2011 Enduroman Triple Ironman Race Report
hen you’ve done ten single IM distance races and one Double and you realise that there is now a Triple on offer there’s only one place to go right? Yes, the bar for a nice pint and a sit down.
Well, I tried but I must have got lost because somehow I found myself in the endurance tri mecca that is Lichfield once again this year for the Enduroman Triple Iron UK
I should be reporting massive training, unbelievable feats of endurance and monkish self denial. And maybe if I was I would have finished a bit quicker but hey ho, where’s the fun in that. Without me being rubbish, no one would look good.
In fact compared to the Double in 2009 my total training hours weren’t massively up. A couple of ultras (Jurassic Coast Challenge and 24 hour challenge) earlier in the year meant that my run mileage was quite a bit up but the lack of an early season IM (I did Lanza in 09) meant that my bike mileage was up, but not by much. Once again I did Bala Half and A Day in the Lakes in June and each time I did a 100 mile+ ride the day before to get a high volume weekend in. I think this works and would recommend it.
Did I follow a plan? No. Should I have? Probably. Would I do it differently again? Probably not. In the end you do what you can and fit training around work, family and everything else in your life. I know that true champions need single minded purpose but I’m happy to just get round and try to keep everything else sweet. I think my one bit of good relevant training was a set of about six swims every Wednesday before the race, all of them 5K+ all in a wetsuit in the pool. OK that was also the sum total of my swim training this year, but nothing new there.
Race day approached and it started to look pretty real. After a concentrated week or two of buying stuff, near hysteria on the race thread and a huge amount of pressure to meet a couple of deadlines at work we finally had the car packed and headed down to Lichfield. I always have a last minute panic that I have forgotten something, or need something new, and this year was no exception. Driving south from Glossop I realised the stopwatch wasn’t working on my watch and I started hassling Mrs. Repo to find an Argos so that I could buy a new sports watch. I did take a few minutes for me to realise the absurd hilarity of needing a watch that measures hundredths of seconds in a race that was going to last for days…
We went straight to Friary Grange to pitch the tent and say hi to the early arrivals. After that it was down to Esporta for the race brief where Steve confirmed the extended cutoff (60 hours) for the triple (Thanks mate!) and all the other race blurb. There was a great atmosphere building already which we rounded off with a pint in the hotel before bed.
Surprisingly I slept like a log and was up spritely at 04.00 for a bit of brekkie and the short drive down to Friary Grange. I drove Mrs. Repo nuts with one of my usual pre-race panics (This year: I’ve Lost My Wallet and I Need it Now!) and generally faffed around enough to nearly miss the start.
I eventually slithered into the end of the pool with a couple of minutes to spare with my recently purchased water bottle carrier containing my supplies. I had about 9 litres in all, comprising H5 4:1, Nuun and plain water. Rather stupidly however I had put them all in identical bottles which would later prompt a kind of aquatic Russian roulette as I tried to guess the correct bottle for the required beverage. I managed about a 75% strike rate which wasn’t bad.
We had elected to go off in number order so as number 5 I went off first, with my lane mates Rod (Bigfoot) and the two Tonys following. And so it began….
I was buoyed (Geddit?!) by the extended swim cutoff but fairly sure that I would be OK within the standard 5 hours as long as I didn’t have a major mechanical (er mechanical of the body that is: a physical? A corporeal?) My plan was to take a drink and gel break as required after every km, or after 500m if I felt I needed it. Within 10 minutes or so it became clear that to my horror and shame as a staunch swimophobe, I was actually the fastest in the lane and every 6 or 7 lengths I was passing one of my lane mates. For ease of counting I swam the first 1400m then had a break, leaving a theoretical 10 x 1K swims to do.
Things plodded along nicely, the wetsuit buoyancy compensating for my usual legs-made-of-stone swim style and I have to say I felt pretty good for the first IM swim which I think I did in something like 1.18. I was drinking well and having the odd salt tablet and gel when I fancied it. I had a Mule bar too but probably should have finished eating it before I set off again as I seemed to spend a length trying to breathe, chew and swallow, and the next length scooping up partially eaten Mule bar like a whale drifting through plankton. It’s a great look.
At some point fairly early on I lost track of the odd lap and made a conscious decision to go for the lower count if I had an internal dispute, which was often:
Brain: “Oi – that was 10 you tw@t, not 8!”
