Accidental Ironman by Martyn Brunt Page B

the same hostility as a cornered badger, to the point where anyone attempting to swim in the same lane as him is likely to get their teeth knocked down their throat. It is also written in
The Triathletes’ Bible
that: ‘Thou shalt try to beat thy mates above all others’ so, despite the presence of lots of other competitors, the fiercest rivalry was the Brunt vs Burdett celebrity death-match.
    The first part of the DIY-Tri challenge involved doing seven swimming races in a day and first blood went to Keith who trounced me in the 800m freestyle. Revenge was mine in the 100m medley, and after that we set about thrashing each other until even our hair hurt. Honours ended reasonably even before we legged it for the last evening ferry crossing, which we made by the skin of Keith’s dentures. It was thus late and cold when we arrived at our Dorset campsite on Saturday night, and the atmosphere was also frosty when I jokingly implied to the stuffy campsite owners that Keith and I were a couple, a comment that went down like a horse in a burger. Fortunately, I concealed the subsequent awkward silence by saying, ‘Well, this is awkward,’ and, even though I later explained that we were in the area because of swimming and running races, we spent the rest of our stay being studiously ignored by the campsite owners and all the stuck-up gits who would only know what a triathlete was if one ran their quirky local cheesemongers.
    Part
deux
of the DIY-Tri was the ten-miler, a hilly run around country lanes near Poole that was also doubling as the National Masters ten-mile championship (‘Masters’ sounds so much nicer than ‘decrepit old farts’). There were plenty of very handy runners there but, of course, the only race that mattered was Brunt vs Burdett as the world’s most competitive middle-aged men lined up against each other. It ended in narrow victory for Brunt – otherwise I wouldn’t have written about it – but Keith got some measure of revenge by farting in the campervan on the way home and almost rendering me unconscious. The trouble came when I was halfway back to Coventry and my mobile phone rang. It was one of the race organisers calling.
    ‘Where are you?’ he asked.
    ‘Halfway home,’ I said.
    ‘Any chance you could come back, only you’ve won gold in the 40–45 age group and we want to present it to you.’
    The reason I had left so promptly was that I was under strict orders to get back home in order to attend a Nuremberg Rally (visit to my mum’s house) so I was now presented with a dilemma – turn back to accept the gold medal and crowd adulation that comes with being a national champion but condemn myself to a week of living in a house with the atmosphere of a tomb for being late agaaaaain, or carry on home and risk upsetting the organising body of a sport not noted for its warmth and flexibility of rule application. In the end I opted to head home, mostly because the fuel costs of heading back would have bankrupted me. I asked for the medal to be posted to me – which took
six months
to sort out, by which time no one I’d told believed I’d ever won a medal let alone become a national champion. And, as we all know, it doesn’t count if no one believes you.
Trouble number five
    This is perhaps the biggest one of all because it involves someone uttering eight words to me that completely changed my life. It’s ridiculous to think that eight simple words, spoken by someone you barely know, can lead to a total change in your world that affects who you are, what you are, what you look like, where you go, who your friends are, how much money you have and what you do with all your time. The year was 2003 and the place was back at good old Barclays Bank. It was the day after I had completed the London Marathon and I was walking into the office like my legs had been placed in callipers. Despite being in agony I was proudly holding aloft my finisher’s medal and accepting the plaudits of my colleagues