Ironman, a year late

I had signed up for this a year earlier, in 2015, talked a couple of people into it, and then work stranded me in Abu Dhabi and I missed the start. So Ironman Zurich was unfinished business I owed myself, a year late. And to be clear, an Ironman is not the triathlon most people picture; it is closer to four of them: a 3.86-kilometre swim, a 180-kilometre bike, and a full marathon, back to back. In the months before, I went from swimming my first uninterrupted kilometre in January to being daft enough, by July, to attempt all two hundred and twenty-six of them in a single day.

I came to my senses about ten seconds before the gun: fourteen hours of non-stop sport, what exactly was I thinking. From then on I ran a more or less continuous cost-benefit analysis of the Ironman against simply going to the beach. The low point was watching my lifetime archrival, Justinas, glide past me on the bike, having stubbornly failed to drop out during the swim as I had quietly hoped.

What kept me moving was absurd: a spectator holding a sign that read Chuck Norris has never completed an Ironman, and a steady stream of strangers reading my name off my bib and shouting me on. You go a bit robotic, counting down the hours. Then suddenly there are five hundred metres left, then the finish chute, then my time on the board, twelve hours and forty minutes, and the genuine confusion of wondering whether I had somehow skipped a lap.

I crossed the line certain of two things: that I had just done one of the hardest things of my life, and that I was never, ever doing it again. By the tally going round at the time, I was among the first fifteen Lithuanians to have finished the race. Better, at least, than Chuck Norris.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely not. Would I do it again? Probably, if I can get my archrival back in the water too.