Brain: “How would you know, you were too busy drooling Mule bar out of your mouth to notice!”
Brain: “Lets go with 8”
All: “Can we get out yet?”
Brain: “No. Not for about 3 hours”
Brain: “Awww. Arms are hurty. Want to get out”
Arms: “Will you two shut the fcuk up and watch where we’re going”
Left leg: “Boy this is sweet, I’m doing fcuk all here”
Right leg: “Enjoy it while you can pal, I think the rest of this race is going to go badly for us”
Ringpiece: “Nothing to see here”
And so it went on. Push, glide, swim, swim, groan, drink, push, glide, swim, swim, suppress a wee, swim, glide, push, drink, inexplicably-hit-the-lane-rope-with-hand-is-that-possibly-the-most-irritating-thing-ever, swim, swim, glide and then …what’s this…is this a float I see before me? Two lengths to go! Get in!
The signal from my lane counter was like someone throwing the prison door open, a get out of jail free card for the aquanopolist. My cautious counting of any suspect lengths meant that I had effectively “banked” about 10 lengths and I got out of the pool joyously early and in a time of about 4.10 which was I was more than happy with.
I clambered out, wobbled about a bit, thanked my lane counters and padded down to the changing rooms. The weather looked overcast but dry so I stuck with my planned attire of shorts, short sleeve top, arm warmers with a gilet in the pocket just in case. By now the Doublers were starting to mill around the pool so I had a bit of banter with them on the way out to the bike and within a couple of minutes I had found the happy place that I look for in any tri: swim completed and on the bike. About 24 hours later “happy place” would not be my first description of my feelings on the bike, but it was nice for a while. About 7 miles to be precise.
Smiling on the bike. Must have been early.
Having done the Doube last year I knew exactly what to expect of the bike course and I don’t think that anything had changed much apart from some slightly worse road surfaces. Out of the leisure centre, turn left, slight hill, down, right at Mash corner along, down, garage, more along, Clamp Silage, village, flag, hill, roundabout, shop, pub, hill turnaround. And then come back.
Clamp Silage? Ah yes…..When you are riding a bike for more than a day its nice to have something to look at. Names painted on the road, estate agent signs, billboards, anything would be nice. What did we have? A solitary sign, a white board on which had been inscribed – from the look of it using a childs severed arm dipped in squid ink – “CLAMP SILAGE FOR SALE” Every time I went past this it pi$$ed me off more. What on earth is clamp silage? Is it a little known Samuel Beckett character? A Fall B Side? The by-product of some extreme sexual practice? If it is so rare and ambiguous why did the vendor not see fit to describe it better and advertise it more alluringly? Some mysteries are best left out on the race course, but every time I saw this sign it irritated me more.
Like everything in life I didn’t really have much of a plan for the bike section beyond start at the beginning end at the end and eat and drink loads in between. I started well, knocking off the first couple of laps in about 45 minutes each and taking Mrs. Repo by surprise at my first snack stop, which as I recall at the end of lap 2 for a box of very tasty noodles and a cup of tea. Every lap I went out on the bike with a bottle of 4:1, a couple of gels and a Mule bar but that was mostly for insurance in case of a sudden bonk. You definitely need to eat real food on a race like this and plenty of it so sports nutrition was very much an adhoc top up for me.
I pretty much flew around the first 4 or 5 laps feeling great in general but with a few niggles starting to make themselves known. I had been nursing a piriformis injury for the past few months ( a side effect of my higher running mileage earlier in the year I think. And of being an old git) and that intruded a bit on the bike but I was expecting the worst on the run. Most irritating however was a trapped nerve in my right shoulder which was giving me shooting pains down my right arm and making my fingers tingle like an Ann Summers quality control inspector. This became a real pain in the, well, arm, as the bike progressed, making it hard to get down on the aero bars, the hoods or the tops. Indeed I had to resort to just letting my arm dangle there in the wind for some stretches.
Compared to the biblical deluge on the bike during the Double last year the weather was pretty favourable. There were a couple of light showers during the afternoon but they only really needed a gilet to keep the damp out. As the afternoon progressed all the doublers joined the course along with the two singlers and pretty soon the bike course was full. Well as full as 78 people can make a 14 mile stretch of road: Mass participation racing this ain’t.
Mr and Mrs.
