Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, October 16, 2002
11 HOURS EATING KILLER PYTHONS
THIS Saturday, come hell and high water, bantamweight Verity Edwards will compete in the Hawaiian Ironman, a combined 225km of swimming, cycling and running in one day. Verity, a twentysomething Messenger journalist, expects the whole thing to take her about 11 hours to finish, by about 6pm Hawaiian time. The cutoff is midnight, so she has some time up her, er, singlet. The Hawaiian Ironman - there is no Ironwoman - was first staged on the island of Oahu, named after the oh-ah-oow noise that tri-athletes made crossing a lava field in the scorching sun, as they really do in this event. The swim leg is 3.9km, equivalent to swimming between Henley and Grange jetties twice. I know someone, not Verity, who has done the annual Henley-to-Grange swim twice, both times while pregnant. The extra bouyancy apparently helps. The bike leg is 180km, the same as from Woodville to Nuriootpa and back. ``Nigel's parents live at Nuriootpa,'' Verity said after a training ride, ``so when we get to the halfway mark we sit down for 15 minutes and eat homemade chocolate cake and lamingtons. If you can't eat chocolate cake when you're riding 180km, when can you?'' Quite. In a recent Hawaiian Ironman, the side winds roared over the lava field so fiercely that some competitors were knocked off their bikes. Should the wind blow again this year, Verity, all 52kg of her, will be tossed across to the next island. The final leg is a marathon run of 42.2km, or about 3000 jelly snakes in Verity's training regime. She carries snakes with her for the sugar hit but thinks she will take carbohydrate gels during the event itself. She knows lots about nutrition now. I mentioned that we were told at school never to drink water before playing football because it would cause stomach cramps. Same thing with eating food inside half an hour of a swim. Both old wives' tales, said Verity. Imagine how damned good I would have been with water. She has spent 12 months preparing for this weekend's race. I asked how much weight she had lost in hard training and she said, not much, maybe a kilogram, because the fat had been converted into muscle. My excuse, too. She certainly looked great before leaving for Hawaii last week, positively glowing in fact, no blisters, trim and taut, although she said she was feeling a bit tired from the training. Have another Killer Python, Verity. Her partner Nigel did the Hawaiian Ironman in 2000 and after running all day in the sun, Verity said the unburnt silhouette of the painted numbers on his arms and legs could still be seen weeks later. I do hope she gets a nice number. As it happens, another friend of mine, a woman of middling years, is doing the New York marathon next month. What has got into these women? Mind, she is going to walk the course, not run it, and afterwards she has an apartment to herself in the extremely exclusive Trump Towers where she can recover before going shopping on Fifth Ave. Life for an elite athlete is hell.
