Driven to the power of 10

Seeing himself in a photograph taken with his childhood idol sparked Gerry Duffy to transform his life. Now he is taking on 10 Ironman challenges — a 2.4 mile swim, 112-mile cycle and a marathon — in 10 days

THE best place to begin Gerry Duffy’s story is where he begins it himself. 18 months ago he was lying on an examination table when the doctor made casual conversation about the latest challenge the then 41-year-old had set for himself.

“So, how many years are you planning to do these 32 marathons over anyway?” “It’s not over a few years,” Duffy corrected her.

“Well, how long then?”

“32 days.”

The doctor stopped right in her tracks to peer over her brown-framed glasses.

“Pardon?”

Duffy repeated himself. He’d be doing his 32 marathons in 32 days in 32 counties.

Life had taught him the body and mind was capable of so much more than we’d been led to believe, especially his.

“If someone else can do it,” he explained, “Then so can I, and if someone else has never done it before, then I can be the first.”

The incredulous but impressed doctor remarked: “Well, you’re certainly not my average patient!”

“But I am,” Duffy corrected her. “I just changed a few beliefs and a few things, that’s all.”

He wasn’t being falsely modest. There is nothing false about Gerry and it is his modesty and sincerity that makes him so easy to identify with and so easy to like.

At the launch of his new book, Who Dares, Runs, he self-deprecatingly noted how much more handsome his running partner Ken Whitelaw was than him and how only six years ago he needed a hypnotist to help him get through the ordeal of publicly speaking to an audience of four people. Now can comfortably give radio interviews with over quarter of a million people listening.

What he does is extraordinary, but all the more so because he was, and in many ways remains, so ordinary. He wasn’t a jock in school. He’s not the retired county player who then turned his love of fitness and competition to the road and the sea. He’s the brother, the cousin, the friend, the man in the mirror we all know who’d laze about and eat and smoke too much.

At 27, Duffy wasn’t just Joe Bloggs but Fat Joe Bloggs. The only sport he’d bothered with since school was golf. About the only exercise he was getting in was sauntering to the door of his Dublin flat to collect his takeaway before resuming viewing the latest episode of Corrie or Blackburn’s latest goal in the Premiership. He lived on a couch, in a compound, in a complete comfort zone.

“I was lazy, unmotivated, totally unaware there was so much out there to be grasped,” he says.

“I was living a passive existence in which weeks just blended into months and then into years. I could never look back at the end of any year and say I’d achieved any kind of goal that had helped me learn or grow as a human being.”

In the summer of 1995, an external image captured the malaise inside. His childhood hero Seve Ballesteros was playing in the Irish Open at Mount Juliet and Duffy managed to swing a photograph with the great man.

Two days later he skipped in to his nearest pharmacy to collect his photos and skipped out again until the contents inside prompted him to freeze on the spot.

“Seve was instantly recognisable,” he recalls in his book. “It was the chap beside him I didn’t recognise. I was shocked and disgusted. ‘This picture,’ I said to myself, ‘will never see the light of day’.”

He went straight home and weighed himself. He was 17 stone, at least four stone overweight. The following day, much to the amusement of his flatmate, he bought himself a pair of runners and the following Saturday morning, at 6.45am, he was out of his rut and out running like his highly-active father Michael had urged him to do for years.

An hour later he’d ran over three miles. By the end of the week he’d ran another 10. Within 18 months he was down to 13 stone. Within another two years he’d met his goal of getting his golf handicap down to four. By 2002 he had finally managed to quit smoking at about the 50th attempt and by 2003 he’d set up his own property business. He was out five evenings a week either walking or running, off the fags, on the vegetables, setting and meeting goals, living an active, happy life.

All that though was still a comfort zone compared to the solar system he was about to enter.

He didn’t even know what a triathlon was until his brother Tom asked him in 2004 to do the swimming leg for a team down a swimmer at an event just outside his native Mullingar. Those 750 metres in Lough Ennell changed everything.

The mayhem all round him upon the sound of that whistle, the thrill of passing the 500-metre buoy, his legs feeling like jelly as they touched the sand. It was intoxicating and he was hooked.

