utterly hooked.
The journey between that chilly start line and the thrilling finish was among the most testing and rewarding
of my life. But it was the journey that got me to that start line that was the real challenge.
The adventure started with an innocent email dropping into my inbox one Tuesday afternoon, inviting me
to try the London Triathlon – the UK’s biggest – which snakes around the Docklands. I had always half-
dreamed of doing a triathlon, but had scheduled it in my head for “next time” and “next year”, and nothing
immediate. But then, something took hold of me, and I signed up.
As I look around at people’s goggled faces, they glare back. One thing’s clear: we are competitors
A triathlon is a swimming race, then a cycling race, then a running one; in the case of the “sprint” version
that I did, that meant 750 metres of swimming, then 20km of cycling, followed by 5km of running. I had
just two weeks to prepare.
I am not a triathlete. Far from it. By chance, I have some experience in each of the three sports, though not
much. I’m a swimmer who almost always swims breaststroke; a cyclist who largely rides an e-bike; I’m a
runner who mostly walks.
After signing up, I’m in a panic and fling out questions at anyone I think might have done a triathlon. Some
are encouraging. The Independent’s science correspondent tells me that all of your training needs to be
finished two weeks before the race, and that nothing later than that makes any difference. This information
comes under a fortnight before the race.
All of the training plans (and there are plenty of very useful ones all around the internet) recommend that
you take eight weeks to get ready, presuming you are of decent all-round fitness already. There is no
training plan to help you prepare for a triathlon when you have fewer than two weeks to train. If there were,
it would presumably be very short, perhaps offering just one piece of advice: don’t do it.
In the face of this, I improvise and boil down what seems to be the fundamentals of triathlon training into
something I can do in such a short time. In practice, this is a few principles: get as fit as you can, ensure that
you’re practising each sport and not neglecting any, and try out the disciplines as close as possible to the
way you will actually do them in the race.
Different strokes: the swimmers transition to
take on the cycling raceWhich brings me to the phrase littered across these training plans, spoken about with the combination of
doom and levity most familiar from the Old Testament. One word powerful enough to inspire fear in every