When we met a year ago, Rowena had already entered Ironman
Lanzarote. Not long after she changed to Mallorca 70.3, but with less than a
year to get up to scratch we were in no doubt that it would be a hell of a
challenge. A 1.2-mile sea swim, a 56-mile bike ride up into the mountains,
followed by a half marathon in the heat of Mallorca was never going to be a
walk in the park.
I want to tell the story of how my girlfriend became a
Half-Iron-chica; my experiences of the journey over the last year, and the race
itself – Ironman Mallorca 70.3, which Rowena completed last month. Something
that has since inspired me to my first open water swim last week.
I like to run, but there was nothing about watching Rowena
train for Ironman over the last 12 months that made me want to take up
triathlon. The training looked hard, but seeing what she achieved, from her
starting point a year ago, and experiencing Ironman first hand, well….it was truly
inspiring.
The Swim.
This time last year Rowena could swim, but only like we can
all swim. You know, we learnt when we were kids and swim occasionally; usually
on holiday. But how do you go from that to swimming over a mile in the sea
whilst lots of other triathletes all try and swim in the same direction at the
same time? She started with some lessons at the pool to improve technique and
then she worked up to swimming a mile at Swimathon. This took a lot of swimming
practice, week in week out at the pool. When she moved to Manchester she joined
a local leisure centre just out of the city. Imagine the most down-at-heel
inner city place you can and then insert a leisure centre – not paradise, but
she loved it!
Then came the wet suit. She travelled around different
places trying them on, researched extensively, but it was no good, she simply
didn’t know how to buy a wet suit. And I certainly couldn’t offer any words of
wisdom. In the end, with a swim camp booked in Lanzarote she ended up hiring
one. She later bought it because the fine for how late it was would have been
more than the cost of buying it! She then found out it was too big and had to
buy another!
As the winter set in and Rowena got a job in Salford, a
change of pool was required. Throughout the long cold winter she was getting
the first train at 6.50am and doing 2-2.5k every Tuesday and Thursday morning –
mind-boggling swim sets provided by her new online triathlon coach.
The swimming became the strongest of her 3 disciplines – I
think a result of her ability to continue all the way through winter when
running and cycling had become more difficult. But she was still nervous about
open water swimming; the only dip in the open water all winter having being a
swim in the freezing cold of Salford Quays on New Years Day with the brilliant
Uswim. And lets face it, this winter didn’t want to leave us and so she didn’t
manage a single decent open water sessions before we flew out to Mallorca in
April.
Our first trip out to Mallorca was a recce during which Rowena
swam what she thought was going to be the course. Luckily though she also went
out there a week early in May, a week before the start of Ironman, because the
course wasn’t where we thought it was going to be. Without doubt it helped to
swim the actual swim course twice in the week leading up to the race.
Come race day I was nervous as hell, stood by the railings
as Rowena waited in the pen for the start of Ironman Mallorca 70.3. I’d been
down to the shore and watched the professionals set off 5mins earlier and it
was carnage! When the gun fired I could see the look on her face. Calmer than I
expected! Focussed. She was ready, you could tell. She was supposed to be
starting near the back to avoid being trampled, but ended up near the front and ran
down and into the water along with another 500 other women in their black wet
suits and orange race swim hats.
Then that was it. Rowena’s mum and I moved around to the
other side to get a better view and we could see a huge swell of bodies
splashing around in the water. Many often say it looks like a shoal of piranha
– it does. It’s an amazing sight. By this point though we had no way of knowing
which one was Rowena. All we could do was make the short walk down the beach to
the finish and wait.
Rowena and I had sat in our apartment the night before going
over cut off times. We expected her to do the swim in around 45 mins, which was
well before the cut off. We knew that unless something bad happened out there
she would be OK. We’d also spent the night before practicing getting the wet
suit down to her waist, something we knew she should try to do as she came out
of the water. The back-up plan was to ask a fellow competitor to help in
transition – the race officials can’t help!
But that wasn’t necessary. She came running up from the surf
at around 41 mins with the wet suit stripped to her waist, looking awesome!
Still focussed, but we got a smile when she saw me and her mum. I was so proud,
but really excited too. The adrenalin was pumping.
The Bike.
Wow. This one was a struggle. Really. 12 months earlier when
she was getting into triathlon, she was using a hybrid that she’d bought off a
friend. She didn’t understand the gears. She had no road sense. No handling
skills. She won’t mind me saying this, but she was a complete amateur!
But what she lacked in ability, she made up for in guts. In
September, as I was running Kielder Marathon, Ro signed up to do the Duathlon!