The laps ticked away: Lap. Chicken and dumpling stew. Lap. Rice pudding. 2 Laps. Pasta. Lap. Tea and jaffa cakes. Lap. Bagel. It’s like eating at constantly moving restaurant with a very eclectic menu. About 8 ish competitors were required to don hi-viz gear and light up. Put lights on that is, not have a fag, although I was ready to try anything at this point. I was very confident in my lighting set up from last year and sure enough it was pretty good. However good your lights are though, the night sucks something away from you and everyting becomes amplified: the effort required, the fatigue, the bumps in the road, the hills, the hunger…
A couple of laps after lighting up I had a full pit stop and changed into long tights, two top layers, clear glasses and gloves. I had a decent feed and cracked on again although I had a bit of a mental wobble and felt slightly overwhelmed by what was still left to do. A couple of laps later I was moaning at Carole and feeling very down. I think I had done about 200 miles but I really felt like jacking – I just couldn’t see me making through another 30 odd hours, whatever magic dawn might bring.
The laps through the night from about 01.00 to 04.00 were grim. The field was thinning out as the faster Doublers were finishing their bike legs and the grunts of acknowledgement between those left on the course were those of the lifers, the long distance lags with an apparent eternity yet to cover.
The one oasis of cheer out on the bike course was Woody32 holed up in a lay by banging a cow bell and shouting encouragement. You don’t know how welcome that was to a man traversing the slough of despond with not even the words clamp silage visible to offer succour. Top work Woody, thanks. Special thanks too to the Mashes who manned Mash Corner all day and night dispensing cakes and good cheer as well as marshalling on the swim and run. Enduromarshalls!
At some point during the night I succumbed to the inevitable and cadged a liitle bit of a power nap with Mrs. Repo on guard duty to make sure that I didn’t sleep until Wednesday. Sure enough reveille was sounded about 20 minutes later and I dragged my sorry ass out again, not sure whether I was feeling better or worse.
It’s true that the dawn brings renewal. But not enough fcuking renewal for my liking. I perked up a little bit though and pulled in for a bacon sandwich procured by the ever ready Mrs. Repo and changed into my 3/4s and short sleeve top which somehow made me feel a bit better too. By this point I reckon there were no more than 7 or 8 triplers left out on the course and the stories coming through from the frontline were of epic suffering but considerable determination. Out on the course nothing had changed except the downhills had got flatter and the uphills steeper, and in a cruel parody of the elves and the shoemaker fairytale, the Lichfield fairies had obviously taken pity on the local highways department and gone out in the night and turned the final run in to the leisure centre into a ploughed field dusted with gravel.
Clamp Silage was still for sale.
Sometime during the last lap my daughter Meg arrived on the train as Crew no.2 to give Mrs.Repo a break. It was great to see another friendly face and she rapidly got into the crewing swing of things, every ready with a bagel, a twiglet or some jelly sweets.
And then, after a bracing 336 miles, the bike was done and dusted. Naturally I was pretty pleased to get off and do something else, unfortunately that was running 78 miles rather than being tumbled in marshmallows and licked all over by puppies.
Polish Special Forces
Knight Lancer found time to win an Ian Curtis dancing competition on the way.
I trudged out and reacquainted myself with the 1.2 mile loop that was to be home for the next day. It was now early afternoon on Sunday and try as I could I couldn’t shake the fact that I still had 78 miles to cover and my brain simply refused to break it down into one lap at a time units. I kept on seeing the big picture, and unfortunately the big picture was a particularly twisted Francis Bacon with 78 legs poking through the earth each with a bloodied trainer attached.
After 4 or 5 laps of run/walk/shuffle I stopped and felt pretty despairing. My normal good humour was gone and I couldn’t see any escape apart from stopping. But to stop just seemed like a waste of what I had already done. Something subconsciously something nudged me on (or maybe Mrs. Repo told me to get back out there) and I went out again. Round the transition area, down the slope, walk up the hill, up the steps into Blair Witch, on good laps run all the way down to the turn, trudge back up trying to keep the pace up and flop, flop flop in a gravity fall that you could maybe call running back into the leisure centre. It wasn’t pretty, and it got uglier each lap.
