Life Without Limits, A (19 page)

All of a sudden, the cameras started to appear. I wonder if any of my friends are watching at home, I thought to myself. You can get coverage of the race live on the internet. Look at those helicopters overhead. Listen to the cheers. Wow, there are a lot of people lining the streets. Isn’t this surreal?

Surreal is the word. During a race I feel as if I’m in a kind of bubble – it’s as if I’m swimming underwater. I can see and hear all this pandemonium – helicopters, cameras, media and spectators jumping up and down – but it also feels as if it is happening just slightly somewhere else and to someone else.

Transition two went smoothly enough, and soon I was out pounding the streets of Kona, out and back along Ali’i Drive and then onto the Queen K. You never know whether your run legs are going to be waiting for you in your transition bag, but they’d been there all right, and now they were whisking me away.

Not that people were taking me too seriously at this stage. I think there was still very much a feeling that I was some silly rookie who had gone off too fast and would fade on the run. On the commentary there seemed to be more interest in the fact that I wasn’t wearing a hat or visor. This was Hawaii – everyone wore a hat in Hawaii. But I’d never liked headgear – it makes me feel as if my head is in a vice. All I had were the $20 sunglasses that I’d bought in a gas station in New Zealand two years earlier.

The commentators were desperately trying to think of things to say about me. My friends watching online were screaming at their computers as the poor experts floundered in the dark.

Roughly five miles in, Belinda and I crossed paths. I was now a couple of miles ahead of her and she screamed at me: ‘Chrissie, it’s yours! Just remember to eat! Don’t forget to eat! Focus!’

From that point on, our friendship blossomed.

In my excitement, I suddenly remembered that England had played against France in the Rugby World Cup. I asked a guy who was waving a St George’s flag if he knew the result, and he told me that England had won. They were in the World Cup final, against all the odds.

There must have been something in the stars for the English that weekend (we won the football, too). I was even more of an underdog than the rugby boys, and yet I was still winning. From the moment I’d taken the lead, about five and a half hours and a hundred miles into the race, I’d just assumed it would be temporary. They’ll catch me, they’ll catch me, I thought as I got off the bike. They’ll catch me, as I headed out on Ali’i Drive. They’ll catch me, as I hit the Queen K.

Where are they? The gap just grew and grew. With five miles or so till the end, it dawned on me that this was mine to lose. Brett had always said that the race doesn’t start until this point. You can be feeling great and suddenly it hits you, the proverbial wall. His words rang in my head. I didn’t think my body was going to break down, but I couldn’t let myself believe I was going to win, either. If I let my concentration drop, my body might be next.

I remember seeing my old friend from Birmingham University, the nutrition expert Asker Jeukendrup. He was halfway through the run as I was coming towards the end. We high-fived each other.

I ran down the hill into town, and I could almost see the finish line. I was half laughing, half crying, totally bewildered. I saw my friend’s boyfriend on the side of the road, grabbed the Union Jack off him and belted for the finish, waving, weeping and grinning.

Then, much to my surprise, the lead motorbike turned left at the bottom of the hill. ‘Oh, no,’ I thought. Muppet strikes again. I hadn’t looked at the map properly, and it turned out we had to do a loop through town before we finished. There was another mile to go, another mile carrying this huge flag and continuing what I’d started on the waving, weeping and grinning front.

As I finally reached the last couple of hundred yards, I heard this low-frequency humming sound and I suddenly thought: ‘They’re booing me!’ No one knew who I was, this irritating flag-waving Brit, and my win was clearly not welcome. It took the wind out of my sails for a moment or two. Until I noticed two large islanders blowing into their conch shells to welcome the world champion across the line – another Kona tradition I’d been ignorant of.

And there it was in front of me – the finishing tape, and the first inkling that things were going to be very different from now on. I had won – Chrissie Wellington, World Champion. I took a bow in front of the crowd, who were definitely cheering now, and at around 3.53 p.m., 9hr 8min 45sec after I’d started, I reached out for the tape, seized it with both hands, brought it down to my knees and hoisted it high over my head.

Everything fell out of me at that point – tears, laughter and any remnants of British reserve. Important-looking people shook my hand, a lei was placed around my neck and a garland on my head. An excited guy in a white baseball cap, whom I now know to be Mike Reilly, the Voice of Ironman, grabbed me and thrust a microphone in my face.

By now everything was blurred. Someone else grabbed me for an interview, and I followed his lead blindly. My eyes were full of tears, and the fixed smile was making my mouth hurt almost as much as did my feet and legs.

People have often asked how it felt. It’s the hardest question to answer, and I still can’t do it properly. Surreal is the adjective that I use most often, but there are lots of other words that hint towards how I was feeling, without ever truly getting there. Words like elated, confused, satisfied, delirious and proud. The coming together of all that you’ve trained for at the moment you secure your sport’s biggest prize is a rush of euphoria much discussed by other champions, but it doesn’t make it any less powerful when it happens to you. And no less difficult to capture in words. I do remember feeling sadness, too, that my parents weren’t there (they had long before booked a holiday in Sicily, never knowing I was going to be in this race, let alone win it) and that Brett wasn’t (he doesn’t go to Kona, partly because of his controversial past, partly because he feels his job is done by then).

I was whisked away for a drugs test and then to a nearby restaurant for the most amazing buffet, where I ate my body weight in food. Then it was back up the side of the volcano to salvage my things from the apartment. I now had a hotel to stay in, and it struck me that moving out of our hovel into it could prove symbolic. I was no longer Ms Anonymous. I knew barely anyone in that town down below, seething with thousands of racegoers, but suddenly they all knew me. I would be shaking a lot of hands for the next few days; I would have a big target on my back at all future races; and my funky chicken would be scrutinised like never before. Oh, Lord, I thought, my life is never going to be the same again.

