I watched in awe as hundreds of whippet-thin athletes made the halfway turn on their spindly bikes. Then I experienced a life-changing phenomenon. In the middle of the pack, grunting with every downstroke, was a fellow fat bloke. He looked like a rhino on a grasshopper, his gut hanging down like a small beer keg as he made the turn. He was laughing and cheering with the crowd of school kids that had gathered at my station on Nai Thorn Beach.
As he rode away, the school kids screamed hysterically and I turned to see that the fat bloke's bum had eaten his swimmers. His pimpled, lily-white gluteus maximums were bouncing like sacks full of puppies.
I looked at the numbers on our sheet and saw that the fat bloke was placed 120th out of more than 400 competitors. Suddenly I was gripped by the ridiculous idea that anything one fat bloke can do, another fat bloke can.
6.00am: Beep, beep, beep, and beep… Alarm is too loud. Eyes fly open, sense of impending doom envelopes me.
6.05am: Eat apple. Read somewhere apple is better than coffee to wake you up. Nonsense. Eat another apple and have a strong coffee.
6.20am: Drive pickup truck with trusty steed in back to classy hotel to pick up Bald Bloke, a friend, and have a few croissants with two more coffees. Too much coffee. Begin to chatter and shake like a shitting dog. Drink lots of water to dilute caffeine. Need to pee like a racehorse, now, every five minutes.
6.45am: Pickup truck screeches to a stop at the entrance to Laguna Beach Resort. We're late. Head of security thinks jittery, wide-eyed Fat Bloke may be terrorist, but turns us toward Canal Village carpark. Out come the bikes, bananas, keg of Vaseline, sunscreen, energy bars, shoes, helmets and towel.
7.00am: "Number please," asks number-painting guy. "Three-sixty," I reply. He's a mate. He notices my gut. I try to suck it in, but it suffers from Newton's Law.
7.10 am: Unpack knapsack full of goodies under bike rack. Towel for feet, shoes for bike pedals, bananas for fuel, sunscreen for nose, Vaseline for agates, helmet for brain? It's all there. Take huge dollop of Vaseline, pull back front of Lycra pants, and apply grease liberally to giblet area. Pull away back of shorts and shovel in some more.
7.20am: Angry organizer chastises Fat Bloke and Bald Bloke for not being fast enough. Walk about a kilometre along the beach from transition area to swim start. Need to pee. Beach is sloping — one leg is getting longer than the other. Walk backward to compensate. Feel phantom pain in leg muscles. I never train enough for the swimming leg. Ah, relax. Swimming is buoyant Fat Bloke's specialty.
7.45am: Arrive with hundreds of others at starting area. Chatter inanely, trying to impress skinny people that I don't even like. Terrified, I realize I've achieved the status of heaviest competitor.
7.55am: My mate the Phuket Gov thanks everyone, and says it's all go. Circus ringmaster introduces the super-skinny professional bastards. Blokes. They step forward and wave. We cheer. Everyone looks like an alien conehead with their goggles and caps. Not me. Fat Bloke goes au natural.
8.00am: The gun goes off and 460 of us race down the beach. A charging mass of rippling sinews and washboard stomachs and one fat bloke invade the Andaman Sea. I am engulfed by a frothy swarm of flailing limbs and shower caps like a whale harried by a pack of barracudas.
8.02am: Survival instincts and adrenaline finally kick in, and I pull away from the mob like an offshore racer on nitro. Unfortunately, this burst of speed is short lived. Too bad I can't drink coffee while swimming. Search horizon for first buoy. Inhale lungs full of salt water. Cough and sputter. Locate buoy on outer limit of worlds' curve. This is not good. Not good at all.
8.09am: Arrive with 300 others at the first buoy. Swimmers confuse Fat Bloke for the buoy. Get kicked in the head repeatedly.
8.15am: In the nick of time, breaching and spinning, endorphins finally arrive. These fascinating creatures have been known to save human drowning victims, as indeed they must today if I am to make it back to terra firma.
8.29am: Miraculously make landfall, where a dignified transition, à la McArthur returning to the Philippines, is thwarted by emaciated alien bastards scrabbling up the beach like so many golems from Middle Earth. "I have returned," mutters Fat Bloke.
The unwashed masses cheer from the ramparts as the conquering hero charges up the slope in respectable 100th place, on to the next phase of this gruelling Herculean ordeal, the freshwater swim - the purpose of which is to humble our superhero by reducing his buoyancy to that of an anvil.
