Dubai: Luke Mathews’ toes are curling inside his trainers and his calves are screaming with cramp as he shuffles towards the next aid station in search of salt to stave his body from submission.
Suddenly the runner he has been focused on passing for the last 30km collapses up ahead and his outlook brightens.
“He’s gone, I’ve passed him,” the 30-year-old Dubai-based Englishman tells Gulf News. “It’s sadistic, but I’ve gone through a world of pain and taken something of someone else’s pain and used it for my own glory.”
Scroll down to watch the video
That’s Ironman. A triathlon made up of a 3.86km swim, 180.25km bike, and 42.2km run triathlon, which is widely considered to be one of the most difficult one-day sporting events on earth.
“It’s what evolution has always been about,” he adds. “The fittest survive.”
Mathews only took up triathlon in 2011, but in his first Ironman in 2013 he qualified to that year’s World Championships in Kona, Hawaii, and finished in nine hours and 45 minutes, slashing 30 minutes off his personal best.
He’s now qualified himself back to Kona this October, when he will be looking to improve his record in order to turn professional next year. But why is he putting himself through so much pain?
Reasoning
“People think I’m crazy but I’ve found something I’m pretty good at and I wake up happy. And if you wake up happy you’re doing something right,” says the former security guard to a police custody suite in Lincolnshire, who now works at The Cycle Hub bike shop in Dubai’s Motor City.
“I used to be a 90kg gym junkie” – he’s now a lean 70kg, standing 180cm tall with 6.5 per cent body fat – “but there was no competition in lifting weights. Triathlon has drawn me in due its competitiveness.
“And for an individual sport there is a hell of a lot of competition. We all know what we are going through, we are suffering a lot of pain, but at the end of the day you want to be the first one across that finish line.
“I’m doing this to set and achieve goals and move towards the next level,” he adds. “Something inside just drives me to succeed. You speak to a lot of Ironmen and they describe it as an addiction. And it does become an addiction, but the endorphins it releases and the health benefits are massive.
“People say it’s too extreme and you’re putting your body under too much stress. You hear horror stories,” he refers to athletes dropping dead. “But you shouldn’t let that put you off, for me that’s just an excuse. There are freak accidents and it’s really sad when it happens, but often there’s an underlying reason and as science improves you can detect these issues. You just have to listen to your body.”
Asked to explain the depths of hell he goes through, Mathews replies: “If you had given me a gun right there and then I would have probably have ended it all. You go through some dark, dark places, but if you push through it you’ll come out the other end.
“The run is probably the place where the least can go wrong, in the swim you can get a punch in the face due to overcrowding at the start, and during the bike you can be hindered by a flat tyre, but once you’re onto the run the only thing that can break down is your body.”
Inspiration
He says the pain is nothing compared to what others have suffered, most notably his mother Joanne, who has recently been given the all clear from breast cancer, and who was there at the finish line with tears in her eyes as he came up the final straight in Kona in 2013. That to him, he said, made everything worthwhile.
“Given what she had to put up with to still be with us today is amazing. You do draw on inspiration from what you’ve read, and pieces of advice from family. So much goes through your head that you can use as motivation. You go through all sorts of emotions.”
At the moment Luke is reading Unbroken, a book-turned-film on the life of US Olympian Louis Zamperini, who survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
“If those guys can go through hell for so long - me running an extra five or ten kilometres, I might go through some pain but it’s nothing on what people have suffered, like my mum, to give me the opportunity to be where I am today.
“The hell they went through in those camps, the beatings they took, if their bodies can go through that and the malnutrition they suffered, me doing this, it’s not a lot really. You do go through some dark places but mental and physical torture? That’s massive.”
Mentality
Why doesn’t he just quit? “Because I’m not a quitter. I’ve come close to it, I hear voices while I’m competing - one’s a bad guy the other’s good, and I try to listen more to the good guy. Don’t get me wrong, if you have an injury that’s only going to jeopardise your career, that’s serious. But if it’s just a mental battle that you’re up against, then you have to push on.
“If you can come out the other end and prove your body and other people wrong, that’s the cause you strive for, you know that pain is going to come, it’s just a matter of how you deal with it.
“I break it down into chunks, like anything in life if you break something seemingly insurmountable into segments, it’s easier to handle, and it’s the same with sport.”
So, can anyone do an Ironman, or is it reserved for the mentally and physiologically elite?
“An Ironman is massively mental, some say 80 per cent mental, 20 per cent physical. I believe anyone, with the right training, can do it, but you have to be prepared mentally because you are going to go through hell.
“There’s a 17 hour cut off period and that’s a long time. As long as you have the basics and can swim, ride and run, anyone can do it.
“Physiologically you have to train for it, you can’t just pick anyone off the street and expect them to do it, but if there are triathletes who are 80 years old competing, anything is possible.”
Hunger
During the summer months, Mathews can get up as early as 3am to escape the heat and hit the cycle track in Al Qudra for three to five hours. He then heads home for breakfast and a rest before the next session, which will be in the pool or around a running track. With strength, conditioning, physio, yoga and massage things can total four to eight hours a day and 20 to 35 hours a week, depending on what stage of a season he’s at. He also has to fit that in with his job at The Cycle Hub, where he works eight to ten hours a day, 28 hours a week.
Luckily his employers have given him reduced hours and support him by supplying his bike. Within The Cycle Hub there’s The Cycle Bistro, a Paleo restaurant, which adheres to the paleolithic diet (or caveman diet), promoting food that only our ancient ancestors would have eaten, such as meat, nuts and berries. Later agricultural developments such as dairy, grains and processed foods are omitted.
“I try to eat as healthily as possible, avoid preservatives and complex carbohydrates, and get my sugars from natural sources. I also eat a lot of raw food to get the nutrients,” he says.
“You hear a lot of triathletes eat anything because they are going to burn it off anyway, but is that going to do them any good in the long run? I don’t think so.
“I want to be in this sport for the long term and I think if you eat as naturally as possible you’re going to gain a lot more over a longer period of time, instead of consuming, additives, preservatives, fast food and processed sugars.”
Relations
Of his schedule he adds: “You have to commit a lot as well as holding down a job. It’s tough and I don’t go out as much as I want because most nights I have to be in bed for 9pm in order to get up early for training the next day. On a crazy night I’ll go to bed at 10pm.
“You hear a lot of Ironmen struggle with relationships because it becomes an addiction. There’s been marriage break ups and all the rest of it, it’s not nice.
“I’m single, but it would be hard to keep a relationship down at the same time as this because who wants to go out with a guy who has to be in bed by 9pm? It would be hard if I was with someone who wasn’t in the industry or didn’t understand what I was trying to achieve. Hopefully there’s a perfect Ironwoman out there but I’ve yet to find her.”
In all he says the sport isn’t glamourous as he travels to around 15 events a year (of varying distances) all over the world, and he has to balance his budget supplied by his sponsors, forfeiting pricey accommodation in order to spend more on his diet.
As an amateur he isn’t eligible for prize money and, even as a professional, an average event’s total prize purse ranges from $15,000 to $250,000 (Dh55,000 to Dh918,000), with first place earning $3,000 to $45,000. Kona is an exception with a total prize purse of $650,000 and the winner taking home $120,000. Across all events, the purse is only shared among the top ten finishers, however, leaving thousands of competitors out of pocket over the course of the season.
“You’re never going to be a millionaire or earn what a footballer’s on, it’s just never going to happen. But we don’t do it for money, we do it for passion,” he adds.
“If you want a glamourous lifestyle, Ironman is not the way forward. But if you want to achieve something in life, the feelings you get from completing a triathlon are inexplicable.”
