Thomas Hellreigel had set a new race record of 4 hours 24 minutes 50 seconds for the bike. But Van Lierde remained calm and used the enforced rest to compose himself for the run. Dave Scott was in the field but too far back to figure in the finish, despite an amazing 2-hour 45-minute marathon. Van Lierde chased Hellreigel, who had built up a lead of more than 5 minutes, even though he was hampered by a tightening hamstring. By the time Hellreigel reached the Natural Energy Lab, Van Lierde had cut his lead back to 2 minutes. Some 3 km (1.9 miles) out from the finish, Van Lierde ghosted up behind Hellreigel, then powered past him to cross the line in a race record of 8 hours 4 minutes 8 seconds. Hellreigel held his nerve and came in 2 minutes later.
The ride had taken the edge off Greg’s running legs but he still finished an excellent third in his fastest Hawaiian time of 8 hours 18 minutes 57 seconds—two and a half minutes faster than his winning time two years before.
STORIES OFTEN HAVE what TV producers call ‘a natural out’–a compelling and logical end.
Chapter 9
A Natural Out
BACK IN SEPTEMBER 1993, like millions of his countrymen, Greg’s Aussie heart had swelled with pride when he heard the International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch announce: ‘…and the winner is…Syd-en-ee!’ Sydney had beaten Manchester, Istanbul, Beijing and Berlin for the right to host the 2000 Games. Greg was even more delighted the following year when the IOC announced that triathlon would debut as a full-medal sport in Sydney. In 1997, the International Triathlon Union took a further step down the road to Sydney when it agreed on a formula for a point series that would allow triathletes to qualify to represent their countries at the Olympics.
Prior to the ITU announcement, Greg had noticed that his enthusiasm for the grind of competition had started to wane. For the first time in his life, he had begun to seriously question how long he wanted to push himself and nurse his body through the pain and pressure of training and competing at the top level. ‘I was standing on the start line and I was pretty blasé about it. I was turning up, and my natural talent just took over and I would still be winning races, about 4 out of the 5 in the space of six weeks, but I wasn’t that motivated. I reckon I was going.’
From his broadcasting experience, Greg knows that stories often have what the producers called ‘a natural out’—a compelling and logical end. Looking back, he can see that 1997 or 1998 would have been his ‘natural out’. Except for one thing—the chance for a final incandescent blaze of glory in Sydney.
What started as a fleeting thought started to play as a feature-length movie in his subconscious. The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games were almost within touching distance, he felt, just three short years to go. How good would it be for the boy from Greenacre via the Shire to win the first ever Olympic gold for triathlon in his home town? He would have the Triathlon World Championship Golden Grand Slam—victories over all major distances and an Olympic gold medal. It would be the ultimate Hollywood ending to his career.
He found the golden lure irresistible, so he began to slowly set himself to achieve the dream, feeling an unaccustomed strain. ‘I think that the Games started to bring a little bit of pressure, a different kind of pressure. And there was the pressure of qualifying. Although I was ranked number one in the world, that didn’t qualify me for the Olympic Games. I’d have to perform well in the two Olympic Games selection races or get that third subjective choice spot, which I couldn’t count on. I really thought about it a lot and I really put a lot of pressure on myself to actually perform. That’s out of character for me.’
Greg’s concern was due to the strange qualifying system. There were two qualifying races. The winner of the first race qualified for a place on the team. If that person won the second race, the second placed finisher would then qualify. Then, there was a third ‘subjective’ place to be awarded at the discretion of the selectors. Greg, as the then world number one, would have had a strong claim for the position but so would Miles Stewart, the best performed Australian from the previous year’s world titles.
After his third place at the 1996 Ironman, Greg had taken a couple of months off. When he came to Australia to compete in the St George Triathlon Grand Prix in January the following year he was grossly undertrained for the first time he could remember. (Greg and Sian had gone to Lake Tahoe, where they skied and partied and took a complete break from training for a change.) ‘I came ninth in Manly in a very fast race—a triple super sprint. I knew I was vulnerable. I was just trying to intimidate the rest of the field because they knew that I was always one to beat.’