Somehow the laps kept ticking over. I kept feeding through my sulking depression and I guess this helped later on, though at the time it was simply fuel going in to a reluctant and unresponsive engine. Earlier in the year I had had problems with blisters on ultra races and still hadn’t found a solution. My negative mental condition seemed to create a gateway for the physical and sure enough within a few laps I could feel some hotspots. I changed from my Nike Lunar Glides into Innov 8s but that disnt seem to help and I eventually settled on my oversize Nike Pegasus and a suck it up pill. At a couple of points in the night I got Tim the physio to strap and then treat my feet which helped, but they were still in shreds after the race.
Somehow day drifted to night and it was time to put on hi viz again and break out the head torches: I’m guessing this was about 37 or 38 hours into the race, and needless to say I didn’t really fancy it.
Foot repairs
Still, onward, I guess. I can’t really remember much until a fairly comical interlude with Big Ted which must have been sometime after midnight. I think BT was a few laps ahead of me and we had decided to do a few laps together and inevitably we started calculating and recalculating laps completed, laps left, marathons completed and marathons to go. We were addled with mental fatigue and things were complicated by the fact that we were on different laps but we didn’t know the difference. It was like two people who could only retain facts for 5 seconds trying to do a sum when each one could only see part of it and had to explain it to the other one. In Chinese. In the dark.
The firmest conclusion we could get to was “If we can make it through to dawn….” Quite what would happen then we didn’t really get to the bottom of, although we had worked out that we would have completed some laps, there would still be some laps remaining and those laps would be some unknown proportion of a marathon. Or maybe more than one marathon.
We also had a strange discussion about whether what we were doing was actually sport or some parallel thing, some kind of fairground trick like seeing how long you can hold your hand in an open flame. It didn’t feel like sport at the time but in retrospect I’ll take it as a sport. More than darts anyway.
Dawn duly arrived. Again. I’d like to say that dawn’s golden fingers chased the demons of the night into the shadows of Blair Witch woods or something, but in fact it just pi$$ed me off. Again. It quite quickly got pretty warm which you think would be welcome but for some reason my thermostat was fcuked and I couldn’t regulate my temperature. I was sweaty jogging down the hills, then cold, then clammy and then burning on my neck. Still it gave me some new stuff to grumble about to Mrs. Repo.
Slowly things perked up. I had a Mcdonalds Sausage and Egg McMuffin. I had a cup of tea. I put on my favourite Craft base layer. I enjoyed seeing other people finish. The sun still shone but it didn’t irritate me. I realised I was going to finish…
Eh? What was that one? At some point during what was now Monday I reached an unknown tipping point where despair and resentment turned to flowering sense of relief that I was going to make it. Not elation or joy, just relief; having come so far and depended on other people so much the fact that I was going to actually do it was a yoke lifted off my shoulders.
As the afternoon wore on a few of the finsished and rested Doublers appeared to support which was fantastic, and as the Triplers slowly finished the support got even better and more personal. And then….I just had four laps to go. With a mixture of rage, exasperation and relief I attacked them; legs cranked up to full speed, running not jogging the downs, jogging the ups, no walking at all…one lap….pass Rev Graham who was still moving strongly….two laps….keep running…surprise the Mashes at the turn….keep running…..three laps….last one! Last lap, in reverse, keep running, fantastic! Hug each of my fellow competitors still out there, pass the big “HTFU” which Pink Sally had put on the gate into the leisure centre (fantastic!) and I’m bounding up the steps, mashing my blisters but oblivious, a last run through transition and over the line. 57 hours and 43 minutes later it’s all over.
I still can’t quite believe it really. I do feel like a bit of an interloper in these ultra thingies but you know what they say. If you can’t go fast, go long.
After the race I was pretty achy but I’ve been worse after a single IM. Strangest thing was my legs which have rings of colour from shaving lines (furry boxers) tan lines, compression guards and sunburn. They look a bit like fruit pastille ice lollies made of meat. It’s a great look on the beach.
Thanks to everyone on the race thread on Tritalk, to all the superb marshalls, to the Tritalkers who turned up to support, to the other crews, to my fellow competitors, to Eddie and Steve from Enduroman for another brilliant event but most of all to Carole and Meg, my tireless crew.
This was a truly epic weekend made possible by loads of people who did some really hard work all for other people: I just turned up and shuffled round – I’m very grateful to everyone who made it happen. The atmosphere at this race is superb and if you have it in you to finish then somehow everyone involved in the race will drag it out of you.
