The Bolton ironman got me, I had the ironman bug. This time though I wanted to research what other ironman races were out there. There was a double ironman distance race called the double brutal (4.8 mile swim, 224 mile bike, 52 mile run) called the double brutal up in Snowdon national park.

The swim started in Llyn Padarn in Llanberis and then the bike was made up of 33 mile loops (with crazy elevation due to the mountainous area we were in) until you completed the whole 224 miles then the 52 mile run started with climbing Snowdon first then making up the rest of the miles looping the 5 miles circumference of Llyn Padarn.

I signed up and started training. This time I got myself a coach Mark Whittle from Whittlefit and he wrote me up a training plan for the event. After months of training I was good to go. The 4.8 mile swim in the lake was brutal to say the least, even with a wetsuit on it was really cold and the more tired I got the colder it got but you get your head down and keep trucking.

I finished the swim then got ready for the 224 mile bike with something like 20,000 plus of climbing elevation. My aim was to do the whole event without sleeping but as the night wore in all I wanted to do was sleep. From 2am until at least 6am my head was scrambled and so was my body but I refused to go to sleep and keep my legs moving which I did apart from my feed stops that is.

Once the sun comes up that makes a massive difference to your moral and gives you a huge boost. I was so glad to finish the bike section but knew I still had Snowdon to climb and then the lake loops before I finished. I was in bits and wasn’t in the mood to eat but had to feed myself or I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Thanks once again to my support team who kept me going the whole time. You have to remember these multi day endurance challenges are not possible without the help of your support team, they play a massive roll in your success and getting over that line. You also have to remember that as much as it’s a race its also an eating competition. without food you won’t have the energy to move just like a car without fuel. It was half way up Snowdon that I realised just that.

Little did I know that this, my first ironman race would set me up for many more to come over the years. I first decided to do this race thanks to my friend Buttsy Butler who sent me a youtube link on facebook of Rick & Dick Hoyt a father and son duo.

The father Dick Hoyt Swam with his disabled son in a dingy, cycled with his son stepped onto a special made bike and ran the marathon with him in his wheelchair. I couldn’t believe it and it inspired me to search the web to see if there were any ironman races in our country and found Ironman Bolton. I signed up straight away and started the 9 months of training. I was extremely lucky to get quite a bit of help from a few people regarding kit etc. Geraint thomas (cyclist) agent contacted me and said she could get me a bike sponsor and thanks to her I got a brand new Dolan bike plus she sorted out a cycling day with Geraint Thomas which was mega.

After 9 months of training the big day was upon me and it was game time. I’ll be honest it was the toughest thing I’d ever done at the time but at the same time it was also the best thing I’d done. I remember someone bought me a bottle of champagne for the finish and i couldn’t even muster a sip of the stuff that’s how f***ed I was.

After completing the run a year before I got it in my mind about cycling the exact same route. I had never really done any long distance cycling before but I wasn’t going to let that faze me.

I mean, after all I can cycle a bike so to me it was a case of sitting on the saddle and peddling until you couldn’t peddle anymore then rest up and go again until you reached the finish line. Granted, a bit of training would have made the challenge far easier.

I was going to attempt it with my mate Alex Symonds as the both of us had signed up for ironman Bolton and we needed to get as much cycle training in as possible so this was a great way of getting some much needed miles in. Luckily for us Geraint Thomas’s agent sorted us with Dolan bike sponsorship so we had these state of the art posh road bikes to do this challenge in so it was game on.

Alex’s brother Dan Symonds agreed to be our support driver so the 3 of us jumped into our van which was given to us by the generous people at Trade Centre Wales and headed to John O’Groats to start our mission. One thing we didn’t do our research on was that many of the cyclist normally start from Lands End due to the wind direction hitting out country from west and north which meant whenever it was windy we’d have one hell of a headwind.

If you are a cyclist you’ll know that this is nothing but a nightmare. Day 2 heading towards Inversness we had such strong winds and we were bearly moving and I remember it well, I was close to tears it was that bad and unforgiving.

My friend Mathew Ryan aka Dykie asked me if I was up for running the length of the country from John O’Groats to Lands end to help raise money for a girl called Elodie who needed an operation in the USA. I was right up for it and so was another friend of ours Leo Sharpe.

The 3 of us along with Leo’s wife Kirsty who was the designated driver and chief support crew headed off to John O’Groats ready to start our decent on May 1st. Our goal was to run on average 34 miles a day breaking it up into 3 run sessions. We would wake up at 5am in our mobile home, eat breakfast and then hit the road for a 11 mile run. While we were running Kirsty would drive the 11 miles and find a lay-by and get ready for our arrival and have our food ready for when we arrived. That process was repeated until we hit our 33 to 35 mile day. We’d do our stretches eat more food then repeat until we arrived at Lands End.