They Just Looked At Me Like I Was Crazy

They just looked at me like I was crazy.

All we'd been doing was chatting about our plans for the weekend. A perfectly normal conversation. The kind you have a hundred times. Except my answer, apparently, was not a perfectly normal answer.

That's the thing about triathlon. It starts so innocently.

A word of warning to any new members reading this for the first time: what follows is not a cautionary tale. It is, however, probably a preview of your future.

Just a Sprint

Just a sprint, you tell yourself. An hour or so, maybe less. I'll give it a go.

I should confess — when I entered my first sprint I couldn't swim four lengths of Bulmershe pool without being lapped. I didn't even own a bike! The cycle leg was six laps of Green Park, and I enjoyed it so much that I did seven. Not because I was feeling strong. Because I didn't know how to use my bike computer, and somehow convinced myself that 19.8km wasn't quite enough and I needed one more lap.

Olympic Distance

An Olympic distance though — that'll be done in three hours. How hard can it be?

My first Olympic was Windsor Triathlon. Mass start. River swim. The swim went fine, which, given my four-length backstory, was a success. The run, however, is either uphill or downhill, with absolutely zero flat, and somewhere along the way I cut a corner.

I reported myself to a race marshal at the finish.

He looked at me, baffled. "Why are you telling me?"

"Because I'm a golfer," I said!

He had no follow-up questions.

The following year, despite my self-confessed corner-cutting, they chose me as the Rear of Windsor. No matter what people say about TVT kit, it is easy to spot!

You cross the finish line, legs like jelly, lungs on fire, completely buzzing. And then — almost immediately — a small, dangerous thought: what if I did the Middle distance?

And that's it. You're done. You just don't know it yet.

Middle Distance

Middle distance next. Five and a half hours. That's nothing. I'll do one of those.

The Cotswold Classic. A brilliant race, popular with TVT, and one that — as at least two club members can confirm — is almost (but not quite) impossible to get disqualified from. I wouldn't know personally, but the bar seems reassuringly high.

On the start line, a friend who had just left the Special Forces spotted me in Wave 2, him in Wave 3. "I'll overtake you," he said. Casual as you like.

The one and only time in my triathlon career I have genuinely wanted to beat another person. The ex-RAF grandad of two never saw him again, at least till we had a well-deserved beer afterwards.

Middle distance is, for my money, the sweet spot. It's a proper day out, but achievable for most reasonably fit people, as long as you can survive the swim. Which, as we've established, is not always a given.

Ironman

And then someone mentions Ironman.

You're basically there already. And the next thing you know you're lying in a Travelodge somewhere in Dover, on the way to a cycling sportive in France, watching your phone light up with live tracking notifications from a group of club mates doing Ironman Italy.

Fourteen hours of swimming, cycling and running. In the heat. In Italy.

And instead of thinking those poor people, you think: why not?

That's the moment to stop and think. You won't.

Because here's what Ironman training actually looks like. Five in the morning. Dark outside, and probably raining. Bike lights on. Windsor loops, and just as sensible people hit snooze on their alarm clock, you start your brick session — straight off the bike and into a run — a run that is longer than anything you ran in your first sprint triathlon!

How do we end up here? Nobody decides to become this person. It just... happens. One reasonable decision at a time, until you're checking live race trackers at midnight wondering when exactly your weekends stopped being yours.

The answer, if you're honest, is that you wouldn't have it any other way.

It's not just the weekends either. I turned up to work one Monday barely able to walk. Shuffling. Wincing on the stairs. A colleague gave me that knowing look — the universal "rough weekend?" face. The assumption was obvious. The hangover. The late night. The bad decisions.

I'd run a marathon the day before.

To be fair, it was a bad decision. Just not that kind.

Beyond Ironman

There's nothing after Ironman, right?

Meet Streatley Man. An extreme Ironman-distance event, set entirely on a single hill just outside Reading — one of the top 100 cycling climbs in the country. You swim to the hill. Then you cycle up it. Repeatedly. Then you run up it. Repeatedly. The brainchild of a club member who, you'd stake money on it, started off with a sprint triathlon and thought: how hard can it be?

We've been here before.

Oh, and I may have also done the Marathon des Sables at some point. 150 miles across the Sahara. But I don't like to talk about it.

But here's the thing — I didn't even start as a triathlete. I started with Couch to 5K. Just a gentle jog. It starts with a minute run, a minute walk. Nothing extreme. And somehow that gentle jog ended up in the Sahara Desert.

So it's not just triathletes. Runners, you're not safe either. You've been warned.

Back to That Look

I'd been chatting to someone at work — a non-triathlete, which in hindsight was my first mistake — and they'd asked what I had planned that weekend.

I told them I was just cycling to Southampton, and then going for a run.

That was the moment I realised I'd become the person at parties nobody asks about their weekend anymore. The blank stare said it all: why? Now I just say "nothing much" when asked. And it's only a 5 hour ride.

Here's the truth: triathlon doesn't attract normal people. Or rather, it takes normal people and does something to them. It makes the unreasonable feel reasonable. It makes 5am starts feel like a gift. It makes "I'll just do one sprint" sound like the beginning of a sensible sentence, rather than the lie we all know it to be.

If you're reading this as a first-timer — welcome. You think you're just here for a sprint.

You'll be fine.