January we booked, and started training, March we didn’t keep on schedule and I messed up a tendon running on cold heels, and by early May, well, we were as ready as we could have been given the demands of two careers and two families! I veered between thinking it was utter madness and that broken down into constituent parts, a triathlon was perfectly possible. Now I’ve done it I realise it is a combination of the two...
The morning dawned clear and pale, and there was plenty of time to hoist bikes onto the rack on the car, make a banana-and-Malteser rescue bag, find plasters and other diversions from nerves – as ladies in the 35+ bracket, we were in the penultimate heat (called a wave in triathlon-speak) and had until 12.45pm to get our acts together.
The drive through Berkshire was pretty, and the sun began to come out, but I have no recollection of what we talked about and luckily I got us through Maidenhead and out to Dorney Lake without incident. The lake is magnificent – 1000m stretches of water in front of a huge beautiful pavilion, which looked from a distance like the focal point of an oriental painting. Parking was on the grass banks, not unlike a point – to –point but with bicycles not horses.
Moving through the quiet crowd towards the registration tent, the enormity of what we had agreed to do began to become real – there were real athletes here, with equipment that must have cost more than the value of my car, with spare lean bodies, and plenty in those race cycle helmets that make the wearer look like a comedy alien, especially when teamed with yellow-tinted wraparound sports glasses. We were both rather subdued as we lay our non-sports bikes down outside the registration tent, and bought our day licences. Just as at the start of public exams, your papers are in an envelope, our fates for the next couple of hours were sealed in envelopes – a fluorescent swimming hat and a batch of stickers so that bike, person and helmet all co-ordinated. It was just our luck that our wave’s hat colour was orange – a lovely colour on fruit, or at sunset, but next to winter-white English skin, not the happiest of colours.
There was nothing for it but to get going and we wheeled our non-important bikes and Ikea bag of wetsuits into a holding pen in front of the boathouse, called Transition. This is where you swap your wetsuit for your bike, and dump your bike before running. There were male entrants like streaks of lycra lightening whizzing through, barking instructions to keep out of the way, and marshals saying firmly “Enjoy it!” – they can no doubt spot a novice very easily. Wetsuits are not easy or elegant to get on, but with a friend it makes it less of a struggle, and we zipped ourselves in, and out of any pretension to having a recognisable figure, pinged our sunset hats onto our heads and waddled over to the edge of the lake. A jolly man with a loudhailer invited us to get acclimatised in the water – it was rather beautiful clear cold water, and had it been, say, a Canadian lake, it might have felt exhilarating. With competitive comments all around (“What is your strongest discipline?” – to which the answer is not, obviously “smacking” – “oh I wonder why she is wasting strokes like that”), one just knew keeping to the back was the only option. After being loud hailed through instructions, the bobbling orange heads all lined up and at the off, the front swimmers made a whirling splash that looked to me for all the world like a feeding frenzy in a piranha pool. My ladylike breaststroke kept me well to the back, where the safety boat clearly identified a potential flounderer, and kept close by. Visions of being hauled out like a prize tuna were a good spur to keep swimming. It’s hard swimming where you can’t actually feel like you are making progress but after what felt like 20 minutes + there was the landing stage and out I went, to rather muted encouragement from the timing marshals.
Elite triathletes peel off their wetsuits and hop onto their bikes in under a minute – we took 7, partly out of puff, partly because a sodden wetsuit and exerted limbs don’t co-operate with each other that well, but mostly because of chat (most unprofessional, but we weren’t doing it for that!). The next ¾ hour was really rather wonderful – purring round smooth pale paths up and down the sides of the lake, over sinewy elegant bridges, going really fast and on lap two, being greeted by our children roaring encouragement – what a spur that was. I realised I was the cyclist who made the others laugh (basket still on the front of my cycle, flask of Ribena held in place by a large elastic band and my elderly bell tinkling away), as they whistled past like sleek jet planes, on amazing thin cycles with extra handlebars out to the front, like techno-stag-beetles. I could have cycled on and on in the sweet air (aha! Maybe it’s my Strongest Discipline!), but it had to end so we could do the running bit.
Well, the running was purgatory. The track was quite dull – just up and down the side of the lake, so we’d got to know that view pretty well already from the safety and comfort of our bike saddles. And after 1km, the troublesome tendon started to hurt again (how dare it – I had trained it into submission, and it had been behaving well for two months...). But I kept running – just then, the thought of children with meningitis, of which both Kathy and I had had more experience than one would wish on a worst enemy, made the exhaustion and the pain seem trivial. I just kept running, got rather outraged when a shoelace came undone, and went on again. Thud thud thud thud. I resorted to counting to make space in my head to keep going. My bingo wings were flapping away – most unkind of them, as all the swimming training had toned them into submission, but I think at this point my whole body had begun to say “enough already!”, and they had no tone left in them.
By the last quarter of the run, I could feel my face contorted into that expression that the losing team in the boat race wears, although their pain is no doubt far greater than mine, as I had no pretensions to anything other than finishing. As the last 500m came to meet me, there was a very encouraging shout from the side, and there was the finish. I don’t think I have ever been more relieved to finish anything, not even childbirth, and I am afraid that as Kathy and I hugged each other I did let out some not very fresh swear words, and a small girl standing nearby heard me. That I do regret, but not taking part, and especially not the fantastic support that we received from all the friends and family who sponsored us – at the last count it was £1200. It may sound corny, but setting oneself a challenge like this, and then putting it out to tender, so to speak, made all the difference. The work of the MRF is vital, valuable, incalculable, and we are very proud to have been able to make a contribution to it.
Posted in Fundraising by Louise Ansdell on 01 June 2010
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