Ironwoman Part 2

Training at work is unique. Running on a treadmill on a moving boat is an art form. Seven Kestrel is 125 metres long and 24 metres wide. There are not many places you can go. You can’t pop back to land when you fancy and the amount of mileage you can clock up in a day, mostly spent at the computer, is very limited.

The boat is always moving, even in the calmest of weather. The diving bells are up and down, the 120 tonne crane is always busily leaning over the side, lifting and lowering things and the ship’s heading changes regularly.

In rough weather, despite being quite stable, the vessel lifts, rolls and heaves and sometimes the bang of a wave against your porthole makes you jump out of your skin.

Seven Kestrel working at a windfarm. Image: Subsea 7

Russel and I use Training Peaks combined with Strava to track my progress. We converse mainly over WhatsApp which is the offshore communication channel of choice. Our schedule has to work around weather, port calls when the medic (me) is super busy, and crew change days which move multiple times over one week.

The great thing about having a coach is they do all the number crunching for you. It wasn’t long before Russel got the measure of what I could and could not do and he was soon dialled in to giving me training sessions that were spot on. Hard enough to get me fit and faster and stronger, but not so hard that I couldn’t finish them.

Jesolo 70:3 came around and I’d planned the whole thing meticulously to perfection. The hotel was superb and had a nice spa to relax in. I rented a car so I could get about easily and run up and down to the Ironman village for registration and shopping.

Oh my word – shopping!

There were so many lovely things in the Ironman village I had to restrain myself from buying all of it!

Registration was painless and I took the time to write a little note for my uncle Phil who I’d lost only a few weeks before. He was basically the Dad I never had.

I was going to miss his funeral. But I’m certain he wouldn’t have wanted me to throw away all that hard work on his account. I knew he’d be watching and behind me all the way.

I popped my wetsuit on and walked down the pristine sandy beach to the water’s edge. It wasn’t as cold as expected and the waves had gone away as the weather started to settle. I didn’t really feel like I had much energy, so I just did a slow 400m swim and got out.

Russel said I was likely to feel sluggish during tapering week, so I put it down to that. Then I went and changed by the car and jumped on my bike.

My Orro venturi went beautifully with her new tyres and tune up at the Ironman village. The Italian traffic though was a little scary, so I bailed early and ran for safety back to the car.

The evening was spent packing the Ironman specific bags for transition.

Transition is considered the fourth discipline of triathlon. It is where the athlete switches from one discipline to the next, dumping swimming gear for the bike and then the bike for running gear. There are two transitions; T1 is from swim to bike and T2 is from bike to run.

For the professionals, races can be won or lost in transition. In regular triathlons, your bike, trainers, helmet, shades, cycling shoes, towel, race belt which holds your race number, all reside in a neat pile under your bike which is ‘racked’ on your numbered station, usually hanging on a scaffold railing among hundreds of other bikes.

At Ironman events, things are done slightly differently, otherwise the transition area would look like a burglary at a jumble sale.

Athletes are given coloured and numbered bags: Blue for Bike, Red for Run. They hold all your equipment you need for the next phase of the race.

Transition opens the day before the race and athletes started to congregate at the entrance to the two huge transition areas.

Blue bags are hung on pegs with your corresponding race number and the same for the blue bag rack. They started to fill up, with 2800 athletes taking part. I racked Orro on number 721.

I planned to walk the triathlon routes the next morning as it would look very different once all the bikes had been racked. It is imperative that athletes remember how to find their bikes or you could be in transition a lot longer than planned!

My next job was to go and find some food. I don’t have a sweet tooth and anything sugary or sticky will go untouched, so planning my nutrition for something useful to me that I would actually eat, always proves difficult. A mouthful of sandwich and focaccia seemed the way to go, along with some dried papaya, mini pizza crisp breads and tasteless carb powder for one of my water bottles.

I cut everything up into bite size pieces and put them in ziplock bags ready to stuff into my cycling jersey and transition bags on race morning.

As I walked round transition, I felt lethargic and had developed a dry cough. It seemed to come out of nowhere and initially I just put it down to the hotter climate. As the day went on, my voice changed and the coughing became more regular. I started to feel wheezy in my upper chest. I prayed it was an allergy of some sort but deep down I knew I was getting sick.

I forced a pizza down the night before the race but didn’t really want it and couldn’t really taste it. I drank full fat coke in an attempt to stifle my cough, but it didn’t work. I headed to bed early, struggling to get to sleep as I kept on coughing.

I woke the day of the race before my 5am alarm. The hotel Atlantico Jesolo amazingly had laid on breakfast super early for the athletes and the volunteers staying there.

I was still coughing. I just didn’t know what to do. I had to get on that start line in the hope that this was all a fuss about nothing. Better to start and not finish than to not start and find out it was just an allergy.

I stashed my food in transition, checked my bike tyres and changed into my wetsuit. Any bubbly excitement was killed by the incessant cough and generally feeling rubbish.

The party atmosphere was electric, and I desperately wanted to enjoy it, but I stood in the heat of the swim pen knowing full well I was getting sicker by the minute.

I figured I could only really die on the swim, so planned to get that part over and done with and the rest would be just academic.

For various reasons, the traditional spectacle of a mass start had been curbed to staggered starts. Swimmers were initially divided into ‘pens’ according to their swim speeds and then let go 6 at a time, 10 seconds apart.

Marshalls held the swimmers back and we were standing around in the heat for a long time as 2800 athletes started the swim, 6 at a time.

I should have started in a faster pen, but knowing I was sick I decided to play it safe and go in the slowest group.

That was a mistake.

As I got closer to the start line, we filtered into lanes on the sand. I felt quite emotional at this point. I was on the start line of an Ironman 70.3. This was real.

In a few seconds I would start swimming and would not let up racing for another 7 or so hours.

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