Ironwoman - Part 1
“Everybody put your hands in the aaiiiiiirrrrrrr!!”
The tannoy boomed across Jesolo Lido beach, Venice, Italy as 2800 athletes dressed in wetsuits and wearing yellow swim caps, raised their arms in unison.
Stomp stomp clap - stomp stomp clap…it went on.
I wanted to join the party, I so badly wanted to join.
Instead, I stared into the abyss, knowing I was doomed to failure. I had started coughing the day before the Ironman 70:3 triathlon race – a dry, hacking cough and I’d started to feel ‘achy’ and just not right.
I’m in that lot somewhere….
My voice had gone hoarse, and I was getting breathless doing nothing, with my heart rate refusing to budge from 106. It was normally 56 at rest, owing to the 8 months of intensive training I’d done for this very moment.
Now, I was staring out to sea, looking for the distance between jet skis in case I needed to hail one for help. This was not how it was meant to be and the situation I had dreaded.
Ironman is probably the best-known brand of triathlon. Triathlon is a multisport competition, beginning with a swim, followed up by a bike course then finishing up with a run. In between each discipline is the process of ‘transition’ where the athletes must switch between sports, and this is all done against the clock as well and is included in the total time. Practising putting your socks on, with wet feet quickly, is a thing!
Triathlons have varying distances. From super sprints which are very short with only a few hundred metres of swimming, 20 or so km or cycling and a 3-5km run at the end. Then there is the extreme end such as the holy grail of the ‘full’ Ironman, which is:
Swim: 2.4 miles (3.9 km)
Bike: 112 miles (180.2 km)
Run: 26.2 miles (42.2 km) or, a full marathon.
In total, a full Ironman Triathlon covers 140.6 miles (226.3 km).
Given I work on a ship at sea 6 months of the year, a full Ironman wasn’t realistically achievable. Despite being surrounded by the ocean, it is not permitted to swim. It’s probably not the best idea to hop off a North Sea dive vessel into 160m of water with 6 thrusters going, saturation divers and ROVs in the water and currents running…besides, it would be considered a suicide attempt, and definitely career-ending.
Despite this, you can’t explain this to folk at home who just say, “Can’t you just swim off the boat?”
No, I cannot. And that is why.
My office, Dive Support Vessel - Seven Kestrel, working at a previous office, the Claymore platform, North Sea. Taken from another previous office, Boka Atlantis.
So, swim training is limited for me. I only get so much time I can reasonably spend in the gym and the gym on board is also limited. Some days, you cannot go in due to bad weather and some days other people will be using the equipment you need, and your time window has passed.
When I get home, I have to run my house and do adulting things, plus try to make time to see friends that I miss when I’m away so much. It can be a lonely existence just training all the time without having any social time with people I know. Most of them are at work midweek when I’m off on shore leave.
So, it is not as idyllic as it sounds.
I figured a half Ironman, or an Ironman 70:3 was achievable and still quite a challenge.
I was aiming at an Olympic (standard) distance triathlon (Swim 1500m, Ride 35.5km, Run 10km) in my favourite spot Lake Annecy, France, but was worried about getting registered and getting a slot. I got itchy feet and wanted an interim challenge.
It was as if Facebook read my mind. A Venice-Jesolo Ironman 70:3 advert popped up. A pan flat course for both the bike and run seemed idyllic. Without blinking, I signed up.
Then I told my coach.
Russel Carter is a legend in cave diving circles. Understated, but hard core, his mantra is well known within the Cave Diving Group of Great Britain: “If you weren’t hard enough, you shouldn’t have come!”
A significant support diver in the expeditions in the 1990s in the Doux de Coly, France, Russel moved on to Ironman triathlon and didn’t do that by half either, finishing no less than 10 full distance Ironman races. Some of these were on particularly tough courses, such as Lanzarote and Mallorca.
Russel Carter racing Ironman Barcelona. He’s in there somewhere!
He had been following my progress as I dabbled in sprint triathlon over the last few years and was always on hand to offer advice or check in on how I was doing. It was no surprise then that when I asked, as a level 3 triathlon coach, if he’d like to coach me to Annecy. Of course, he agreed on the proviso that I kept his 100% finisher record intact.
A half Ironman wasn’t on the table. Now we were going to have to get down to work.
An Ironman 70:3 is basically half the full Ironman distance. I guess it suited me, being little miss average. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Good enough, but never the best.
Given I’d limped round sprint distance triathlons finishing in the bottom 20 with no real clue about how to train for multi-sport, this would be a proper challenge.
I’d held an amateur jockey’s license in my 20s, riding in 3-mile steeplechases and raced kayak marathon, finishing mid-divison – and I won the high jump on school sports day and 2nd in the 400 metres! I was on the school netball team – always goal attack, never goal shooter even though I scored the most goals…and I was in the hockey team and went to ‘away’ school competitions. So, I wasn’t a complete slacker at sport. I considered this an achievement, given I was not blessed with athletic genes, or the sort of parents who come to watch me compete. Neither of them turned up to my first horse race.
My second race on board Clashbridane.
But athletics was another game altogether.
I mean, why be crap at one sport when you can be crap at three?
I grew up knowing how to ride a racehorse but couldn’t ride a bike. Everything I did was in the shadow of an absent father and an uninterested, unsupportive mother who said no to anything that cost money or involved any effort on her part, such as getting out of bed early or driving anywhere.
Triathlon is not a cheap sport. I could only embark on it once I had learned to ride a bike in 2020. Plus, I had to get myself a decent job to be able to be able afford it.
I spent the deep winter and early spring taking myself away on solo training camps in between my work rotation, first to Lanzarote then to Mallorca. The sea was calm and warm enough to swim in and the cycling is world class. The running through the volcanic landscape in Lanzarote was preferable to the streets of Alcudia in Mallorca, but I kept on increasing the mileage under the daily watchful eye of Russel.