After the double last year I said to anyone that would listen that no way was I doing the double, and after the triple I think I’ve now found my endurance limit.
Having said that, the Quin does look interesting
_________________
Well, I tried but I must have got lost because somehow I found myself in the endurance tri mecca that is Lichfield once again this year for the Enduroman Triple Iron UK
I should be reporting massive training, unbelievable feats of endurance and monkish self denial. And maybe if I was I would have finished a bit quicker but hey ho, where’s the fun in that. Without me being rubbish, no one would look good.
In fact compared to the Double in 2009 my total training hours weren’t massively up. A couple of ultras (Jurassic Coast Challenge and 24 hour challenge) earlier in the year meant that my run mileage was quite a bit up but the lack of an early season IM (I did Lanza in 09) meant that my bike mileage was up, but not by much. Once again I did Bala Half and A Day in the Lakes in June and each time I did a 100 mile+ ride the day before to get a high volume weekend in. I think this works and would recommend it.
Did I follow a plan? No. Should I have? Probably. Would I do it differently again? Probably not. In the end you do what you can and fit training around work, family and everything else in your life. I know that true champions need single minded purpose but I’m happy to just get round and try to keep everything else sweet. I think my one bit of good relevant training was a set of about six swims every Wednesday before the race, all of them 5K+ all in a wetsuit in the pool. OK that was also the sum total of my swim training this year, but nothing new there.
Race day approached and it started to look pretty real. After a concentrated week or two of buying stuff, near hysteria on the race thread and a huge amount of pressure to meet a couple of deadlines at work we finally had the car packed and headed down to Lichfield. I always have a last minute panic that I have forgotten something, or need something new, and this year was no exception. Driving south from Glossop I realised the stopwatch wasn’t working on my watch and I started hassling Mrs. Repo to find an Argos so that I could buy a new sports watch. I did take a few minutes for me to realise the absurd hilarity of needing a watch that measures hundredths of seconds in a race that was going to last for days…
We went straight to Friary Grange to pitch the tent and say hi to the early arrivals. After that it was down to Esporta for the race brief where Steve confirmed the extended cutoff (60 hours) for the triple (Thanks mate!) and all the other race blurb. There was a great atmosphere building already which we rounded off with a pint in the hotel before bed.
Surprisingly I slept like a log and was up spritely at 04.00 for a bit of brekkie and the short drive down to Friary Grange. I drove Mrs. Repo nuts with one of my usual pre-race panics (This year: I’ve Lost My Wallet and I Need it Now!) and generally faffed around enough to nearly miss the start.
I eventually slithered into the end of the pool with a couple of minutes to spare with my recently purchased water bottle carrier containing my supplies. I had about 9 litres in all, comprising H5 4:1, Nuun and plain water. Rather stupidly however I had put them all in identical bottles which would later prompt a kind of aquatic Russian roulette as I tried to guess the correct bottle for the required beverage. I managed about a 75% strike rate which wasn’t bad.
We had elected to go off in number order so as number 5 I went off first, with my lane mates Rod (Bigfoot) and the two Tonys following. And so it began….
I was buoyed (Geddit?!) by the extended swim cutoff but fairly sure that I would be OK within the standard 5 hours as long as I didn’t have a major mechanical (er mechanical of the body that is: a physical? A corporeal?) My plan was to take a drink and gel break as required after every km, or after 500m if I felt I needed it. Within 10 minutes or so it became clear that to my horror and shame as a staunch swimophobe, I was actually the fastest in the lane and every 6 or 7 lengths I was passing one of my lane mates. For ease of counting I swam the first 1400m then had a break, leaving a theoretical 10 x 1K swims to do.
Things plodded along nicely, the wetsuit buoyancy compensating for my usual legs-made-of-stone swim style and I have to say I felt pretty good for the first IM swim which I think I did in something like 1.18. I was drinking well and having the odd salt tablet and gel when I fancied it. I had a Mule bar too but probably should have finished eating it before I set off again as I seemed to spend a length trying to breathe, chew and swallow, and the next length scooping up partially eaten Mule bar like a whale drifting through plankton. It’s a great look.
At some point fairly early on I lost track of the odd lap and made a conscious decision to go for the lower count if I had an internal dispute, which was often:
Brain: “Oi – that was 10 you tw@t, not 8!”
Brain: “How would you know, you were too busy drooling Mule bar out of your mouth to notice!”