Greg knew he was in trouble at Manly when he placed himself in race positions where he’d normally be comfortable but instead of his heart rate being at its normal aerobic level, he was struggling well into his anaerobic threshold. He felt like a 2 am partier with too many beers on board—on the verge of throwing up. After the race he knew he would have to take immediate remedial action. He decided some desperate measures were needed.
Greg went to Australia’s highest area, around Thredbo, for a concentrated three-week block of training. After two weeks of solid training there at altitude, he subjected himself to an extraordinary day of workouts, just one week out from his next race in Adelaide. In the morning, he swam 6 km (3.7 miles) in the Australian Institute of Sports pool at the base of the Thredbo ski slopes, at an altitude of about 1400 m (4593 ft). He then rode a 6-hour ‘turbo trainer’ on a stationary machine. He knew that riding inside was a harder workout than riding outside because there was no freewheeling and he would always be forced to drive the wheels. Greg aimed to spin his pedals at 90 revolutions per minute. Scientific testing had shown that this was his most efficient rate. ‘While I trained on the stationary bike, I watched the entire Australian Open tennis final, and it was a three-setter. It was Pete Sampras and Albert Costa. It ran for about 3 hours and 45 minutes. Then I put a video on and watched a 2-hour movie and still had 15 minutes to spare. The beauty of that day was that I never went anywhere near my median aerobic threshold. I stayed below 135 beats a minute the whole time.’
This drastic training regimen worked amazingly well. Greg won his next Grand Prix event. It was an extraordinary example of his recuperative powers and it heralded the start of a purple patch that saw him notch up three firsts and two seconds in his next five starts.
Greg was selected for the ‘shadow’ Australian Olympic team of six men and six women (the likely team members whom the selectors fund and expect to be in the final team). As part of the team’s preparation, Dr Diana Robinson gave each member a series of extensive medical checkups. Greg’s blood tests came back with some strange results. His ferritin (or iron) levels were off the charts. Greg was in Mooloolaba training with the team when he was asked to do a follow-up blood test at a local laboratory. The results confirmed that he suffered from hereditary haemochromatosis, a relatively common iron overload disease that causes the body to absorb and store too much iron. It is a manageable but serious condition. Without treatment, the extra iron can build up in the organs and damage them. Left unchecked, it can cause the organs to fail—a strange irony for an ironman.
While iron is an essential body nutrient, too much can cause major problems. Most people absorb around 10 per cent of the iron contained in the food they eat to meet their bodies’ needs, but people like Greg, who suffer from haemochromatosis, absorb more iron than their body needs or can handle. Because Greg’s body has no natural way to rid itself of the excess iron, it stores the iron in body tissues, particularly in the liver, heart and pancreas. Once absorbed in the body, iron becomes part of haemoglobin, a molecule in the blood that transports oxygen from the lungs to all body tissues. For Greg this meant good news…and bad news. ‘It probably explains why I was such a good endurance athlete because the oxygen-carrying capabilities of someone with haemochromatosis are far superior to someone without it. I’ve been told it’s almost like taking EPO.’
EPO, or erythropoietin, is a protein hormone produc
ed by the kidney. When released into the bloodstream, it binds with receptors in the bone marrow and stimulates the production of red blood cells. In conventional medicine, EPO is used to treat certain forms of anaemia, often those caused by chronic kidney failure. Because it accelerates red blood cell production, EPO also increases the body’s capacity to carry oxygen. In simple terms, the drug stimulates bone marrow to produce more red blood cells, allowing the user to benefit from more oxygen in the bloodstream and, thus, have more stamina. All an athlete needed was three or four injections a week for a few weeks and he could experience as much as a 10 per cent improvement in performance.
