After the initial success of the 10K run, I thought about longer distances. I’m not really one for half measures, so I immediately wanted to go for a marathon. Which one, and when, and how much training I would need could come later – I was keen to build on the momentum I’d gathered from the 5/10K runs. But then, circumstances changed. One morning I woke up with shoulder pain. I couldn’t raise my hand above shoulder height without excruciating pain. I visited the work physio and he told me it’s because of hypermobility.
I’ve always been hypermobile, although it used to be called double jointedness. A party trick when I was younger was to bend one of my arms back the wrong way, only a little but enough to make others groan. I never thought it to be a problem, until 42 years into my life it was explained that an excess of collagen, and the resulting hypermobility, need to be treated with a certain amount of care. The ball in the shoulder joint normally rotates tightly within its socket, but with my hypermobility it also moves up and down, which literally pinches bits of muscle and whatever other fleshy bits it comes across, and causes this pain. The physio said I’d need to learn to raise my arms differently, walk differently, do press-ups differently, stand differently – pretty much everything would need to change, so that all my joints should behave as they would ‘normally’ (if I wasn’t hypermobile). At the same time I told him about my notion of running a marathon, and his response was that not discouraging, exactly – but that I should consider other complementary activities to help balance out the running. Cycling and swimming, say. Yes, triathlon would be ideal.
So, this being July 2011, I set about finding a triathlon for sometime in 2012. Friends and colleagues of mine heard about it and some said that they did triathlons, something I didn’t know before. I suspect this is a similar phenomenon to the baby aisle in Tesco being invisible to shoppers until they have kids. All these people doing triathlons, until that time unbeknown to me. Two had even completed half-Iron Man events, and one a full Iron Man. So, I had a mountain bike, I could hire a wetsuit, this was for me. I started buying Triathlon magazines, getting into the swing of it all, and kept up my running. Just by thinking about triathlons I felt fitter and more capable. Some weeks later, I decided on a whim to bring the date forward by a few months to November 2011, because I found the Castle Series Triathlons – and the Hever Castle Tri looked like a good family-friendly one to have a crack at.
I trained and trained, doing most of my cycling in the gym along with some bike-to-run transitions. I happened to get talking to one of the mums at my son’s school, who said her husband (who had done an Iron Man) swims at a local open water lake – another thing that until then had passed me by. A lake that you could swim in, 3 miles from my house. (The lady’s husband, Alick, would later become my friend and training partner, and introduce me to the joy of trail running.) I found the idea of swimming in a lake exciting but scary, and turning up to my first swim at 8am on a Sunday morning was a pretty intense experience. I remember having to stop swimming so a family of ducks could swim past, which made me smile. I kept on going there each Sunday for a couple of months until I could swim 400m without stopping. Some effort, I can tell you – I’m not a naturaly swimmer.
Then in November I did the tri. The 400m swim went OK, I started at the very back and managed to overtake a few people; and I saw my wife and kids cheering me on before and after the lake. The 20K bike was great, I’d borrowed a nice carbon Bottechia from one of the PT instructors at my gym, which made me a bit more speedy; and then finally the 5K run – well, my chip time said 22 minutes, which put it in the fastest 5K I’d ever done by some 4 minutes. I always suspected the distance was nearer 4K. Anyway, I got round in 1 hr 35 or so, and knew I could easily improve in a few areas – particularly one of the transitions which was very slow.
I was ready for the next challenge.
