I’ve been quiet for a while. I have a few reasons for that—including working on my next book—but one of them is because I’ve been training for a triathlon. In case you’re wondering, being a long distance triathlete and being a writer have a surprising amount in common. For one thing, you have to develop endurance. For another—at least in my case—you need to be aware of your feelings, physical, mental and emotional. And finally, you need to have a clear idea of what success and failure mean to you. But more of those things another time. Right now, I’m telling the story of the race I did in Geelong, Australia, recently. It’s not a travelogue, although Geelong is a bayside city with many attractions. It’s just a story about being an athlete on the day.
It began around 5.30am when I was sitting in my car in the dark, a couple of hundred metres from the race venue.
‘Why am I such an idiot?’ I was thinking. ‘Why do I keep doing these things to myself?’ My usual pre-race meltdown had struck. My meltdown doesn’t care that I’ve been training for months and have done a lot of similar races before. It’s primal and it’s always terrified.
My lovely partner Helen spoke sensible words to me as I got out of the car and walked downhill towards where my bike was located along with 1500-odd others in the part of the triathlon course known as ‘transition’. It’s a place you transit through between the swim, ride and run stages of a race. A nice thing happened there to settle me down.
They tend to put all the old guys together at one end of the transition zone but this time a couple of younger ones found themselves there as well. We had a chat and a laugh about them being mixed up with the wrinklies and by the time I warmed up with a bit of running and swimming I’d shaken off the heebies and was calm and ready to go.
The thought of spending six hours in my case (a lot less for most others) swimming, cycling and running can be a daunting one. But it can also be very satisfying and, dare I say despite the inevitable periods of pain, even pleasurable. I find the trick is to try and take pride in everything-the fact that you’ve made it to the start and beyond, and the fact that you can do all or even some of it.
The morning was calm although a little on the cool side at 13 degrees. With water temperature around 20 and the sun coming up with a forecast of 30 it was looking good for someone like me (I’ve lived most of my life in the tropics.)
Within each age group (mine was men 55+) you had to self seed your swim based on your estimated swim. With a bit of trepidation I put myself in the fastest group, hoping to swim 1.9km in less than 33 minutes. I thought if nothing else the faster ones would drag me along.
My hopes were fulfilled and after ploughing through the water for a bit over half an hour with hundreds of other crazies I ran up the swim finish ramp towards transition.
This is where I have to tell you about my wetsuit, who goes by the name of Flatman. For some reason known only to himself, Flatman’s zip had stuck. This meant a stupendous struggle to get the top half of his tight-fitting rubber envelope off my body, accompanied by significant cursing, all while running as fast as I could to where my bike was suspended from a metal rack among all the others. I found it okay and at last managed to discard Flatman leaving me a lot lighter and freer. In my red and black lycra triathlon suit, I ran my bike towards what they call the mount zone.
A heap of other people were doing the same thing and some of them were among the lucky ones capable of leaping on to their bikes with grace and power. Sadly I’m not one of them. I have to sit down, put on my bike shoes (they have little cleats that attach them to the pedals to make you go faster) and then get on. My bike’s name, incidentally, is Venus. She’s a fast lady and her only handicap is me.
It takes me about three hours to ride 90 km on a good day and luckily for me this was a good day. Unlike many cyclists/triathletes I don’t worry about keeping track of my average speeds or power outputs or anything technical while riding. I’m old school. The only time I look at my bike speedo is when I’m going fast downhill—it’s great for the confidence.
Anyway, the flats and gentle hills of the Geelong bike course were finally behind me as I ran my bike back into transition, pulled off my helmet and grabbed the bits and pieces I needed for 21km of running—mostly sachets of energy gel, because your body likes fuel on long distances. As I jogged out of transition, I heard the race announcer say the name of the athlete who was leading my age group. It wasn’t me. But then he added my name and I realised I was somewhere near the front. (I should add that it’s possible to do a whole race without having any idea where you are in the field. It’s a consequence of there being so many people out there, all in different stages of the race.)
The Geelong Ironman 70.3 course is very picturesque, taking runners along the foreshore and through the Botanical Gardens. With so many athletes of all ages on the course, from lithe professionals who have finished before you start, to keen amateurs of all ages and stages, there is a fellow feeling grounded in mutual suffering and joy as well, if that makes sense. Some people like a friendly word and others are totally focused. I’m somewhere in between, concentrating hard when I need to go into interior mode and other times exchanging a joke or a friendly few words.
After two and a bit hours of running interspersed with short bursts of walking, the red-carpeted finish chute finally appeared. As I went under the arch and checked the on-screen time, I knew I’d done as well as I could have expected. But a surprise was in store and it came from Helen: ‘Guess what? You’ve won your age group!’
I was stunned. What did it mean? It meant that I was first in a group of seven men aged between 70 and 74, and it also meant I was the national champion for my age group over the distance. But there was more—a place at the Ironman 70.3 World Championship.
It’s an odd thing, finding a form of success at an advanced age. In most aspects of my life, including writing, I’ve experienced a good chunk of failure. Our culture, with its lopsided emphasis on what it narrowly defined as ‘success’ doesn’t necessarily help us to deal resiliently with our perceived shortcomings. So I know that winning a race can simultaneously be a big and a small thing depending on how you view it.
I’m going to write more about so-called success and failure in my next post. In the meantime, I’ll bask in a sense of achievement that has come late and unexpectedly—and, like most achievements, came with a bucket load of support from others. But that’s a story for another day.
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