20/5/2008
For years I was one of those people who sat on the coach every weekend and watched sports on TV. Any sport that was on I watched. And I always said to myself that one day I would be as fit as the athletes I saw on the screen. Of course I never did anything about it and 20 years later I was still the archetypal coach potato.

At the age of 45 I was smoking 40 cigarettes a day, an addiction I had started when I was only 16, I was 12 kilograms overweight and yet I was strangely content with my life. Every weekend without fail I still told myself that ‘one day’ I would be as fit as my sporting hero’s. I was a typical middle aged South African male.

Then four and a half years ago my wife of twenty years suddenly died of a heart attack.

There are two ways you can go when that kind of thing happens to you. Up or down. I am an up kind of guy and so was my late wife (except she was an up kind of girl, but I’m sure you get the picture). One of the last things she made me promise her was that I would give up smoking and get fit. Oh joy. She really left me with no option did she? Firstly I am a man of my word, and secondly I know her. She would have come back to haunt me if I didn’t keep up my end of the bargain. I now owed it to her to do something with my life and in hindsight I really can’t thank her enough for what she made me promise.

So there I was a week after she died. The 1st of November 2004. As promised I had already given up smoking and I was now signing on at the local gym. The process was cathartic and the exercise helped drown the pain. Then after about 2 days of gym the pain also started to drown the pain. But she was looking over my shoulder checking that I didn’t slack off. That was strong motivation indeed.

Within 3 Months I was losing weight and feeling good. I remember when I first finished a 4km run, I was so happy and excited I had to phone everyone I knew to tell them about it. Man I must have been annoying. Very soon running wasn’t enough for me and I bought a hardtail mountain bike. Three weeks later I did the Wiesenhof 24 hour MTB race. Three days after that I bought a dual suspension MTB to sooth the pain of my sore butt. I was now getting addicted. To sport and to life.

The great thing about sport is that you meet so many people. That’s how I eventually met my second wife. Now I had two women to spur me on, one to look over each shoulder. I doubt many men are lucky enough to have loved and been loved as much as I have in my life. Having a wife with a passion for sport ramped up my sporting ambitions even further.

Fast-forward to 2007. I’d tried running, done a couple of sprint adventure races and had been cycling both Mountain and on road for almost 2 years. I had even completed a 3 day stage race in the Cederberg. So what to do next? I needed a new challenge. How about triathlon? No, how about ‘doing’ IronMan to celebrate my 50th birthday in 2009? Great idea. I’d seen IronMan on TV and thought that I had a reasonable idea of what it entailed. Except that I really didn’t have a clue.

The problem is that by the time I had found out the full horror of the thing I’d told all my family and friends that I was going to enter it. I couldn’t possiby back out. So I bought books about the event that scared me to death. I tried tranquilisers to put it out of my mind and hypnosis was the next option on the list Then it was suggested to me that a coach would be far less destructive and a lot more useful if I actually wanted to finish the event.

So now I have a great coach in the form of Claire Kinsley, the support of my training buddies at mytrainingday.com and my two favourite women watching over me all the way to the finish.

How can I fail?