27/11/2019
This is an excerpt from my second and new book. It’s currently available as an ebook on Amazon at the link below and the paperback will be out in December.
https://www.amazon.com/Kona-Secrets-Lessons-learned-Qualifications-ebook/dp/B07ZTMNKLV/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=kona+secrets&qid=1574864165&sr=8-1
Ever since I first saw Ironman Hawaii on TV in my early twenties, as a heavy smoker, I dreamed about racing there. It was only in 2011, when I asked Aisling (who’s now my wife) if she thought it was realistic. She surprised me a little when she immediately said yes. I was surprised because I’d already competed in two Ironman events that didn’t go so well. The first was Ironman France in Nice in 2008, where I finished just inside the top 1000. The second was in the following year, when I spent a solid six months training my skinny little arse off with the very secret intention of seeing how close I could get to one of those magical Kona slots. That July, I stood on the start line of my second Ironman in Switzerland. After all my hard work I moved up a grand total of about fifty places. I think the universe was telling me I wasn’t Kona material. In fact, I wasn't even close.
Still, despite the apparent reality that I was slow, I’d spend my long training rides daydreaming about racing in Hawaii and telling myself that if I just focused on each sport individually then I wasn’t a million miles away from hitting the numbers I would need to qualify. I reasoned that I was only a handful of minutes away from where I’d need to be in the swim and I’d ridden close to six hours in Nice, which is a mountainous bike route. That somehow made me think that a five-hour Ironman bike split was within my reach. Funny logic, I know, but that was how I saw it then.
The marathon, however, was another matter entirely. In France, I’d clocked a less than impressive four-and-a-half-hour marathon on a pancake flat course, albeit in thirty-five-degree heat. In Switzerland, I just about broke four hours. Again, it was on a fairly flat course but in much cooler conditions. I knew that I would need to run a substantially sub-three-and-a-half-hour marathon to secure a Kona slot and, even if I could, it would have to come off the back of a five-hour bike ride and a sixty-five minute swim.
Despite my apparent lack of physical ability, Aisling saw some potential that no one else (myself included) could see. Even when she said that she thought I could succeed and that I should have a go at chasing a Kona slot, I didn’t really believe that I had what it took. I wanted it and I wanted to believe it, but it really felt like more of a dream than a possibility. But I trusted in Aisling’s belief in me and her judgement. So, we decided to have a go.
We are both fairly impatient people and, in the beginning, we set a very short timescale in which to qualify. We thought: why aim to achieve something in twenty-four months if we could possibly achieve it in twelve instead? We knew that it might take considerably longer, but we didn't really look past that initial short-term goal because I wanted the pressure of the short timescale to keep me working hard and motivated to do things I had never thought physically possible. That doesn't mean that if we weren't successful then we would accept defeat and quit, if it took longer than twelve months we would, of course, keep on trying.
I think we have a unique perspective on what is required for an average athlete to make it to Kona: I didn't have a traditional or typical entry into the sport and I also didn't show any signs that I could race at the level that I eventually achieved. I didn't have what most people would have thought was required and I certainly didn't have any ‘God-given talent’. If Olympic champion Usain Bolt won the genetic lottery then I won the equivalent of a local school raffle.
I started my athletic journey in my late twenties after more than a dozen years spent chain smoking, drinking and living a very unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle, before turning my life around. Up to the point that I stopped smoking I had never taken part in sport of any description outside of what I did in school physical education classes once a week for an hour, and that was only until I was sixteen (and, if I’m really honest with myself, most of those classes were spent trying to do as little as possible).
When I did stop smoking in 1999, I bought my first mountain bike as an incentive to keep it up. I couldn't ride for more than twenty minutes without needing to stop and rest but later that year decided to enter a race. As I rolled in dead last, I thought that it was the stupidest thing I had ever done and swore to myself that I would never do it again.
It didn't take long to be lured back in to try another race. It was funny how the misery and suffering of that first race was forgotten almost as soon as I got off the bike and was quickly replaced with the satisfaction of finishing something that I had thought was beyond me.
Over the next couple of years, I stuck with cycling and managed to move up from coming last place at my first race to being a consistent mid-pack finisher. But I always thought that those racers finishing at the front were a different species. I believed that they had that ‘God-given talent’ that I lacked. Back then I didn't know that the difference between the majority of those athletes and me was the number of hours in the saddle and lots of hard, consistent training.
