Triathlon in China: taking on the Qiandaohu Ironman

Some races hurt more than others… an Ironman hurts most!

My time in China was defined by running. I started running properly when I came to the country in 2018, and was swept along to far-flung locations, races and experiences by the running boom. But one thing it was not defined by was swimming. At the age of 32, after three years in China, I hadn’t swum more than a couple of lengths since school, with swimming being a very loose definition of the splashing around with my head out of the water that constituted all I was capable of. I should have stayed in my lane and concentrated on running. But of course, with people all around me in the Shanghai expat community extolling the virtues of swim, bike, run, I didn’t want to be left out. I followed the classic path of many runners searching for something more demanding, more impressive, more brag-worthy - and was enticed into the shiny new world of triathlon.

Shanghai running

At a local Half Marathon

Triathlon was shiny and new to me. It is exciting, and can quickly become all-encompassing. I was already running a lot, meeting with a small group on Wednesday and Friday mornings to do interval sessions as the sun rose before work, as well as for weekend long runs. I would run almost every day alone if not with the group, but triathlon brought back cycling with a vengeance. If I was going to do one properly, I would of course need a new bike! I nerded out reading about all the gear I could buy to try and improve my training and performance by that elusive extra percent - power meters, aero helmets, deeper wheels. I bought an expensive all carbon road bike from a Chinese manufacturer, and started hitting the training hard. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my running - I was going to have to bike AND run after all - so started getting up at 4am to do two hours on the bike followed by a ‘brick’ run immediately after, all before going to work. Alongside all my triathlon friends, I signed up to the first big triathlon back on the schedule in post-Covid locked down China, at the Qiandaohu (Thousand Island Lake) 226 (Ironman) and 113 (Half Ironman) race weekend.

But there was a problem, and it loomed large. I was a terrible swimmer. With the race only four months away, I signed up to a fitness club with a pool and started trying to learn how to do front crawl properly from YouTube videos. My self-taught swimming was given it’s first test three weeks later at a 1.2km swim- 9km run event in Meilan Lake, Shanghai. Jumping in off the jetty (I didn’t trust myself to dive😯) I swam less than ten strokes with my head in the water, popped up to look around, only to find I had been going completely in the wrong direction and had lost my swim buoy. A bemused safety canoe was shouting at me to change course, which I duly tried to do, but after a few more attempts of breathless thrashing around, I was quickly far behind the rest of the pack. The safety canoe slowly resigned himself that I was going to need my own personal safety boat, and bedded down behind me. For the next fifty minutes he followed me as I swam a few strokes, then flipped onto my back to float along a bit getting my breath back. When I finally made it to the end of the swim course all the other competitors had already finished most of the run, and I was alone in the water except an old man doing breaststroke.

My swimming improved with d’Arcy’s help

Chastened by such a poor showing, I redoubled my efforts in the pool. I enlisted the help of my friend Chavi, a Spanish ex-pro basketball player who now dedicated his sporting exploits to triathlon. Through extensive drills with swim toys, fins and snorkels, I slowly started to improve. I remained far behind the standard needed to be competitive, but I at least began to have the capacity to swim close to the distances needed for a Half Ironman.

During the October National Holiday, a month before the race, my friend d’Arcy and I took a trip to Qiandaohu to get some training in. We stayed in a local guest house next to the water, thrashing ourselves all day before leaving the guest house owners incredulous as they watched the amount of fried noodles we put away at night. But the biggest confidence I took away from the trip was the open water swimming. Many new triathletes find transitioning into the unknown environment of a dark lake or choppy sea scary, but with d’Arcy beside me to provide life saving duties if something went wrong, I started to enjoy it. Being in nature just felt so much more calming than starting at a line on the bottom of a pool. By the end of the week, I was looking forward to getting into the water, a far cry from my mindset after my first attempt at Meilan Lake.

