Free Accidental Ironman by Martyn Brunt Page A

a few minutes of this I glanced up to see that I was now surrounded by a ring of empty bikes, the cast of
Loose Women
having moved to the fringes of the studio to avoid that awful man whose skin appeared to be leaking.
    It is worth mentioning at this point that you can also train indoors for other parts of triathlon. In running you can try a treadmill, which is a bit like a turbo trainer except that it has the extra comedy potential that you might see someone trip over and get fired out the back like they’ve been shot from a catapult. Then there’s circuit training, which involves running round a room doing press-ups, squat thrusts, box-jumps, burpees, reverse dips, pull-ups, sit-ups and ‘Oh, God my stomach hurts and my arms are going to drop off and I think I’m going to diiiiieeeeee!’ If you are really committed you could also try weight training, which involves hanging around in strange rooms where scantily clad people spend a lot of time looking at themselves in mirrors and making the kind of loud straining noises you only otherwise hear in the toilets at motorway services. Being able to lift enormous weights is less important than being world class at posing around while inadequately clad, and I don’t find going to the gym a comfortable experience. To be honest I’m a bit clueless about it all. For example, the push-up bra I bought recently is hopeless. Even when I’m wearing it I can still only do about ten of them.
    So far we’ve discussed how cycling dominates my free time in the winter and summer, but it dominates my working life, too. Partly this is because these days I don’t own a car, just a campervan that is capable of passing everything on the road except a petrol station, so consequently I cycle everywhere as my main mode of transport. It is also partly because I now have a job in cycling, which came about as a direct result of me taking up triathlons. Let me explain …
    If you’ve ever heard of me before, it’s probably because you have read a column I write in a monthly magazine called
220 Triathlon
(the 220 being the number of people who read my column, timesed by ten), an opportunity that came my way after winning a readers’ competition to see how many knob gags one person could fit into a single paragraph. Despite appearances I am not a professional writer – which you may well have worked out for yourself if you’re still with me this far into the book – and I’ve had several jobs in what I laughingly call ‘my career’ so far, all of them crap. However, these days to keep a roof over my pretty little head I have a job that involves helping to convert old railway lines into cycle routes, and travelling round the country identifying places where new cycle paths and bridges can be built. This obviously sounds like a lot of fun – and it is, I won’t lie. The organisation I work for is a charity called Sustrans, which is responsible for creating the 14,000 miles of the National Cycle Network, and as its development manager I spend most of my days on a bike, riding around looking at places where cyclists have a hard time as a result of the design of roads and speeds of traffic, trying to see what can be done about it. Admittedly, I’m usually riding round on a Brompton folding bike that makes me a figure of fun to schoolkids and the occasional commuter on the trains I catch but, as I recently pointed out to one gentleman with a face like a dog’s bum with a hat on who suggested that my 6 foot 3 inch frame perched on top of a mini-wheeled roller skate made me look like ‘a twat’, in my world it wasn’t as hopelessly twattish as wearing an ill-fitting Marks & Spencer suit on a train with 300 identically dressed people who all wish they were doing something else other than spending 40 hours of misery a week in a corporate shitfarm.
    Going to work for Sustrans was a complete departure from the previous jobs I’d had, which all involved working in ‘head office’ type roles for