I have participated in sports from an early age having been inspired by my father who was a professional boxer. I took up martial arts aged 4 and was one of the youngest to achieve black belt standard in the UK. I turned my attention to competitive swimming aged 13 after racing a school competition and discovering that I could beat club level swimmers having had no previous swim training. By 15 I was ranked top 5 in the UK in my age group, at aged 18 I was a member of the fastest swimming squad in the UK and had raced in several national finals with various county and regional records to my name. However it wasn’t until I was 22 before I took up triathlon, I was inspired to enter an Ironman through a research project that was taking place at my university. I have never looked back since and it is now my ambition to pursue a career as a professional Triathlete.
Where did your love for triathlon stem from?
I started two years ago. I was a swimmer for about ten years and never really thought about triathlon until one of, a good friend of mine, he used to come on a swimming camp with me to Lanzarote and he started getting into triathlon and then one thing led to another and before we knew it he was doing the Ironman Lanzarote. I didn’t know anything about Ironman until he explained to me and I thought he was nuts. I was like, that’s crazy, but yeah, after seeing him perform there, and really enjoying it, it kind of, you know, planted a seed in my head and about probably two years on from that my swimming career wasn’t going quite where I wanted it to go. So I kind of sporadically entered a race. Having never done a triathlon I decided to enter Ironman UK for charity and started my training there really. I had about nine months to get ready for it.
As far as growing up, I mean swimming was a big part of your life, but did you run and ride bikes as a kid at all or was this all fairly new to you?
No, I didn’t do any running. I played squash with my dad for a couple of years and I got quite competitive at that and really enjoyed it. I started swimming when I was about 14. I originally started that to kind of supplement the fitness levels for my squash but I found out I was actually useless at squash, I was rubbish and I was quite good at swimming. So I turned my attention towards that.
Have you always been fairly competitive?
Yeah, I’m very competitive. My whole family is quite competitive really even though they’ll say they’re not, they are quite competitive, especially my dad.
Talk to me about that first Ironman UK. I mean the Ironman UK course is not one of the easiest in the world as far as Ironman’s goes. How was your first experience of an Ironman?
I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Looking back on it now I was so naïve going into that race. I knew that it was going to be a massive task and I didn’t really know just the extent of how long it is and how big of a mental occasion an Ironman was. I’d never seen an Ironman before then. I’d done a few races but I didn’t realize the atmosphere. It was more than anything I’ve ever seen in terms of swimming. I’ve been to nationals at swimming and the atmosphere at the Ironman UK you know, was far beyond that, so it gave me a great lift going into it.
What do you still want to achieve in the sport of triathlon?
I would really like to replicate a podium performance at Kona at some point. For me that’s definitely, if I’m to do that again I know I’m going to have to be one of the fastest age groupers in the world, so sort of looking at pushing on the doors of a nine hour finish at Kona, maybe sub nine hours so if I’m to get on the podium again that would be a massive, massive achievement for me.