Brain: “Lets go with 8”
All: “Can we get out yet?”
Brain: “No. Not for about 3 hours”
Brain: “Awww. Arms are hurty. Want to get out”
Arms: “Will you two shut the fcuk up and watch where we’re going”
Left leg: “Boy this is sweet, I’m doing fcuk all here”
Right leg: “Enjoy it while you can pal, I think the rest of this race is going to go badly for us”
Ringpiece: “Nothing to see here”
And so it went on. Push, glide, swim, swim, groan, drink, push, glide, swim, swim, suppress a wee, swim, glide, push, drink, inexplicably-hit-the-lane-rope-with-hand-is-that-possibly-the-most-irritating-thing-ever, swim, swim, glide and then …what’s this…is this a float I see before me? Two lengths to go! Get in!
The signal from my lane counter was like someone throwing the prison door open, a get out of jail free card for the aquanopolist. My cautious counting of any suspect lengths meant that I had effectively “banked” about 10 lengths and I got out of the pool joyously early and in a time of about 4.10 which was I was more than happy with.
I clambered out, wobbled about a bit, thanked my lane counters and padded down to the changing rooms. The weather looked overcast but dry so I stuck with my planned attire of shorts, short sleeve top, arm warmers with a gilet in the pocket just in case. By now the Doublers were starting to mill around the pool so I had a bit of banter with them on the way out to the bike and within a couple of minutes I had found the happy place that I look for in any tri: swim completed and on the bike. About 24 hours later “happy place” would not be my first description of my feelings on the bike, but it was nice for a while. About 7 miles to be precise.
Smiling on the bike. Must have been early.
Having done the Doube last year I knew exactly what to expect of the bike course and I don’t think that anything had changed much apart from some slightly worse road surfaces. Out of the leisure centre, turn left, slight hill, down, right at Mash corner along, down, garage, more along, Clamp Silage, village, flag, hill, roundabout, shop, pub, hill turnaround. And then come back.
Clamp Silage? Ah yes…..When you are riding a bike for more than a day its nice to have something to look at. Names painted on the road, estate agent signs, billboards, anything would be nice. What did we have? A solitary sign, a white board on which had been inscribed – from the look of it using a childs severed arm dipped in squid ink – “CLAMP SILAGE FOR SALE” Every time I went past this it pi$$ed me off more. What on earth is clamp silage? Is it a little known Samuel Beckett character? A Fall B Side? The by-product of some extreme sexual practice? If it is so rare and ambiguous why did the vendor not see fit to describe it better and advertise it more alluringly? Some mysteries are best left out on the race course, but every time I saw this sign it irritated me more.
Like everything in life I didn’t really have much of a plan for the bike section beyond start at the beginning end at the end and eat and drink loads in between. I started well, knocking off the first couple of laps in about 45 minutes each and taking Mrs. Repo by surprise at my first snack stop, which as I recall at the end of lap 2 for a box of very tasty noodles and a cup of tea. Every lap I went out on the bike with a bottle of 4:1, a couple of gels and a Mule bar but that was mostly for insurance in case of a sudden bonk. You definitely need to eat real food on a race like this and plenty of it so sports nutrition was very much an adhoc top up for me.
I pretty much flew around the first 4 or 5 laps feeling great in general but with a few niggles starting to make themselves known. I had been nursing a piriformis injury for the past few months ( a side effect of my higher running mileage earlier in the year I think. And of being an old git) and that intruded a bit on the bike but I was expecting the worst on the run. Most irritating however was a trapped nerve in my right shoulder which was giving me shooting pains down my right arm and making my fingers tingle like an Ann Summers quality control inspector. This became a real pain in the, well, arm, as the bike progressed, making it hard to get down on the aero bars, the hoods or the tops. Indeed I had to resort to just letting my arm dangle there in the wind for some stretches.
Compared to the biblical deluge on the bike during the Double last year the weather was pretty favourable. There were a couple of light showers during the afternoon but they only really needed a gilet to keep the damp out. As the afternoon progressed all the doublers joined the course along with the two singlers and pretty soon the bike course was full. Well as full as 78 people can make a 14 mile stretch of road: Mass participation racing this ain’t.
Mr and Mrs.