That fact was brought home to me powerfully in the hours that followed. I was grilled at the hour-long press conference by a range of journalists who had never heard of me, before returning to the finish line, where I stayed till midnight when the race comes to an end and all competitors still out on the course are gently told that they will have to stop. I shook hands, signed autographs, threw things into the crowd, cheered on the other athletes as they finished, danced . . .

But I was also overwhelmed. I had no mechanism in place to deal with all the attention I was receiving, all the offers. Asker was really the only person there I knew and trusted, so he acted as a kind of manager. I just handed him all the business cards as they were thrust at me. Bike manufacturers, shoe companies, management companies, we can do this for you, we can do that. I tried to smile through it all, but inside I was in turmoil.

I managed to get through to my overjoyed parents to tell them that their little girl had just done something that she feared was going to have major repercussions – and for once, it wasn’t because of some accident I’d been in. Which was just as well, because my mum revealed that she’d been in hospital for three days, having tripped on a kerb in Sicily, landed on her arm and damaged her gall bladder and one of her kidneys. You see where I get it from.

And I got through to Brett.

‘Good job, kid,’ he said, simply, just as he always did. Those three words meant everything to me.

The next day I sat down to write my victory speech for the awards party that night. I didn’t have a dress either, so I had to borrow one. Standing up on the stage with the other girls in the top ten, who included Belinda and Rebecca, was intimidating not just because of all the people in the audience but also because of the calibre of athletes lined up alongside me. It was a long speech, I’m afraid – they always end up longer than you think they’ll be – but it was straight from the heart.

And I used it to foist upon everyone my passion for international development. ‘I worked as a swimming teacher at a day school in Boston,’ I said, ‘and I saw at first hand what a difference sport can make to children’s lives. And again in Nepal, where sport was one thing that could bring conflict-affected communities together. Sport has a tremendous power, and can be a force for considerable change.’

It was a crazy night, a crazy weekend. I finished it the only way I knew how – low-key and with friends. I might have met Scott and Eneko for the first time only a few days earlier, but we had bonded, and after we’d danced into the small hours at the after party at Lou Lou’s, the three of us headed out to Denny’s fast-food joint for the most disgusting, polluting, delicious meal of chicken wings, chips, mozzarella sticks and every other deep-fried delicacy you could dream of. The boys gave me a silver necklace with three turtles, one for each of us, and I still wear it.

It took a while for me to get to grips with where I was, all of a sudden, after Kona. All year, I’d simply completed the next task that was put in front of me, and I’d never considered my progress to be much more than doing just that. I’d certainly never expected to become a world champion. Now that I could stop for a moment and look back, it was plain that, yes, it had been an extraordinary few months. I’d turned pro in mid-February as a wannabe Olympic triathlete. And here I was, in mid-October, the champion of the world in ironman. I had a cheque for $110,000 in my back pocket, I’d just registered the eighth-fastest time ever recorded on the course by a woman, and my marathon split of 2hr 59min 58sec was the second-fastest ever. I had people clamouring outside my door and was being showered with praise, the like of which I’d never known before.

It was the sort of thing that could go to a girl’s head. I knew my challenge now was to make sure it didn’t.

10

A Triathlete’s Life

Of all the body parts we train for this unforgiving pursuit of ours, none is more important than the head. There is a culture in triathlon for logbooks and data, obsessing about how far and how fast we have gone in our latest session. People think that if their logbook is in order, then so must their preparation be. Then they hit kilometre thirty in the marathon, their bodies racked with pain and fatigue, and they despair that there are another twelve to go. That’s when they are in danger of breaking down, and certainly of slowing down. That’s when they most need a mind that is as honed and as powerful as their butt cheeks.

The best coaches will tell you this. It is more or less the first thing Brett said to me when I turned up to be assessed by him, even if his observation that he would need to cut my head off was a somewhat unconventional way of letting me know I had work to do. I was fretful and obsessive when I first turned pro, running at everything like a bull in a china shop.

‘The training you got a handle on,’ as Brett had told me in one of those emails. ‘The walking around in nerd land you have not. You get over that the same way as you improve an athletic weakness – by knowing and training it out. Life is nothing but a habit. Get to work.’

At the start it seemed daunting. ‘But I can’t relax,’ I wanted to say. ‘I can’t slow down. I can’t not be a muppet. It’s the way I am.’ These protestations, though, were no different from saying: ‘But I can’t lift that weight, I can’t run that fast, I can’t complete an ironman.’ You may not be able to right now, but, with a positive frame of mind and a willingness to work, anything is possible.

Remaining positive really is one of the most precious faculties for any athlete. That, and an ability to stay focused and disciplined. Develop a mind bank of positive images and thoughts – family, friends, previous successes, favourite places, a big plate of chips. You need to build it up as you would any collection, but soon you will have a range of thoughts to flick through when next your body and soul are screaming out for relief.

There is a lot of repetitive activity in an athlete’s life, particularly in ironman, and you need to learn to handle it. The best way of improving your capacity to endure boredom is to endure boredom. Spend time training on your own and challenge your mind to stay focused. We had a room in Leysin that we called the dungeon, where the treadmill was. It was airless with no windows, and if you stretched your arms out you could touch either wall. It smelled of the sweat and tears of previous workouts. The radio was broken. Brett used to send athletes down there for sessions. He made some, such as Hillary Biscay and Bella Comerford, run entire marathons down there. Hillary once forgot to charge her iPod and had to do the whole thing with no stimulation at all. Now, I’m not necessarily recommending you try that at home, folks. Brett knew what he was doing when he picked and chose certain sessions for certain athletes. But it gives you an insight into the sort of techniques with which you can train your mind as well as your body.