Ironman France 2014

My plan to update this blog weekly fell down in the past couple of weeks, but I’ll aim to get back on track now.

The chateau in Le Bar-sur-Loup

A week after returning from San Francisco (see blog entry below) I headed down to the south of France with two of my three kids to meet Camilla my wife and our other son. We landed at Nice airport very late on Friday night and sped up the windy roads into the foothills of Alpes-Maritimes to a 10-bedroom chateaux in Le Bar-sur-Loup, a small and beautiful alpine village. Over the next few days, about a dozen friends and their kids also arrived to share the vacation with us.

About 18km into the run

The vacation was a little different to the norm though, as Camilla was competing in Ironman France, one of the toughest and most established Ironman events on the circuit. Like all Ironman triathlons, competitors swim 3.8 km (in the sea), bike 180 km and run a full marathon (42.2 km). One of the things that makes the Ironman in Nice one of the toughest though is the 2,000m+ elevation competitors soak-up on the bike course, as they climb up into the Pre Alpes. To make the event tougher still, a big storm hit the region on race day, leaving the alpine roads slick with water and strewn with rock fall – and especially treacherous to descend! Nevertheless, Camilla had a great race, cranking out a 4hr 10min marathon to end the event in 10^th position in her age-division. With two Ironman events under her belt for 2014, Camilla now tops the Ironman points ranking for Swedish women!

My boys after finishing the IronKids event,
which takes place on Ironman day

Like me, Camilla is also fund-raising! Whilst I’m raising money for diabetes research, Camilla is raising money and awareness for childhood cancer. Almost exactly three years ago, Camilla was diagnosed with an aggressive form of skin cancer called malignant melanoma. About a week after the diagnosis, before we knew if the cancer had spread and how bad the situation was, she decided to sign-up for an Ironman. A bold move, not least because she’d never done a triathlon of any length at that stage and couldn’t swim a length! The summer was stressful, with four weeks spent waiting for the full diagnosis, which felt like an eternity, followed by surgery, and months of recovery from complications, during which Camilla couldn’t train at all. But by January 2011, she’d had the all clear and set about learning to swim!! After a couple of months of tuition, she acquired the basic skills and her Ironman training began in earnest. By June 2011, Camilla had packed in as much swimming, biking and running as any working mother of three young kids whose husband travels perpetually could ever hope to!! I stood on the beach at the start of the event not far from the athletes enclosure, trying to feel completely confident Camilla would cross the finish line but anxious that she might have bitten off more than she could chew!! Unbelievably though Camilla didn’t just finish the Ironman on that day, but ranked high enough to qualify for the Swedish women’s team the following year for the ITU Long Distance Triathlon World Championships, where she finished 9^th in her division and top Swedish woman. It’s safe to say, she’s gone from strength to strength, placing top 10 in all of the international events she’s entered since, topping out with a 7^th place finish at Ironman Switzerland last year. So if you wondered why I’ve found my passion again for triathlon, the answer is perhaps now clear – when you spend time around such an inspirational person as Camilla, it rubs off!

A very happy and proud family at the end of the Ironman

And so it is that for the past three summers, the deal between me and Camilla is that she competes early season, and I focus on work and taking care of the kids, and once she’s done, I pack in a few weeks hard Ironman training and compete later in the summer. So the day after Ironman France, eight weeks before my Ironman event in Copenhagen, I woke early and set out on the bike for a ride up into the mountains, and biked and ran daily for the remainder of the holiday!