The laps ticked away: Lap. Chicken and dumpling stew. Lap. Rice pudding. 2 Laps. Pasta. Lap. Tea and jaffa cakes. Lap. Bagel. It’s like eating at constantly moving restaurant with a very eclectic menu. About 8 ish competitors were required to don hi-viz gear and light up. Put lights on that is, not have a fag, although I was ready to try anything at this point. I was very confident in my lighting set up from last year and sure enough it was pretty good. However good your lights are though, the night sucks something away from you and everyting becomes amplified: the effort required, the fatigue, the bumps in the road, the hills, the hunger…
A couple of laps after lighting up I had a full pit stop and changed into long tights, two top layers, clear glasses and gloves. I had a decent feed and cracked on again although I had a bit of a mental wobble and felt slightly overwhelmed by what was still left to do. A couple of laps later I was moaning at Carole and feeling very down. I think I had done about 200 miles but I really felt like jacking – I just couldn’t see me making through another 30 odd hours, whatever magic dawn might bring.
The laps through the night from about 01.00 to 04.00 were grim. The field was thinning out as the faster Doublers were finishing their bike legs and the grunts of acknowledgement between those left on the course were those of the lifers, the long distance lags with an apparent eternity yet to cover.
The one oasis of cheer out on the bike course was Woody32 holed up in a lay by banging a cow bell and shouting encouragement. You don’t know how welcome that was to a man traversing the slough of despond with not even the words clamp silage visible to offer succour. Top work Woody, thanks. Special thanks too to the Mashes who manned Mash Corner all day and night dispensing cakes and good cheer as well as marshalling on the swim and run. Enduromarshalls!
At some point during the night I succumbed to the inevitable and cadged a liitle bit of a power nap with Mrs. Repo on guard duty to make sure that I didn’t sleep until Wednesday. Sure enough reveille was sounded about 20 minutes later and I dragged my sorry ass out again, not sure whether I was feeling better or worse.
It’s true that the dawn brings renewal. But not enough fcuking renewal for my liking. I perked up a little bit though and pulled in for a bacon sandwich procured by the ever ready Mrs. Repo and changed into my 3/4s and short sleeve top which somehow made me feel a bit better too. By this point I reckon there were no more than 7 or 8 triplers left out on the course and the stories coming through from the frontline were of epic suffering but considerable determination. Out on the course nothing had changed except the downhills had got flatter and the uphills steeper, and in a cruel parody of the elves and the shoemaker fairytale, the Lichfield fairies had obviously taken pity on the local highways department and gone out in the night and turned the final run in to the leisure centre into a ploughed field dusted with gravel.
Clamp Silage was still for sale.
Sometime during the last lap my daughter Meg arrived on the train as Crew no.2 to give Mrs.Repo a break. It was great to see another friendly face and she rapidly got into the crewing swing of things, every ready with a bagel, a twiglet or some jelly sweets.
And then, after a bracing 336 miles, the bike was done and dusted. Naturally I was pretty pleased to get off and do something else, unfortunately that was running 78 miles rather than being tumbled in marshmallows and licked all over by puppies.
Polish Special Forces
Knight Lancer found time to win an Ian Curtis dancing competition on the way.
I trudged out and reacquainted myself with the 1.2 mile loop that was to be home for the next day. It was now early afternoon on Sunday and try as I could I couldn’t shake the fact that I still had 78 miles to cover and my brain simply refused to break it down into one lap at a time units. I kept on seeing the big picture, and unfortunately the big picture was a particularly twisted Francis Bacon with 78 legs poking through the earth each with a bloodied trainer attached.
After 4 or 5 laps of run/walk/shuffle I stopped and felt pretty despairing. My normal good humour was gone and I couldn’t see any escape apart from stopping. But to stop just seemed like a waste of what I had already done. Something subconsciously something nudged me on (or maybe Mrs. Repo told me to get back out there) and I went out again. Round the transition area, down the slope, walk up the hill, up the steps into Blair Witch, on good laps run all the way down to the turn, trudge back up trying to keep the pace up and flop, flop flop in a gravity fall that you could maybe call running back into the leisure centre. It wasn’t pretty, and it got uglier each lap.
Somehow the laps kept ticking over. I kept feeding through my sulking depression and I guess this helped later on, though at the time it was simply fuel going in to a reluctant and unresponsive engine. Earlier in the year I had had problems with blisters on ultra races and still hadn’t found a solution. My negative mental condition seemed to create a gateway for the physical and sure enough within a few laps I could feel some hotspots. I changed from my Nike Lunar Glides into Innov 8s but that disnt seem to help and I eventually settled on my oversize Nike Pegasus and a suck it up pill. At a couple of points in the night I got Tim the physio to strap and then treat my feet which helped, but they were still in shreds after the race.