I gradually moved towards road bike racing over the next few years, mostly out of convenience. I didn't have to drive to and from the trails like I did with mountain biking, I just walked out my front door and I was ready to ride. Unfortunately, road racing didn't reveal any hidden talent either. Over a couple of seasons I managed to become more competent and was able to finish near the front of a race, but I never realistically challenged for a win. My highest placing in a local club race was sixth.
This isn't a story about discovering the bike and cycling, and then finding out that I had a Ferrari engine lurking under the bonnet all that time. I looked at the guys winning my races and they were as far away from my reality as to be from a different planet; they were usually showered, dressed and eating lunch while I was still half a lap from the finish line. And I was only racing the entry-level Sport Category races. There were another two levels of freakishly talented athletes above me. And then there were the national and international level riders above them.
In 2003, I discovered triathlon and immediately fell in love with the sport, but I was back to being a beginner. I thought that because I had something of an engine built from a few years cycling I should do pretty well. I guess I did, on the bike leg at least. What I hadn’t anticipated was that I would regularly be almost last out of the water and that I would spend the entire bike section chasing until I got to Transition 2 (T2) close to the top ten, at which point I was re-passed by most of the people I had caught on the bike.
It didn’t matter that I was slow and finished at the back of the pack, what did matter was that I had found my sport and my passion, and so, over the next couple of seasons I became more and more involved in triathlon. After five years of triathlon, in 2008, I attempted my first Ironman.
It was while I was discovering Ironman that I met Aisling. She was a runner, a real runner who raced ultra-marathons and mountain races. Actually raced them, not just got around them like I did. And she won more often than not. She held course records in Irish mountain running races and, not long after I met her, she won a gold medal at the European Masters Mountain Running Championships in the summer of 2008.
Coincidentally, Aisling also did her first Ironman that year in the UK on the old Sherborne course, despite the fact that she couldn't swim a length of the pool only four months earlier. On race day she put her incredible running ability to good use as she ran the third fastest women's marathon of the day on her Ironman debut.
So, in 2011, when Aisling was telling me to try for Kona, I wanted so much to believe that she was right, but neither of us had a clue about how to go about it. Aisling was the one who suggested that we should get a coach and, as it happened, we knew someone who was coaching triathlon at the time and had raced as a professional Ironman triathlete for years. We reasoned that he would probably know what to do, so we approached him.
He didn't believe I was Kona material but, despite this, agreed to coach me like he would an actual Kona athlete. After working with him for the hardest five months of my life, I crossed the finish line of Ironman UK in thirty-sixth place. I beat some professionals in the process and finished eighth in my age group. I missed out on qualifying for Kona by only two minutes and one place and it had taken me less than six months to get to that stage. As an aside, Aisling also raced that Ironman and missed a Kona slot by only one place, and she wasn't even trying to qualify.
We left Bolton that year somewhat disappointed, but to be honest, my overriding feeling was of having achieved what we had set out to do. I now felt like a Kona athlete, even though I hadn't qualified. I was only two minutes away from a slot and, over a nine- or ten-hour race, I reasoned that two minutes was nothing. I felt that, as an athlete, I was already more or less there. I just had to execute properly on my next race day, and I did. I returned to Ironman UK for the following two years, qualified both times and raced in Kona in both 2012 and 2013.
I had worked with a couple of coaches before I asked Aisling to coach me in 2013. She had been coaching athletes for about 4 years for marathon, triathlon and Ironman. She agreed and still coaches me now. Over the past few years, Aisling's coaching roster grew and I became more involved to the point where I now coach alongside her.
This book is about the lessons we both learnt over the following three years, two Kona qualifications and the resulting two trips to the Big Island in Hawaii. It’s also about the lessons Aisling and I have learnt in our seven years running a coaching business.
I got where I am by applying the biggest lesson I learnt from more than a dozen years spent working for myself: that hard work makes up for a lack of talent. I got here by consistently showing up and doing the work and not believing the people who told me it was impossible
Ten athletes with over one hundred Ironman finishes, dozens of professional and amateur wins and over twenty five Kona qualifications between them. These are the lessons they learned in training and racing along the way.