Soon after, a friend sent him a video link of the inspiring story of Rick and Dick Hoyt. Rick had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth and his father Dick had been urged to institutionalise him. But Dick and his wife resisted and by the time Rick was 13 he had a computer that allowed him to communicate and attend public school where he heard about a school charity run. Rick wanted to enter. “How?” his pot-bellied father asked. “Push me,” typed Dick with his head. After the race he had another message for his father. “When we were running it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore.”

They’ve since completed 68 marathons and 240 triathlons and six Ironmans together. Because, as Rick with his college degree unforgettably typed at the end of the video clip that had Duffy transfixed, “I CAN.”

That’s how Gerry Duffy first heard about the Ironman and Rick’s words struck his very core: I CAN. But before he could even think of swimming 2.4 miles, followed by a 112-mile cycle before finishing up with a full marathon of 26.2 miles, he had to begin with his first marathon.

The chosen event was the 2007 Dublin city marathon. At the 18-mile mark on Foster Avenue, Duffy hit the wall and suddenly stopped. Then, with pangs of pain running through all his body and tears of pain running down his face, the bowed 39-year-old felt an arm over his shoulder. It was an elderly man, a complete stranger but a guardian angel.

“Don’t worry, they’re all feeling it,” he gently smiled at Duffy. “Just put one foot in front of the other and I promise you that you will reach the finish.”

By staying true to that advice, Duffy would finish that Dublin City Marathon of 2007, and complete two Ironmans in 2008, a Double Ironman in 2009 and those 32 marathons in 32 days over the summer of 2010 in which he rose over €500,000 for Irish Autism Action.

This year’s challenge is his most demanding yet. Yesterday, in New Forest, Hampshire, Duffy and 19 other ultra-endurance athletes swam 2.4 miles and cycled 112 miles before running a full marathon. They’ll endeavour to do the same today, and every day until Sunday week, 10 Ironmans in 10 consecutive days.

“Three or four years ago I’d have thought it was just insane,” concedes Duffy.

“When I first read about it, I genuinely thought the distances were a mistake. But there are people doing 5kms that have friends telling them they’re mad. It’s all relative. It’s only through all these experiences I’ve realised we’re not really giving the human body enough credit for what it can do.

“My first Ironman in France was torturous but when I did another one in the UK only six weeks later I honestly crossed the finishing line thinking I could do another straight away. Even up until the night before the Double Ironman [that’s 4.8 miles of a swim, 224 miles on the bike and then 52.4 miles of a run] I seriously doubted my

ability to finish it but then I woke up that morning and something just told me while I was on the start line everything was going to be fine.

“I’d trained unbelievably hard for eight months for it, I was perfectly fit and healthy, doing something others had done before, and I was doing something I’d chosen to do.

“I say that all the time. Nobody’s forcing me to do any of these things. There are people going through far greater challenges than I am, like struggling to get out of bed in the morning. How lucky am I?”

For Duffy, being able to swim, run and cycle is a celebration of his health and life itself.

As a young man he’d watch mindless TV from 10pm until midnight. Now he barely watches an hour of television all week, just the news. He’s in bed by 10. By 6am he’ll either be working out or working at his desk.

Since January he’s engaged in what he calls 5.29am Thinking.

“Before I started training for this Deca Ironman, I asked myself in advance how would I know I was officially in the zone. For most of November and December I’d deliberately been just ticking over, getting up at six o’clock and then rambling out at ten or quarter past and maybe doing an hour and a half training, but I needed another switch to begin training proper. So I said, ‘Right, you must be out on the road not at 5.30, but at 5.29.’

“Because half-five could turn into 5.31, and the difference between 5.31 and 5.29 is just huge. How many other people in Mullingar are going to be running at half-five? Is there anyone else anywhere going to be out running? That’s what gives me the self-belief. That first morning I had to give an indoor cycling class at half-six [at his sister Dorothy’s fitness school, where he works part-time as a fitness instructor].

“Everyone else was coming in sleepy-eyed while I had ran five miles to get to the class and then ran five miles home before having my shower and listening to some Newstalk. That’s how I knew I was in the zone. That discipline just jolts the mind, like a charge of electricity.”

The property crash forced his business to close down but while that would have crushed him years ago, he saw it as an opportunity. For the past two years he’s been studying performance coaching and now coaches on fitness and lifestyle to people just like the couch potato he once was. He speaks to business groups and students and sports teams. He now MCs various talent shows and DJs on Saturday nights, the one night of the week when he relaxes his 10pm curfew. Without even mentioning the book he penned all by himself last year, that’s three or four part-time jobs he has, and while he reckons he’s only making half the money he was a few years ago, he loves the life he leads.

