The real iron lady: Chrissie Wellington interview It was only her second race at the Ironman distance. Six weeks earlier, she had competed in, and won by more than 50 minutes, her first, in Korea, to qualify for the World Championships. At Kona, Wellington was trailing after the swim, but on the cycle leg she began to exert pressure on the field, overtaking one of her training partners, the Australian Belinda Granger, who was cycling alongside one of the favourites, Canada's Samantha McGlone. Who is that? McGlone reportedly asked, to which Granger simply replied, 'That's the winner of the race.' So it proved. Wellington reeled in the other competitors to cross the finishing line first, in a time of nine hours, eight minutes and 45 seconds, to the astonishment of most observers in the sport. It was the first of her four world titles in the past five years; she missed out in 2010 when illness forced her withdrawal. She is Britain's only world champion in the sport, and now holds the five fastest ever women's times at the Ironman distance. Wellington may not be a household name, but there is no doubt that she is one of the world's most remarkable athletes. Arguably her most highprofile moment came last December, when the all-male shortlist for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year was announced: Wellington's was the loudest dissenting voice. She said the absence of female nominees 'is sending the wrong message to the general public, especially to children and to youths, that women are a minority in terms of sporting excellence', and she called on all female athletes to boycott the ceremony in protest. At a cafe in Wimbledon village, south-west London, after cycling the 20 minutes from her home, Wellington sits down to chat over a cappuccino. Periodically, she peers out of the window to check that her 'very expensive' bike hasn't been stolen. I ask her how she feels about the furore now. 'I feel proud of the position that I took,' she says. I feel confident that it was the right one. In person, there is little to suggest the iron woman within. She is warm and engaging, open about her life, and she smiles a lot. She appears lithe and energetic rather than muscled, and she talks not about the pain of Ironman but the joy of it, how she loves pushing herself physically; it makes her happy. Ironman Triathlon, invented in 1977 by John Collins, an American navy commander who had the idea of combining three of Hawaii's already gruelling running, swimming and cycling races ('Whoever finishes first,' Collins said, 'we'll call him the Iron Man'), is rightly regarded as one of the world's toughest sports. It is considered the blue riband distance of the triathlon, of which there are many variations, including the shorter Olympic distance (1.5km swim, 40km ride, 10km run). Though Ironman is not represented at the Olympics, 27 major events take place around the world. Wellington tries to run three each year, along with a number of shorter triathlon and half- Ironman events. One of 840-plus full-time professional Ironman athletes, she has never been beaten at the full Ironman distance. I wonder what it is that allows her to push herself beyond the limits of 'normal' people. 'I sit here and I think I am that normal person,' she says. 'I don't see myself as anything extraordinary.' But what happens in a race when she puts her body under that level of stress? How does she get her mind to overcome the body's desire to stop? 'You have practical strategies that you develop in training,' she says. I have images that I carry with me to take my mind off to a happy place, as well as mantras or sayings or quotes. She has the words to Rudyard Kipling's If written on her water bottles. 'Keep your head,' she will tell herself repeatedly. 'I distinctly remember at Kona last year, Lance [Armstrong]'s quote about quitting [Armstrong's maxim was 'Pain is temporary, quitting lasts for ever']. I've thought a hundred times at Kona, "You could quit. Quit. But I know I'd never forgive myself. And I know through experience that discomfort will not last. It fades. It might last the whole race, but you won't feel it afterwards.' It's about creating the right 'mind', she says. 'From a very young age I've been obsessively driven and intensely self-critical, capable of pushing myself without the need for external pressure. I think you need those qualities to succeed in many different fields but they're particularly useful in professional sport.' Adjusting to the training regimen required for an Ironman athlete was a shock. 'I lived a hectic, varied and interesting life before,' she says. 'Now for about 10 and a half months of the year, it's monotonous and relatively monodimensional. It has to be. Wellington lives and trains for most of the year in Boulder, Colorado, with her partner and fellow ironman Tom Lowe, whom she met in 2007. A typical week begins with a 5km aerobic swim on Monday and finishes with strength and conditioning training and a massage on Sunday evening. In between, there will be strength sessions, race-pace sessions, time-trial drills and short, sharp interval training across all three disciplines. She gets up at 7am and has a breakfast of rice cakes or a frozen banana with sunflower butter and honey. She will eat again between sessions, a balanced diet of fresh fruit and vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds, and main meals that include white meat and fish, plus red meat once a week. Expending so many calories means that she doesn't have to be too careful about what she eats - she allows herself dark chocolate and pizza when she feels like it. Wellington had not been an outstanding athlete as a youth growing up in Norfolk with her brother, Matty. She had swum for her local swimming club, Thetford Dolphins, but even then she says she usually came second to another girl. She was driven to achieve academic success at school, but at 17 her 'craving for control' began to show itself as bulimia. When she went to the University of Birmingham, she was routinely making herself sick after eating, a habit that continued until her final year; she managed to overcome it to gain a first-class degree in geography, and then planned a career as a lawyer, but a stint of travelling engendered a desire to study international development. She returned with a sense of her future vocation, but had also become obsessed by healthy eating, weight loss and her own body image, which quickly developed into anorexia. Beginning a masters degree, she would work late into the night before getting up at dawn to go running. She continued to lose weight and her hair began to fall out. The situation came to a head in summer 2001, when Wellington admitted to her family what was happening, and her brother confronted her. He told her that her eating disorder was tearing their family apart. 'You don't care what you're doing to everyone else,' he said. She says it shocked her into eating more healthily. I ask if food is still an issue for her. 'I'd be lying if I said that it ever truly goes away. I think I managed it and channelled those urges and compulsions and feelings for control into something else that's enabled me to be very successful. I think the eating disorder was just another reflection of my desire to achieve perfection, although one has a skewed idea sometimes of perfection. 