8.39am: Sore but clean, I gallop up the road sucking in gut. I grab a drink and enter the transition area amid a chant of "Go, Fat Bloke; go Fat Bloke!" On with clip-on shoes, on with tanktop … Uh, oh — tanktop is stuck. Fat Bloke isn't flexible enough to handle the problem, and resembles meat being squeezed out of a well-stuffed sausage. Cannot reach back pockets of the vest to fill with bananas and power gels, so decide to stuff them down the front of my shorts.
8.42am: Try to ride out one-handed while I fight with tanktop till it covers half of my hanging guts. Get into a rhythm and pick up speed, flying fast into the first hard corner. A banana slips down my pants leg. Spectators point and comment on how well endowed Fat Bloke is. Looks are important. Decide to eat banana later.
9.05am: Whiz … Whiz … Whiz. Sick of being overtaken by overly competitive, anorexic maniacs, yelling- "On your right!" or "On your left!" My role is to help everyone else feel better about how ridiculously thin they are as they overtake Fat Bloke. These hills are steep. Burning lungs, legs and shoulders. "I will not walk. I will not walk. I will not walk. … Oh, stuff it!" I walk my bike the last 20 metres.
10.00am: I soon realize that the first hill walk has cost me a good five minutes, and my hopes of breaking the four-hour barrier are threatened. Eat banana. Finally approach the bike transition area. To cheering crowds, roll across line somewhere in the middle of the pack. Heart fills with dread. Fat Bloke is a very poor runner.
10.46am: Discard bicycle, shoes, helmet and banana skins. Stuff shirt with energy goo and squish into Vaseline-filled shoes. Charge down the course like an elephant in must with hyenas nipping at its heels. This greyhound-like species of runner has been bred for speed, whereas my own genetic pedigree evolved over many centuries of elbow-propping in the bars of Ireland. Loping out, bearing my myriad old rugby wounds, I wonder if I can finish in under four hours. My wonky knees, bad back, disconnected hamstring, and arthritic ankles are exacerbated by a painful lactic acid buildup throughout my entire body. If I were a horse, they'd shoot me.
Quasimodo on amphetamines, I stumble and roll out of the carpark to the cheers of "Go, Fat Bloke." I hobble far enough away that no one can see me, and then I slow to a walk. Then I crawl. Become suddenly nauseous and giddy, stars in my peripheral vision as I begin to burp banana and vanilla gel. Has someone electrified my Kool Aid?
Am I having a heart attack? Oh, dear. Hide under a shady tree till I feel human again. Get up to stagger like a drunk for awhile. Start to feel a little better. Try to jog and walk intermittently.
Am I having a heart attack? Oh, dear. Hide under a shady tree till I feel human again. Get up to stagger like a drunk for awhile. Start to feel a little better. Try to jog and walk intermittently.
11.20am: Constantly overtaken by scrawny, high-speed purebreds as I finally discover my legs again. The sun is microwave hot. Scandi hooligan wearing colourful bandana runs past at super velocity only to faint and collapse to his knees a few hundred metres farther on, eyes spinning, frothing at the mouth. "Bloody hot out here, hey Lars?" comments the revitalized Fat Bloke as he ambles past the chundering Viking marauder.
11.37am: I have run headlong into "the wall". Attempting to climb over it is no use. I can't go around since, like the Great Wall of China, it can be seen from outer space. The only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that I'll get what everyone is out here for: the "runners high". This legendary condition appears when your agony threshold is shattered and pain is converted into a pleasure better than drugs. It happens. I get super high.
12.11pm: Cross the finish line and collect a medal and lots of attention from the event doctor, who asks, "Are you ok?"
"Bloody oath, mate!" smiles the Fat Bloke, as he high-fives his wife and kids, who bask in the glow of their heroic husband and father.
I tipped the scales at just over 122 kilos when, in 1998, I entered my first Laguna Phuket Triathlon. I had to walk the entire run section. But I did finish. Almost everyone had gone home by the time I staggered in over the line. That first one took me more than five and a half hours. Over the next few years, I dropped a lot of weight and got up early two or three times a week to train. Over the next three LPTs, my aim has always been to break the four-hour nemesis. I've managed it two out of three times.
It's the endorphins that lead me on.