Somehow day drifted to night and it was time to put on hi viz again and break out the head torches: I’m guessing this was about 37 or 38 hours into the race, and needless to say I didn’t really fancy it.
Foot repairs
Still, onward, I guess. I can’t really remember much until a fairly comical interlude with Big Ted which must have been sometime after midnight. I think BT was a few laps ahead of me and we had decided to do a few laps together and inevitably we started calculating and recalculating laps completed, laps left, marathons completed and marathons to go. We were addled with mental fatigue and things were complicated by the fact that we were on different laps but we didn’t know the difference. It was like two people who could only retain facts for 5 seconds trying to do a sum when each one could only see part of it and had to explain it to the other one. In Chinese. In the dark.
The firmest conclusion we could get to was “If we can make it through to dawn….” Quite what would happen then we didn’t really get to the bottom of, although we had worked out that we would have completed some laps, there would still be some laps remaining and those laps would be some unknown proportion of a marathon. Or maybe more than one marathon.
We also had a strange discussion about whether what we were doing was actually sport or some parallel thing, some kind of fairground trick like seeing how long you can hold your hand in an open flame. It didn’t feel like sport at the time but in retrospect I’ll take it as a sport. More than darts anyway.
Dawn duly arrived. Again. I’d like to say that dawn’s golden fingers chased the demons of the night into the shadows of Blair Witch woods or something, but in fact it just pi$$ed me off. Again. It quite quickly got pretty warm which you think would be welcome but for some reason my thermostat was fcuked and I couldn’t regulate my temperature. I was sweaty jogging down the hills, then cold, then clammy and then burning on my neck. Still it gave me some new stuff to grumble about to Mrs. Repo.
Slowly things perked up. I had a Mcdonalds Sausage and Egg McMuffin. I had a cup of tea. I put on my favourite Craft base layer. I enjoyed seeing other people finish. The sun still shone but it didn’t irritate me. I realised I was going to finish…
Eh? What was that one? At some point during what was now Monday I reached an unknown tipping point where despair and resentment turned to flowering sense of relief that I was going to make it. Not elation or joy, just relief; having come so far and depended on other people so much the fact that I was going to actually do it was a yoke lifted off my shoulders.
As the afternoon wore on a few of the finsished and rested Doublers appeared to support which was fantastic, and as the Triplers slowly finished the support got even better and more personal. And then….I just had four laps to go. With a mixture of rage, exasperation and relief I attacked them; legs cranked up to full speed, running not jogging the downs, jogging the ups, no walking at all…one lap….pass Rev Graham who was still moving strongly….two laps….keep running…surprise the Mashes at the turn….keep running…..three laps….last one! Last lap, in reverse, keep running, fantastic! Hug each of my fellow competitors still out there, pass the big “HTFU” which Pink Sally had put on the gate into the leisure centre (fantastic!) and I’m bounding up the steps, mashing my blisters but oblivious, a last run through transition and over the line. 57 hours and 43 minutes later it’s all over.
I still can’t quite believe it really. I do feel like a bit of an interloper in these ultra thingies but you know what they say. If you can’t go fast, go long.
After the race I was pretty achy but I’ve been worse after a single IM. Strangest thing was my legs which have rings of colour from shaving lines (furry boxers) tan lines, compression guards and sunburn. They look a bit like fruit pastille ice lollies made of meat. It’s a great look on the beach.
Thanks to everyone on the race thread on Tritalk, to all the superb marshalls, to the Tritalkers who turned up to support, to the other crews, to my fellow competitors, to Eddie and Steve from Enduroman for another brilliant event but most of all to Carole and Meg, my tireless crew.
This was a truly epic weekend made possible by loads of people who did some really hard work all for other people: I just turned up and shuffled round – I’m very grateful to everyone who made it happen. The atmosphere at this race is superb and if you have it in you to finish then somehow everyone involved in the race will drag it out of you.
After the double last year I said to anyone that would listen that no way was I doing the double, and after the triple I think I’ve now found my endurance limit.
Having said that, the Quin does look interesting
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