On average he’ll workout three hours a day. At times, preparing for this latest challenge, he’d have cycled nine hours at a time. One time while he was putting on his runners his sister asked him where he was going and Duffy casually said he was just going out to run a full marathon, as if he was just popping down to the shop.

“A couple of weeks ago I did half an ironman just as part of my final preparation and it felt effortless. I was buzzing for the next three days. Or the time we ran the marathon in Armagh last year; that was our 25th marathon in as many days but I ran it in 3:24 in what felt like second gear. It’s an incredible feeling, to run a marathon and not feel tired. I said to Jacinta last week, ‘God, I can’t wait to go for a cycle tomorrow morning’ and I had already been out at six that same morning.

“I had missed two days’ exercise with launching the book and it made me appreciate it all the more. It’s not that I’m addicted to it, addicted is such a strong word, but I do love the challenge and the physical hardship of it all, I have to say.”

Well, since he brought it up: has he become addicted to it, the way he was once addicted to cigarettes? We’ve brought along with us a six-part questionnaire which research has shown is a reliable indicator of whether someone’s a potential or confirmed exercise addict. The ever-obliging Duffy agrees to take part. “Sure,” he nods. “Fire away.”

“Okay. ‘Exercise is the most important part of my life.’ Give yourself a ‘1’ if you strongly disagree, 2 if you merely disagree, 3 if you’d be neutral on it, 4 if you agree and 5 then if you strongly agree.”

“Three. It’s obviously an important part of my life but it’s not the most important. There’s [his girlfriend and housemate] Jacinta, my family, my other work…” “Okay. ‘I use exercise as a way of changing my mood — to get a buzz, to escape, to feel different.’”

“Another three there, I’d say. I don’t think I’ve ever done a workout and not feel better than before I started out. There’s definitely an endorphin effect so you get a buzz from that, but the question there asks do I run to escape? I don’t run to escape. I run for fun.”

“Okay, question number three. ‘Over time I have increased the amount of exercise I do in a day.’”

“Well, there’s no doubt about that! A five for that!”

“Alright, next: ‘If I have to miss an exercise session I feel moody and irritable.’”

“No. Put me down for a two there. That’s hand on heart. At Christmas last year I did nothing for 10 days, zilch, and I was the happiest man in the world. I’d like to think I’m structured and intelligent about this and know when to back down, when to rest.”

“Alright. ‘If I cut down the amount of exercise I do, and then start again, I always end up exercising as often as I did before.’”

“A four, I suppose, because of the nature of the challenges.”

“Final question. ‘Conflicts have arisen between me and my family and partner about the amount of exercise that I do.’”

“No. I’d mark that a one. All my family are huge into exercise and Jacinta is very supportive of what I do.”

If anything, he says, it’s a source of pride rather than conflict. So, he smiles, what did he score? Is he a potential or already-confirmed exercise junkie? He’s informed his total is 18, six short of junkie status, and somewhere in the middle for potential addiction.

It’s unlikely to ever become full-blown. He knows he’s 43 now and the challenges will probably be scaled down after this one. Maybe next year he’ll just do the one Ironman, or a marathon. “I’d probably get as much kick out of it,” he says, “if that’s what feels right and I’m still healthy and injury-free.”

He’s not even sure if he’ll see out these 10 Ironmans in 10 days. “I’ve done the Double before, and I know how tough a time I have ahead of me, and that was just a day and a half; this is 10 days of it.” He’ll just put one foot in front of the other and see where it takes him.

It’s already taken him so far. To think, seven years ago he thought he was Mark Spitz after that 750-metre swim in Lough Ennell. But he’s proud of that novice triathlete: “I still say it was the toughest endurance event I ever did.” He’s even proud of that photo with Seve.

Only last week the photo he once vowed would never see the light of day was shown to a group of 30 business women to whom he was giving a motivational talk. “I’m so proud to be able to show them that photograph because it made me who I am, it reminds me who I was.”

The caterpillar before he broke his cocoon and a butterfly now to behold.

Picture: James Flynn