'I definitely don't think that I will ever get over it completely, but I have got a different perspective of, and respect for, my body than I did before. I look in the mirror and whereas before I'd just see the external image, now at least I can look at my body and think, "This has taken me to the top of the world." When I hang up my Lycra, will the eating disorder return? She achieved a distinction in her MA, and moved to London for work, landing a job with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Running, meanwhile, had become her new addiction. She fulfilled a long-term ambition by taking part in the 2002 London Marathon. In 2004, feeling compelled to do something practical about the problems she had seen on her travels, she took a year's sabbatical to work with an NGO in Nepal. There, the world-beating athlete began to emerge. In Kathmandu, she found herself with like-minded outdoor sports enthusiasts, who took two-hour bike-rides every morning with the sun rising over the foothills of the Himalayas. As she rode, she would compose haikus in her head of what she saw: 'The cool wind in sleeping streets sobers chaos...' Returning to England, Wellington began to make an impact in competitive triathlon, at the Olympic distance. With her newfound power as a cyclist, her performances were so strong that they left her with a decision to make. She was still working full time, helping to shape Defra's policies, while training before and after work. Should she turn professional, even though that would mean self-funding her training with no guarantee of sponsors or prize money? The answer came when she went for a week's trial with the renowned coach Brett Sutton at his base in Switzerland. Sutton, it was said, pushed his athletes almost to breaking point, and the rumour was that he didn't care how many cracked because those that didn't would become champions. He later told Wellington that he had made up his mind about her on the first morning: he saw not only a top triathlete in the making, but a top Ironman triathlete. Early in their relationship, Sutton emailed her former coach, Tim Weeks, and made plain what he saw in her: 'I start thinking Ironman, I start thinking podiums, I see Hawaii. I am that impressed. But, he noted, 'What a handful.' In less than a year, Sutton guided Wellington to her first world title, but after that their partnership broke apart. Even so, she retained her title for the next two years; in 2009 she posted a time of eight hours and 54 minutes, breaking the 17-year-old course record. Although she is now coached by the former American Ironman champion Dave Scott, it is clear that Wellington and Sutton still have a close bond; she frequently quotes her former mentor in conversation. I wonder about his observation when he first agreed to train her that he would 'have to chop her head off' - in other words, let him do the thinking because otherwise the pressure would eat her from the inside. Is pressure a problem for her? 'I don't think that external pressure can ever exceed the pressures that I put on myself,' she says. 'I've never missed a training session because I've lacked motivation. I can't. I could not live with the guilt of not training. At times, Wellington's inner drive has become her enemy. After she came off her bike on black ice in the Surrey hills in January 2010, breaking five bones in her wrist and hand, she attempted to go swim-training days later with a plastic bag tied around the cast. The stitches became infected. (Sutton had known her well enough to email her: 'Take a tip. Don't rush back.') When she returned to Ironman that summer, Wellington was achieving faster times than ever, smashing her own record for the fastest ever Ironman at Roth in Germany, in a time of 8:19:13, beating her own record, set on the same course the previous year, by nearly 13 minutes. But at Kona in October, with the chance of a fourth consecutive world title, she was forced to pull out on race day with a mystery virus. Blood tests later showed that Wellington had been suffering from a combination of strep throat, pneumonia and West Nile virus. The pressure on her to bounce back in October 2011 was immense. Two weeks before the race, with an almost horrifying inevitability, she had another cycling accident. This time, the impact left her with severe bruising to her hip and a misaligned rib as well as horrifying road rash, the equivalent of second degree burns, that can still be seen three months later. Again it became infected. She made the decision to race even though she says now that she was in no fit state to take part. The Ironman turned out to be a brutal trial. She was 17th going into the cycling leg. Over the next 100km, she clawed her way back into sixth, beginning the marathon 22 minutes behind the leader. In constant pain, thoughts of quitting began to assail her, but she would go on to drive herself to her fourth title. 'I don't know if I've done any lasting damage by racing,' she says, 'but I probably answered my biggest question. I lined up prepared not to win. I had always questioned, doubted my ability to win when under pressure. I didn't know whether I could fight because I've never had to in a race before.' Has the sport made her rich? She explains how her income is made up of sponsorship deals (she received a £25,000 win bonus from one of her main sponsors, which include TYR, Cannondale, Cytosport and Brooks; for smaller sponsors, £3,000 can get their company name on her shirt); prize money (including $120,000 for winning at Kona); public speaking engagements and appearances. 'I'm not a millionaire,' she adds. What about children? Does she want them? Would she continue racing if she became a parent? 'I definitely wouldn't have children and carry on,' she says. 'Some athletes have shown that it's not impossible to juggle Ironman with children, but I think it is too time-intensive and energy-intensive for me to be an effective mother and race to the level that I would want. It would compromise my racing, which I'm not prepared to do. I never had a yearning for children before I met Tom, but being with him makes the idea more attractive. In a way, I have a hard time realising that I'm 35 and that the biological clock's ticking. Physically, I would need to make changes to be able to conceive children because although I'm incredibly strong and fit, hormonally I'm not necessarily healthy.' Just days after we talk, Wellington announces her intention not to compete in Ironman in 2012. She would like the chance to properly explore other opportunities, she tells me later. We had talked about her desire to start a charitable foundation to help disaffected young people through sport. She had also talked about wanting to try her hand at other athletic challenges, such as the Marathon des Sables in the Moroccan desert. I ask her if there is a possibility that she might not return competitively to Ironman. The intention is to return to racing, she says, but she can't anticipate whether new opportunities might change that. She is confident she could switch back on and be ready to compete at the highest level with relative ease, she says. It would take her four months. 'A Life Without Limits' by Chrissie Wellington (Constable, £18.99) is available for £16.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515)