This side effect brought EPO into the sights of sporting cheats. EPO provided unscrupulous athletes with a new way of ‘blood doping’, an illegal method of increasing their red blood cells and thus improving athletic performance. Before the cheats discovered EPO’s illicit possibilities, blood-doping cheats would ‘donate’, say, 1 litre (35 fl oz) of their blood before a big race. It would be kept in storage while the athlete’s body naturally replaced it over about three weeks. When the natural blood replacement was complete, the athlete would have his ‘donated’ blood transfused back into his body—effectively giving him that extra unit of blood and the improved oxygen-carrying capacity that came with it. The advent of EPO meant that blood-doping cheats no longer had to ‘donate’ and transfuse. They could simply shoot up with EPO and artificially increase their red cells and thus their oxygen-carrying capacity. EPO was outlawed in the late 1990s by sporting bodies around the world, not just because its use gave an unfair advantage but also because it entailed some serious health risks.
EPO use can be lethal. It can dangerously lift the percentage of red cells in the blood, known as the haematocrit. In simple terms, a low haematocrit means thin blood and a high one means thick blood. EPO thickens the blood. Past a certain level, that thickening can clog blood vessels. In the worst case, it can cause strokes or heart attacks. EPO can be particularly hazardous to endurance athletes: dehydration alone raises the haematocrit, but dehydration plus the effects of EPO can raise it to critical, even fatal, levels.
But while international sporting bodies banned the use of EPO, initially the authorities had no accurate tests for it: EPO occurs naturally in the body, so it was hard to establish normal levels for it, and the EPO made in laboratories was practically indistinguishable from the natural form.
Nevertheless, some cheats were caught red-handed. In the 1998 Tour de France, some team doctors and team members were caught with bags of EPO doses. Testing has now caught up with the cheats and a urine test can differentiate between artificial and naturally occurring EPO. That test plus the health risks have deterred many cheats from using the substance. Greg says, ‘When I told people I’d been diagnosed with haemochromatosis, some of the sceptics started pointing the finger at me and accusing me of using EPO. It was quite ironic.’
The doctors told Greg they had to treat his haemochromatosis by blood letting—draining units of his blood and allowing his body to replace them, thus reducing the overall amount of iron in his circulatory system. They told him it shouldn’t affect his performance as long as he did it away from racing. Greg did not welcome this advice. He learnt that it took 30 to 50 days for the body to regenerate its full level of blood. In the hectic world of elite-level competition that was virtually unworkable.
‘So, basically, I neglected it. I found out that you don’t normally get diagnosed with haemochromatosis until you’re in the fifth or sixth decade of your life. And even then, it was usually discovered in routine testing when you went to the doctor for a check-up and they found out that you had cirrhosis of the liver. I thought, “I’m in my early 30s. Time is on my side.” Sian and Paula were adamant that I wasn’t looking after myself but I thought, “I can probably put it off for a little while, until I’ve finished as an athlete.”’
Greg felt he knew his body well. He knew his heart intimately. He knew his resting or sleeping heart rate would range from 30 to 35 beats per minute (bpm). During the day his resting heart rate was between 40 and 45 bpm—compared to the average person’s resting rate of between 60 and 90 bpm. Greg could remain in his aerobic zone when he swam at 148 bpm, rode at 150 bpm and ran at about 145 bpm. He would drop into his anaerobic zone (or go into oxygen debt) when swimming from 166 bpm, riding at 158 bpm and running about 162 bpm. If he had to, Greg could crank up his heart rate into the 190s on a very fast track run and he could maintain those levels over 10 km (6.2 miles) or so. But the marathon was a different animal. In the Ironman, Greg always tried to keep his rate below 155 bpm because of the impact of the heat, humidity and wind in Hawaii.
As his career developed, Greg had read widely on scientific advances in training and equipment. He was constantly on the lookout for any knowledge or gear that would give him an edge. When he learnt of the impact of heat on performance, he made sure he wore a cap rather than a visor to prevent additional heat reaching the top of his head. He would also wear lighter coloured clothing to reflect as much heat as possible. And he expanded his understanding of the impact of other factors on performance. ‘I see the Ironman as having five legs, not three. Swim, ride and run are the first three. The fourth is your mental approach and the fifth is nutrition.’
