This new sporting craze is the fastest growing participation event in the free world. IAN O'RIORDANcaught the bug in the TriAthy.
WE WERE somewhere in the depths of the River Barrow, splashing about frantically as if being eaten alive by hungry piranhas, when my goggles fogged up. There are plenty of good reasons for dropping out of your first triathlon, but fogged up goggles is not one of them.
“Spit in them,” Ger Hartmann had advised me the night before. It was too late for that now. I was being eaten alive in another sense – elbows in the face, knees in the ribs, feet in the mouth. Worse still, everyone around me was rapidly disappearing into the distance towards Athy town bridge. All hopes of a spectacular debut were sinking fast.
Two words you won’t hear on the swim leg of a triathlon: “Excuse me.” It’s survival of the fittest, and – in some cases – the fattest. I grew up believing lean is mean, at least in distance running. In open water swimming, lean is meaningless, and as body after burly body passed me, I was eventually left for dead. Payback surely for all the years I’d scoffed at fleshy arms and normal body fat content.
The only incentive to keep going was the notion of making up some time on the cycle and the run. So I struggled on, blindly, narrowly avoiding the set of pillars under the bridge, before being dragged from the water, like a victim of a desperate shipwreck. I was already terribly dizzy and confused, and only a third of the way through.
Little did I realise the hardest part would be wriggling out of my wetsuit. Especially from the waist down. It was like trying to take off a pair of tight jeans in a mad hurry while blindfolded and half drunk.
Just as well the event rules allow for nudity in the transition zone, which quickly resembled some sort of disaster movie. It was total panic. Our brains were full of fear, our only thought being to get out of there as quickly as possible.
So we took off on our fancy bikes as if fleeing the scene of a crime. It was almost a relief to be sitting on the saddle, hard as it was, until my legs began to send out distress signals.
That’s what happens when you go from one exercise to another, without any breather. But the run was to come, my only ally, and when I eventually made it back to the transition zone there was nothing left to do except take off again like a hyena on speed.
Nobody except the morbidly obese will be surprised to hear that this new sporting craze is currently the fastest growing participation event in the free world. There is no easy explanation for it. Perhaps all the Government Health Warnings have finally convinced us that instead of taking up one sport, we should take up three at a time.
What is certain is that the triathlon has come a long way in the 30 years since a group of endurance freaks in Hawaii were debating which of them was the fittest – the swimmer, the cyclist or the runner (The runner won, apparently).
It’s come a long way, too, since the days when Ger Hartmann and Ann Kearney were winning the first Irish titles in the 1980s, and we may as well have been in Hawaii last Saturday when 2,500 of us gathered in the hot sun for what has fast become the largest triathlon in the country: the TriAthy.
There was no way of understanding what the fuss was all about without jumping straight in there. A week into my crash training course I came across a study at the American College of Cardiology suggesting the risk of dying in a triathlon was double the risk of dying in a marathon.
Then I collected my race number. On the back was a medical emergency checklist you’d normally associate with a journey into space.
The problem was I’d already told my editor, who is always known to approve any assignment that may put our lives at risk. “Just make sure you’ve someone to cover that GAA match on Sunday if you don’t make it out alive,” he said. Wonderful.
In a sense, though, I did wimp out. Athy offers the standard Olympic distance – a 1.5km swim, 40km cycle and 10km run – but also the Sprint distance: a .75km swim, 20km cycle and 5km run.
Over half of us opted for the Sprint. I couldn’t help feeling this was a cheap compromise, but the whole purpose of the sprint is to entice more people into the sport, and it’s doing exactly that.
What Athy ultimately offers are the three key components for all successful triathlons: open water, closed roads and an expert organisational team. It’s not an event you can try at home.
It also offers arguably the fastest triathlon course in Ireland, which helps explain why within three years the numbers have shot up from 740 to Saturday’s 2,500. They would have had more had that not been the limit.
Such growth has defied all expectations of the TriAthy organising team.
“Starting out three years ago we thought we might get 300 entries,” said Brian Crinion, a former Irish triathlon champion.
“The whole sport has just grown and grown, but one of the priorities for us was to develop a fast course, and open it to as many people as possible.
“The average age of people starting in the triathlon now is 31, and it’s about 60-40 men-women, which is quite amazing. But you get all ages as well, from all walks of life. I just think as running and cycling have become more popular, this is the next step. And once someone tries a triathlon they’ll almost certainly do another.”
Crinion started TriAthy with his old schoolmate Arthur Lynch, who has no background in the sport, but while working in Athy secured the necessary support from the local council. Karl McCann from the Portlaoise triathlon club Trilogy came on board, as did Crinion’s club, Belpark. Angela Lang completed the team, with her expertise in running and cycling.
The irony is that although it’s billed as Ireland’s fastest triathlon, few of us actually race it. We are talking about two very distinct groups here, two entirely different triathlons – the select few who compete against each other (the beef cakes); and the rest of us, who compete against ourselves (the rice cakes). It’s just that sometimes competing against yourself can be the most vicious contest of all.
What makes it interesting is that we all have our strengths, and weaknesses. In the race for the €1,000 top prize, 24 year-old Northern Ireland champion swimmer David Graham was first out of the water, but was overtaken on the cycling leg by Scotland’s Fraser Cartmell. In the run, Cork’s Bryan Keane was quickest of all – covering the 10km in a sensational 30:36 – but that wasn’t enough to haul back Cartmell, who made it three TriAthy wins out of three in a course record 1:46.44.
Later, as the rest of us began our journey in carefully staggered starts, the question wasn’t of winning, but finishing. Our swim may have been a meagre .75km, but I lost almost three minutes on the beef cakes. It took me another three minutes to get out of my wetsuit and onto my bike. The beef cakes do it in about 30 seconds.
I used to run 5km before waking up in the morning, but if the triathlon does have the equivalent to the marathon’s wall, it was fast approaching.
By the time we ran back along the riverbank into the finish, the Hawaiian-like sunshine still beating down and the deep exhaustion of it all briefly giving way to deep satisfaction, all any of us was capable of was two thoughts; our first beer, and our next triathlon.
