out into the cold air of the Royal Docks.
Climbing down off a pontoon and into the water, you bob around waiting for the beginning of your wave.
It’s announced via the booming of a horn and then all hell breaks loose. It’s less swim, more scramble; limbs
and bright green water are everywhere, and all form and rationality goes very quickly out of the window.
It’s at this moment, in a wave of dread and anger, that the full stupidity of what I have done overtakes me.
Halfway around the swimming route, struggling to see and being kicked in the face, I start kicking myself,
too: this was idiotic, arrogant, unnecessary. This is exactly the worst place to start getting stressed out like
this, with my breathing getting faster and faster and nothing to lean on to take a break. It’s compounded by
the fact that this was supposed to be my best discipline: if I’m doing this badly on one I’m good at, what hell
awaits in the run? There’s no option but to push through, and nowhere else to go but forwards – so I just
keep going.
Getting out of the water means clambering up a pontoon and then taking off your wetsuit. You throw that in
a bag and run to your bike, where you get ready to set off on the second part of the mission. All that
transition practice is supposed to kick in here – but it’s difficult still, and I dread to think how stressful and
painful it would have been without preparation.
The swim went much more quickly than I had expected (I have a Garmin bike computer and an Apple
Watch, both of which do a great job at tracking my progress, but neither is much use during the swim). All
of that stress was unnecessary, it turns out. That realisation gives me a jolt of excitement, and I speed out of
the transition zone and out on the bike.
The bike race flies by. It’s not an especially picturesque journey: the long route heads past all of the iconic
London landmarks, but I’m doing the short one, and so just fly by the Docklands.
The run is a slog. Switching from cycling to running is even more tiring than it sounds, and than it ever was
when I practised. But at this point I am electric with the thrill of having done it. I no longer care what my
time is, how tired I am or that I spend half the time half-walking as I struggle to do that final 5k run.
I had thought that in these final, toughest moments of the race I might learn something profound about
myself, discover new ground through pushing the boundaries of my endurance. In practice I’m far too tired
for that, and have no spare energy to divert to it. But with the fatigue comes a sense of relief: I have nothing
to do but keep pushing myself, no space for anything else in my head. It’s something like the experience
I’ve had throughout these past two weeks: it has pushed away anxiety and melancholy and replaced it with a
kind of furious focus.