Qiandaohu training camp with d’Arcy - good times

That wasn’t to say the jitters weren’t there. As race week approached, I was second-guessing myself. Anyone who does endurance sports will know that feeling of anything you achieve, any personal best time or race position, never being enough. This feeling started to grab hold of me this time even before the race. I had done so much training, averaging nearly 20 hours a week for the eight weeks leading into Qiandaohu. But there was the nagging feeling that I wouldn’t perform as well as I had hoped in the Half Ironman which I was signed up for. I didn’t have aero bars on my bike, which was sure to cost me valuable minutes, and training with d’Arcy coloured my thinking - I was running well, but not well enough to mix it with my friend who was clocking 1:15 Half Marathons in the run up and swam like a fish compared to me. In a crisis of confidence I made a decision that made sense to me at the time, but absolutely no sense to anyone else - I switched my entry to the full Ironman distance.

Doing a full Ironman four months after learning to swim properly. It sounds crazy, but it made sense to me. I had already convinced myself I wasn’t going to perform as well as I wanted in a Half Ironman, so to get a real sense of achievement, completing an Ironamn was a better option. My friends thought I was crazy, but were still supportive, and at the end of October, we set off to Qiandaohu, back to the same guest house, and readied ourselves for the race.

So many emotions go into facing a challenge that you have no idea if you can complete. In my case, those challenges were also potentially dangerous. 3.8k is a long way to swim, and there would be more participants this time, so potentially no personal safety canoe for me. But on the morning of the race I felt a strange calm. I had struggled to sleep, getting up at midnight to eat my pre-race breakfast ahead of time as I didn’t want to just keep tossing and turning in bed, but I put that all to one side as I waited to enter the pre-dawn water.

The first lap of the the swim exceeded all my expectations, I was slower than average, but not nearly as slow as I thought. I would like to say my hours of training had paid off and I had become an accomplished swimmer, but it was probably more due to wearing a wetsuit for the first time, with all the added buoyancy it brings. Even losing my goggles briefly at the start of the second lap and swimming for the last 45 minutes with goggles, and consequently eyes, full of lake water didn’t phase me too much, and I emerged at the end of the swim with 1 hour 39 minutes on the clock! In my wildest dreams I hadn’t imagined this - I would have been happy just to beat the 2 hour 15 minute cut off. I was towards the back of the field, but I loved the bike and knew I would be one of the strongest runners in the race - it was time to go to work.

The rest of the race was exhilarating. There is a big advantage of having your best discipline as the last event in a triathlon, as the positive emotions from passing other competitors entering their weaker events is infectious, and spurs you on through the pain. When other people look in far more pain than you are, you forget your own, and that was the overwhelming feeling I had for the last 90km of the bike and the run. I felt amazing on the bike, pushing hard across the hilly course while focusing on getting as many gels down as possible, watching better swimmers who had gone out hard on the bike blow up. I did see plenty of others riding faster than me, but consoled myself with the fact they were all on TT bikes with aerobars: of those of us using classic road bikes, only one other guy was faster on the bike leg.

As I came to the end of the bike I was focused, and loving every minute of it. I knew I had to not get overexcited, and held myself back to no faster than 4:45/km, knowing that cramps or all sorts of other nasty surprises could set in after putting my body through so much. I focused on catching another friend, Inaki, who had swum thirty minutes faster than me and maintained the gap on the bike. As I saw him grow closer at every turnaround, I felt like a predator closing in for the kill - I was flying! But then, of course, something went wrong. It had to. In my case it was stomach issues from the number of gels I had been forcing down. After pulling myself out of the bushes after my second emergency toilet stop, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, with the setting sun seeming to offer a depressing metaphor for my triathlon ambitions. But I hadn’t come this far just to give up. I forced myslef through, willing myself to reach the next kilometre marker, the next aid station, the end of the next lap. As I reached the last 5km my energy returned - I could almost smell the finishing line. My pace quickened, and as I reached the last kilometre I saw another runner ahead of me and became the predator again. I strained every sinew to catch him as the finish line loomed, and crossed in his wake as he realised the danger coming from behind and willed himself to put in a last effort. As I crossed under the finishing banner in his wake, emotion overcame me. I felt tears in my eyes as I comprehended the magnitude of what I had achieved - I was an Ironman!