Both the fourth and fifth legs came into play in the marathon. Greg knew from bitter experience that if you were at risk of bonking in the marathon, you had to be astute enough to adjust your race plan to cope with the changing situation. ‘If you’re running 4-minute kilometres, that’s a 2:48 marathon. But if you’re reduced to running 5-minute 30-second to 6-minute kilometres for 5 km (3.1 miles), you lose 10 minutes. But what if you went out a little bit easier, you got in your nutrition and you ran 3 minutes slower than usual? Well, you’re still 7 minutes ahead of the curve. At the end, those factors can become critical.’
By the end of 1997, Greg had put all his eggs into winning the International Triathlon Union’s World Cup series. For the first time since 1987, by his own choice, he didn’t race in Hawaii. He was well placed going into the ITU World Championship in Perth, after a fifth in Stockholm and second in Hamilton and in Sydney.
But during the World Championship race, things went wrong from the start. Early in the swim Greg was next to fellow Australian Chris McCormack. In the turmoil of the initial sprint, Chris’s elbow struck Greg, snapped his head back, forced his goggles into his eye and left Greg with mild concussion. At first it wasn’t so bad as Greg battled along with the lead pack, almost swimming from memory. But, when he came out of the water, he found himself disoriented as he ran to his bike. ‘I lost about 45 seconds. I hardly knew where I was, and when I got up, I couldn’t really focus or move properly and I lost contact. I’ve never been punched by a boxer but I imagine what I experienced was pretty close to being belted right on the kisser!’
He regained his wits after a short time on the bike and worked hard to make up ground. But he was forced to ride alone in no-man’s land, between the lead pack and the rest of the field, while the pack increased its lead by taking advantage of the drafting that was permitted in the series. He recovered sufficiently to record the fastest run leg, running from 15th into 6th place, but it wasn’t enough. ‘I had honestly felt that I had been going to win my second Olympic-distance World Triathlon Championship that day. So I was a little bit bummed about that.’
However, Greg finished 1997 on a good note by winning the Laguna Phuket Triathlon, and he looked forward to 1998—his eyes were on the prize of the World Championships because of its associated Olympic point qualifying series.
In August Greg made it into the Australian team for the World Championships in Lausanne, Switzerland, home of the IOC, and was determined to set himself up for the Olympics. But racing in a warm-up super sprint event in Koblenz, Germany—Jurgen Zack’s home town— Greg struck some serious trouble. In a tight finish to the first of three sprint races, he took second place to Simon Lessing of Britain. In the second race, he led out of
the water and flew into the transition. As always, he jumped onto his bike and started pedalling with his feet resting on top of the bike shoes, which were already attached to his pedals. Usually, once he had built up sufficient momentum he would seamlessly slip his feet into his shoes and power off. Not this time.
‘Normally we don’t even look when we’re slipping into our shoes— we do it by feel. Our wheels are thick, deep carbon rims with bladed stainless steel spokes that have a razor-sharp edge. I got my right foot in my shoe OK but then I put my left around to do the same and got it caught in the back wheel. My back wheel just stopped dead.’
Greg didn’t look down. He didn’t want to. He couldn’t feel any pain so he slipped his foot into his shoe and pushed off. After a few laps he started feeling a strange insistent throbbing in his foot and he knew it was serious. ‘I limped into the transition on the bike, took my foot out of my shoe and I said, “I think you guys need to take me to the hospital.” When I looked down, my big toe was hanging off. I went to hospital and they sewed my toe back on. I made it back in time for the after-race party—that was good. But I had to pull out of the World Championship team and that finished my year.’
The toe was very slow to heal. More seriously, even after his toe had healed, Greg began to experience some more doubts about his mental resolve to continue racing. ‘When I was better again, I realised I wasn’t psyched. I’d find myself on the start line without my usual passion for the competition. The last part of 1998 was really tough.’
By the first race of 1999, Greg had regained his hunger. He started the year with two wins and a second in his first three lead-up races to the opening ITU World Cup event in Ishigaki, Japan. ‘I was on fire in April. I went to Ishigaki and had a big win in the first World Cup of the year.’
Heart of a Champion Page 12