If At First You Don’t Succeed, Tri and Tri Again

When people ask me about my hobbies and I tell them I am a keen triathlete, the look on their face is usually worth photographing and having as a screensaver on my mobile phone. One person even asked what I’d done in a past life that I should feel the need to punish myself so grievously. I think I told him that I’d killed a bunch of people and then told him the actual truth – it’s not a punishment, it’s a blast. It can be quite physically exhausting but I’m not complaining. On the days that I have a race or train for a few hours, I’m always in bed early and asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I’d sooner that than insomnia.

My real “eureka” moment as far as triathlon goes was when my dad took me to see the triathlon at the Olympics in 2000. I was eleven then, and we got a pretty good position that allowed us to move and see as much of the course as possible. It really stuck with me that these guys are different than most athletes. Its one thing to be a fast or durable runner, and another to be able to combine it with another sport altogether. To be able to combine it with two sports really made me shake my head in wonder, and since that day I’ve been keenly interested, scanning the listings of every sports channel weeks in advance to see if there’s going to be any coverage of a triathlon from anywhere in the world. Sometimes I’m lucky, sometimes not, but then I’d sooner do than watch anyway.

For a while I was considering trying out to go full-time, but common sense had to take the lead. I have long been a pragmatist and realised that university represents my best chance of going on to earn money, so the triathlon really is just a bit of fun and a way of keeping fit. I’m still deadly serious about competition even if it is amateur, and I was overjoyed to find out when I enrolled at University that they had a Triathlon Club. It’s meant I can keep up the work I was doing while also getting a degree. Keeping my body and mind going.

Whether I’m training or studying, I drink so much water that my friends think I’m going to spring a leak one day. It all goes back to a race where I nearly collapsed about three years ago. I was stupid, putting too much into the swim and the cycle to try and get an unassailable lead, and I was almost horizontal after half of the run. I had to stop and take a huge drink of water, and I shudder to think how it affected me short term, but I know I was dehydrated and it meant that although I finished, I was well down the field. It’s important to keep hydrated in stages rather than cram it all in one go. Lessons learned the hard way, for sure, but consider it learned next time I will have my liquid pack.