The rise of the middle-aged ironman

Article très intéressant sur la corrélation entre la crise de la quarantaine et le triathlon... ceci d'après nos amis britanniques du Times!

The rise of the middle-aged ironman
The male midlife crisis no longer involves fast cars and younger girls. Now it's triathlons and ultra-marathons

Finding himself lagging behind overweight women and toddlers at the village race was a life-changing moment for Robbie Laughton, 44, director of a brand consultancy. “We’d been out getting drunk the night before in the local pub, and had ended up drawing lots to do all sorts of daft stuff: someone had to go for a colonic, and I had to enter the annual village race the next day. During the race, feeling breathless and hungover, I remember thinking, ‘God, I used to be a winger at rugby. Where’s it all gone?’”
Blokes, as father-of-two Laughton confirms, “go through a weird midlife crisis thing in their late thirties and early forties”, but these days, rather than zoom off into the sunset in sports cars with women half their age, he and thousands like him are throwing their lardy bits and the contents of their wallets at all manner of endurance sports. Triathlon is the fastest-growing mass-participation sport in the UK, and endurance sports across the board are bulging at the midriff with middle-aged men with moobs to lose and something to prove.
A good old-fashioned marathon no longer cuts it. Now, it’s all about Olympic-distance triathlons and 17-hour Ironman challenges, or ultrarunning through the night across deserts, along the side of minefields and in jungles.
Celebrities clocking up the miles include the long-distance cyclist and Channel swimmer David Walliams, 38, the back-to-back marathon runner Eddie Izzard, 48, the ultrarunner and chef Tom Aikens, 40, and Vernon Kay, 36, who is presumably keeping well away from women half his age while he is training for this year’s London Triathlon.
Now lean and mean (and no colonics to thank for it), Laughton trains for a minimum of two Ironmans a year, and last year he competed in the 40-44 age group at the Triathlon World Championships in Australia. Like other men on the scene, he has become hooked on much more than purely maintaining his form. There’s the globetrotting to far-flung competitions that eats up all of his holiday entitlement (“It takes a certain kind of dude to say to his family, ‘I’m off cycling for a week and you’re not coming,’” he admits). Then there’s the kit: a mix of sexy £5,000 carbon bikes, hydrodynamic wetsuits and an ever-expanding armoury of performance-enhancing gadgets. Did anybody say James Bond?
First and foremost, though, Laughton is addicted to the buzz. “If you’re 40 years old, you don’t want to be the granddad in the nightclub, so you find another kick,” he says. “There are some crazy races. I did a Coast 2 Coast in Cornwall, where you start by running up the cliffside. Then it’s 140 miles over two days: running, biking, kayaking, then running again for 20 miles. For me, it’s the equivalent of being off my head in the Ministry of Sound in 1991.”
Rory Coleman, 48, is an ultrarunning personal trainer. Most of his clients are high-achieving men in their thirties and forties. Coleman has run 600 marathons and 150 ultra-marathons, and is currently training Aikens for the Marathon des Sables (MDS), a six-day, 151-mile race across the Sahara in 40-degree heat.
“The MDS is chock-a-block with 30- to 45-year-olds, trying to work out what the heck is going on in life,” he says. “So many have spent the past 20 years just working and having kids. When you head off to the desert, everything gets put on hold. Nothing matters: you get to live in the now.”
The post-traumatic stress disorder that often follows the rigours and drama of such an adventure can have big repercussions, however. “Some guys leave their jobs, others leave home,” Coleman says. “The first time I did it, I came back and was in shock for a month. I couldn’t work out why I might need to press a button to cross the road; it’s hard to return to such cosseted lives.”
The danger of the MDS is something that the 35-year-old financial sales executive Richard Cullen is ready to tackle head-on when he goes to Morocco next month. The training might be giving him a superboost in energy and career focus, and friends might say that it has taken years off him, but it’s the rumours of previous contestants coming home in wheelchairs to have skin grafts on their feet that are really getting him going. “I love the fact that we have antivenom pumps because of the snakes and scorpions, and flares in case we get lost. Everyone around me is banging out babies and moving to the suburbs. This is my last break for freedom.”
He may be right. Cullen says his girlfriend is not happy.
Apparently, she is fed up spending evenings and weekends on her own, while her man is out either running or bending it at Bikram yoga in preparation for the desert heat. To make matters worse, he says, even though he’s spending a fraction of what he used to in the pub, she has just found out that the entrance fee for the race is a whopping £3,100.
It is all swings and roundabouts, though, argues Chris Pilling, 43, a triathlete and CEO of a data and software company. “I might have spent a few grand on a bike, for instance, but my wife rides horses. My bike doesn’t need feeding or have vets’ bills. As for the time away, I look at people who play golf all Saturday and Sunday and wonder how on earth they get away with it.”
For Pilling, one of the biggest pulls of triathlon and one of the reasons commonly cited for the fast growth of the sport is that, as with most endurance sports, age is on your side for once: an older guy is more likely to have built up the strength and mental muscle required to run 50 miles than a flighty 18-year-old. It makes sense, he says, that these sports attract a disproportionate number of middle-aged high-flyers who are in it to win it. There’s even a series of Ironman and triathlon competitions just for CEOs, complete with pre-event helicopter tours of the course and five-star hotels. “As you get older, outside of business, there aren’t so many places to compete, and these sports definitely give older men a place to do that,” Pilling laughs. “It’s totally midlife crisis. You’re too young for golf, and you want to prove that you’re not quite dead yet.”
COULD YOU DO IT?
Sprint triathlon 750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run
Olympic triathlon 1.5km swim, 40km bike, 10km run
Ironman 3.8km swim, 180km bike, 42.2km run
Ultrarunning Anything upwards of 42.2km
EXTREME-FITNESS FATIGUE
By Kevin Braddock
Last year, I competed in two triathlons, a half-marathon, a marathon, a 172km Cyclosportive and a competitive 10km run. It was my fourth season as an amateur endurance athlete. Training continuously for four years has left me with fantastic memories, a sheaf of aluminium medals, healthy blood pressure, a low BMI and calf muscles I can barely get into my drainpipe jeans. But what I didn’t anticipate was a deep ambivalence about the new cult of ultrafitness.
Modern life is, in many ways, emasculating, and the relentless focus on challenge, achievement and outcome characterised in the endurance disciplines offer a way for men to feel strong and confident, and to aim for something in life.
Certainly, it worked for me — until I began to wonder if all that effort is really worth the reward. Finishing a race is often an anticlimax, and the usual response is to steel yourself for a new challenge. But gradually, I started to feel like a hamster stuck on a wheel, and my friends genuinely began to worry about the amount of time I was spending in Lycra.
Of course it’s good to keep active, and the ultrafit lifestyle keeps one out of the pub. But endurance sports can be solitary, with competitors usually racing against themselves. In my bleakest moments, it felt as if triathlon was a brilliant way of taking the enjoyment out of three really great activities. So while I still run, swim and cycle, these days I’m in it for fun. A pint with friends at the end of a cycle to a distant pub is as satisfying as any aluminium gong