The same 26.2-mile course, but both running and cycling. I know from running it
the next day that the course is gravelly and very very undulating. She still
didn’t know how to operate her gears at this point! I’m still amazed to this
day that she got around the course without freaking out. And she did it in a
decent time. She could hardly walk afterwards and I remember we had to stop the
car so she could get out and try and stretch her legs not long after we had set
off to our friend Johnny’s house afterwards.
Soon after she bought ‘Red’ – a half decent road bike from
Decathlon, but infinitely better to ride on the road than ‘Grover’, the hybrid.
For Rowena though it was like getting out of a Ford Escort and into a Ferrari.
She couldn’t handle Red’s speed and ‘twitchiness’! Winter had also set in and
at times her confidence on the bike seemed to be decreasing rather than
increasing. A roller in our basement gym helped, but everybody knows that you
need to get out cycling on the roads and where we live in the hilly Pennines that’s
hard enough during good weather. This year, from December through to March we
had nothing but snow, ice and sub-freezing temperatures!
Like I said – guts! She kept at it. She joined an all-ladies
cycling club; a bunch of tough nuts from around these parts, and went on some long Sunday rides with them,
returning exhausted and blue from the cold. She tackled the big hill up onto
the moors from where we live, on her own, and came back unable to move she was
so cold. She suffered a puncture up in the snowy hills and had to get a taxi
home. She cried on her return from these bike rides on more than one occasion
and had her fair share of accidents and near misses, one with a lorry!
By the time we went out to Mallorca in April, she could
ride, but she still lacked confidence. Rowena was scared the first time she set
off to do the actual bike course, but she tackled it, finished up doing it
twice over that 5-day period in April. I drove it and that was scary enough!
The switchbacks on the way down where unbelievable. She had some falls over
there too, but definitely came back from that trip feeling more confident.
The bike was always the weaker of the 3 disciplines though
and we thought she would be close to the cut off times, but on race day when we
saw her emerge from transition and grab her hired race bike, she was looking
good. All we could do now was wait. It was time for me to bond with Mrs
Harding!!
Mama Rowena and I having done a bit of bonding, and a bit of
shopping, positioned ourselves near the end of the bike course and entry to Transition
2. I kept telling her mum that I wasn’t expecting her for a while. We were
there before midday and we’d calculated that it might be more like 1.30pm, but
we were both glued to the road, watching every cyclist come in, and her mum was
convinced she would be much earlier than expected. Which of course she was! An
hour and 10 mins earlier than expected! Why had we been worrying about cut off
times?! Again, I was amazed, proud and absolutely thrilled. All I could think
was ‘awesome’!
We now knew that she could walk the run course and still do
it. I was so happy by this point I could have burst.
The Run.
This should have been Rowena’s best discipline having come
from a running background and in a way it was, but the training had been
difficult. A mysterious foot injury, which we later found out was a nerve
problem at the bottom of her foot, held her back in training. She was more or
less doing the runs that were in the training plan, but they were often ending
in disappointment and pain. And I was her run coach! I couldn’t let her running
let her down.
With a couple of months to go we ignored the training plan a
bit and put our own plan in place for getting her run-ready. Rowena entered us
both in the Blackpool Half Marathon in early April and we built up the miles
over a several week period leading up to it. She nailed it in the end with a PB
of 1:53 and carried that through to Mallorca when she lost a bit of time, as
you would expect, but still did incredibly well at around 2:10. It was 3 laps
of a course that ran parallel to the beach and I loved watching her during this
part of the race. She was smiling so much every time I saw her even though,
whilst looking great, she looked like it was hurting. That’s my Rowena, guts
and positivity rolled into one.
She finished the race strong and recovered well the next day
when we climbed hundreds of steps to visit a church and then tackled a huge
hill up to a monastery. The training had paid off. Swimming twice a week.
Cycling 3 times a week, sometimes for 3-5 hours at a time. Running twice a
week. Strength and Condition sessions at the gym twice a week. And the
incredible amount of research and preparation that went into making that start
line with the tools required to do the job. It had all paid off.
I’m immensely proud off my Iron-chica because not only did
she do this, but she did it for a reason. She did it to raise money for Freedom
From Torture. That’s the bit that I admire the most. When I set out to do a
running challenge I do it because it excites me; because I know I’ll enjoy the
training and the event itself. Rowena did this partly to prove something to
herself, to rise to a challenge, but she deliberately chose something
completely outside of her comfort zone that she knew she would not enjoy training
for because she wanted to raise money for a charity that has become very
special to her over the last few years.
Because my Rowena likes to put
everything she has into a worthwhile cause. And she certainly did that.
To all those who sponsored Rowena, and I heard of some
amazing acts of generosity, thank you. If you didn’t get around to it, you can
still sponsor Rowena by visiting:
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