The Campbell Academy Blog (75)

Creating a tribe

On Sunday evening at Holme Pierrepont in Nottingham (the National Water Sports Centre) around 11.15, there was a single man running around the lake at the end of the Outlaw Triathlon.

That individual had started at 6 am that morning, some 17 hours and 15 minutes previously.

He had swum 2.4 miles in the lake, which would probably take him two hours and then clambered out, probably close to the back of the field and got on his bike.

The likelihood is he'd been on his bike for somewhere close to eight hours before he set out on a seven-hour marathon.

Some people can argue, one way or another, whether that individual should have started the Outlaw, but the cut-off time is 17 hours, as it is for other races of that distance, which the Outlaw guys don't like to name, but which everyone else calls an Ironman.

You're taken off the course if you get to 17 hours in an Ironman race.

You missed the cut-off, and you didn't make it.

Pay your 500 quid again and come back next year.

Maybe that's part of the challenge, part of the potential huge disappointment that you just didn't cut it that time.

The Outlaw Triathlon in Nottingham has run 13 times now, and that is not their agenda.

If you miss the cut-off time on the swim, they talk to you and say, "Are you really going to make this? Do you really want to carry on?".

The same thing happens if you miss the cut-off on the bike.

At the end of the day, though, they stopped the clock at 10:59:59 (one second short of the 17-hour cut-off) and let anyone out on the course finish as long as they were well enough to do so.

I wasn't there on Sunday night.

Louis recounted this story to me (he was busy winning the 20-25 age group hours and hours earlier, five minutes off the course record for someone his age, even though he's only entered this age group).

For the guy who was coming around to finish, as he reached the turnout point far out on the River Trent to Lady Bay Bridge, the remaining competitors to finish were already running the lake miles away.

What happened was that everybody who was at feed stations or in support just fell in behind him as he moved towards the lake, and as he went around the lake one by one, they turned off the floodlights after he passed them, bang, bang, bang until he crossed the line at around about 11.20 pm and then the fireworks went off.

We celebrate the winners, the fastest, and the elite so much.

We aspire to be like them, and we'll never make it, but sometimes it's also great to celebrate the determination and the resilience of the person who finishes at 20 past 11.