From gin to gym – how a party girl ran to survive
IN SEPTEMBER 2013, Helen Croydon woke up at 5am and groaned. She had only crawled into bed four hours before, but alcohol had disturbed her sleep. Again. She smelled the Calvados fumes rising from her sleeping boyfriend and wondered: ‘Why do I have to drink so much for no reason whatsoever?’
A journalist living in London, 36-year-old Croydon had spent years caught up in a party lifestyle with the man who was now snoring beside her. Everything they did involved booze and, finally, she was bored with it.
‘I was a career type who’d lost faith in it,’ she says. ‘A once-popular socialite whose friends had either moved across the Atlantic or couldn’t come out any more because everything clashed with baby yoga.
‘I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t motivate myself to work.’
Croydon dumped the boyfriend and joined a running club. She’d never been a sporty girl: she only kept fit so she could squeeze into her skinny jeans. But she started running to fill the void inside of her. Soon, it turned into an addiction that replaced alcohol.
In this chatty, sometimes racy, account of how she went from glamour girl to Team GB triathlete, Croydon (pictured) explains how that club welcomed her into a world where looks and social status didn’t matter.
She turned up at her first crosscountry race with her gear in a ridiculous patent red designer tote bag and nobody laughed — they only cheered her on.
She listened in awe to their tales of running marathons around Lake Geneva and competing in triathlons in Biarritz. Her own repertoire of holidays featured ‘rocking up to Koh Samui airport for a flight with just one shoe having been raving all night, or being picked up drunk from the floor of a petrol station on a coach trip to a ski resort.’
In 2014, she signed up for a triathlon camp in France, adding cycling and outdoor swimming to the mix. Her first serious swimming race was 1,500m down the Dordogne River. It was 12c. By the time she staggered out of the water, she looked like ‘an electrified scarecrow’. But she was hooked, and set herself the challenge of qualifying for Team GB.
‘Part of the allure was witnessing my body change,’ she says. ‘Not just how it looked, though I loved that, but how it coped...Me, the waif-like, glamorous, central-heating-worshipping follower of fashion was doing all this tough stuff!’
Croydon achieved her goal and competed for Team GB at the ITU World Triathlon in Chicago in 2015.
She continues to challenge herself with endurance sports so she can ‘cycle, swim and run and eat cake afterwards’.
She does still meet up with old, non-sporty friends for drinks. But the last time they ordered prosecco, Croydon whipped the bottle out of the ice bucket and popped in an injured foot.
‘Sorry!’ she laughed. ‘Physio’s orders!’