Free Accidental Ironman by Martyn Brunt

by Primark, and often possess a backside so big you could crucify someone on it.
    Cycling in the sunshine on quiet Majorcan roads is one thing, but if you want to be any good at it then inevitably you’ll have to do some of it in the winter in the UK as well, which is, of course, all-year-round fun – and I use the word ‘fun’ quite wrongly. Training in the winter is a necessary evil. By that I mean it is vaguely necessary but definitely evil. Being a triathlete in winter is hard enough anyway because one side of your brain says that as well as the season to be jolly, ’tis also the season of rest, recovery, cakes and long-postponed nights in the pub. You’ve trained hard, raced hard, eaten healthily, shunned alcohol and you bloody well deserve a rest. Except the other part of your brain nags you with thoughts that every pint, biscuit, Belgian chocolate and individual mince pie is weighing you down, making you slow and rubbish. You’ll be overweight in a week, next season everyone will beat you and your results will plummet faster than a fat kid off a 10-metre diving board. So we keep training.
    In the UK, training in the winter isn’t that different from training in the summer except the days are shorter and you have to clean more crap off your bike, but there’s only so much rain a cyclist can take before their feet become webbed so there comes a point when we are driven indoors. Fiendish minds have been at work and have devised a glittering array of fun-packed ways to ensure you stay at it no matter what the weather.
    Firstly there are turbo trainers, which began life as an instrument of torture with the first recorded use being during the Spanish Inquisition, when confessions were extracted from heretics by attempting to sweat them to death. Now adapted as a training ‘aid’, they sap your legs and your soul by clamping your back wheel into a static metal frame, pushing a magnetic roller against your tyre and allowing you to pedal while sitting still, giving you all the effort of cycling outside but without some of the pleasanter aspects such as air to breathe, a view to see, and blood to circulate around your groin. My turbo trainer sits in the garage staring malevolently at me as the nights draw in. I am convinced it is evil because I once cut myself on a tyre lever and my blood seemed to flow towards it. Soon it will have my rear wheel in its vice-like grip, and it knows it. Hour upon hour of crotch-numbing pedalling awaits.
    Turbo trainers are not the only means of indoor cycling torture. Oh no, there are spinning classes, which are the fitness equivalent of Chris Evans in that they shout fun but they feel shit. They typically involve thunderous pedalling to pumping music which is so bad that if it came on the radio while I was in my car, I couldn’t kick the knob off the stereo fast enough. The music does at least have the blessing of drowning out the excited whoops of the spinning instructor exhorting us to ‘feel the burn’ while I am wishing they could feel the lash of a bicycle chain. The other downside to spinning classes is that they tend to be attended by non-cyclists who are just there to keep fit (or get fit judging by the look of some of them). While training for Ironman Canada I did a deal with the Esporta gym opposite where I worked at that time, that I could go in and join their spinning classes while training for the race. I duly turned up and plonked myself on a bike in the middle of the studio and started warming up. Around me were several people, mostly women of a certain age and wealth, wearing pristine Nike kit with attendant accessories such as headbands, drinks bottles and make-up. Most were pedalling slowly and chatting away while the excitable female instructor started cranking up the music and hormones. I did as I was bid, and started powering away, sweating like a piece of cheese under Anthony Worrall Thompson’s jacket and spraying perspiration around like a garden hose. After