Insanity lurks behind iron curtain

Ironman does strange things to people. For a start, entering an event that involves 3.8km of swimming, 180km of cycling and a full marathon induces habits such as pre-dawn swimming sessions before work and three-hour bike rides afterwards.
It pays not to discuss weekends with ironman athletes either because, by the time they have finished describing the four-hour run on Saturday, it is time for their 100km "easy" bike ride on Sunday.
That's just the athletes though. Things can get strange when you get trapped kerbside at the New Zealand Ironman in Taupo and are forced to have random discussions with the ones they call ``the support crew''.
Well it was mad at this year's race anyway, and not just because it produced one of the closest finishes in ironman history when Kiwis Cameron Brown and Jo Lawn surged to record-breaking wins in the men's and women's races respectively.
Brown won by hammering his way to the lead 6km from the finish and crossing the line one minute ahead of second place in 8hr:26.33min. Lawn blew the women's field apart with a near-record 9hr:20.02min time to become the only women to have won five times.
Truth be known though, this year's race went ballistic before the event even started when one of the biggest crowds in the 23-year history of the event turned up to watch the swim start. Then a few thousand more turned up to party at the finish line.
That in itself might not sound that strange. It is just that watching an ironman event leaves a lot to the imagination. Especially if you are there to bear witness to a significant other accomplishing a sporting feat that belies belief.
For those spectators, there is a brief glimpse of your "athlete" about once every four hours. Then you are presented a dehydrated version of the same to try to hold a conversation with at the finish line.
So in the hours in between seeing, for example, your wife at 7am being drowned in a mish-mash of swimming turbulence from 1000 rival swimmers at the start, and spotting her whiz past at the 90km mark of the cycle leg at lunchtime, there is only one thing to do: Gossip. And drink. Which has always been a dangerous combination.
"I reckon Cameron Brown will run everyone down," said one wise spectator just after exhaling a lung full of Winfield 20's finest tobacco.
"I heard he's crook and almost didn't turn up at all," said the next, before lighting up a roll-your-own.
The conversation then descended into vivid descriptions of various training regimes.
For support crews, that is.
What do you do while the other half spends every hour of leisure time training? Study newly developed websites on the internet, said the roll-your-own smoker. Forget to defrost dinner, said the one who prefers tailormades.
But for the real support crew, the best place to be was at the New Zealand Ironman finish shute as the midnight hour approached, the point where race is officially "over" and anyone left on the course becomes a DNF. As in Did Not Finish.
The last competitor arrived in 16hr:49.16min, just 10 minutes ahead of the midnight cut-off.
Three others staggered home moments before that, dropped to their knees and proposed. A Japanese competitor with two legs amputated below the knee arrived three minutes before cut-off as well. And waiting for the last few competitors were the "other" ironmen - the support crew, many of them wives of husbands using ironman to allay mid-life crisis.
"He wanted to do it, now he has hopefully we can have our life back," said one.
"He can go training after he has cooked dinner and put the kids to bed if he wants to do it next year," said the other.