It’s rare you can credit your employer with getting you fit, but after three year’s participation in CLSA’s own triathlon program, I upped the ante this year to attempt a full Ironman. To the uninitiated, this comprises a 3.8km swim, 180km bike ride and, to round it off, a full 42km marathon – and yes, all consecutively! It’s hard to pinpoint what led me to attempt this extreme act of endurance, but given that three years ago I could barely swim a couple of lengths and had never ridden a racing bike, it only seemed natural to maintain the steep learning curve.

On 24 June at 6am, after six months of intensive training, I found myself dry mouthed in a wetsuit along with 1,400 competitors on the stony beach in Nice, France, wondering what the hell I had let myself in for. Once the claxon sounded, however, there was no going back. Though the spin-cycle dash for the first buoy is always a bit of a nightmare for me, the wetsuit’s buoyancy made all the difference and I was joyously out of the water in 1:17

And so, on to the bike. The Ironman France course has the added difficulty of 1,800m of mountains to climb. Claire Murray, my coach, had ingrained into me the mantra of “don’t over-exert” and “eat whenever possible”.  This, plus many hours of climbing the hills around Beijing where I live, saw me through the ride and back at Nice’s Promenade des Anglais in 6:48.

The marathon course was flat and comprised four 10.5km loops along the promenade. It’s great to be cheered on eight times by your family, parents, sister, nieces and coach, but psychologically punishing on the third loop when you’ve gone so far but still have so far to go. 25-30km was very tough as my stomach spectacularly rejected a cup of coke right back on to the shocked volunteer and cramped up. With my cheering section having come all this way to watch me and US$20,000 of charitable donations backing me, however, there was no question of not finishing and I managed to get it back together for the last loop.

It was all over not a moment too soon at 12:38:28, about 50 mins faster than I expected. What an unbelievable feeling running up the finish shoot…I am an Ironman. Already plotting for the next one in 2008…