attention of the many friendly ladies standing at their windows and we received numerous offers of sports massages, although they seemed to have a funny idea about where my hamstrings were. Being both married and British I spent most of the next five minutes staring at my shoes and mumbling, ‘Nicht sprechen Deutsch,’ as we walked past at the same speed I normally reserve for a five-kilometre run. We knew that our friends back at home would never believe us, so we spent a good deal of time trying to snatch a hurried photo through the windows of one of the sex-toy covered walls before we were collared by some pimp and carried off wriggling into the darkness.
Accidental Ironman Page 17