Busy working mother now triathlon athlete
ATEACHER who hadn’t been on a bike in years is gearing up to compete in the Ironman World Championships.
A few years ago Emma Wheeler was facing turning 50. The busy mother of two was juggling a full-time job and looking after her teenage children, and felt trapped in everyday life. “I thought, ‘I’m going to do something different’,” said Emma, from Pentregwenlais, near Ammanford.
As well as joining a park run at Llyn Llech Owain in Gorslas, Emma also joined a bike-towork scheme run by her employers at Carmarthenshire council.
Emma said: “I got the bike and the bike shop is connected to a local cycling club (Llandeilo Cycling Club) so when I went to get it I wasn’t sure how to ride. They said I could go out with them. Learning how to ride a bike was a huge challenge. I kept falling off. I nearly gave up, but I didn’t.”
After a friend competed in a local triathlon, Emma went to watch. That’s when she knew she was hooked. She competed in her first triathlon in Llanelli in May 2015, followed by two others in Llandovery and Ammanford.
“I loved it,” said Emma. “It was an open-water swim and I managed to survive the ride but it was hard work. I finished a long way down the list. It was hard, but I had that sense of accomplishment and I could do another one of them.”
Now Emma was ready for a big event – the Ironman Wales in Tenby in 2017. Training 20 hours a week alongside her job and role as a mother, it was a huge feat.
“It crept up on me,” she said. “I’d always loved sport but it hadn’t been a priority for a long time. It was a lot of getting up early so I could train before work and dedicate weekends and evenings to train.
“If you’ve got a real level of fitness, anyone can do an Ironman. You’ve just got to really want it.”
But then disaster struck when the asthmatic mum got a chest infection and pneumonia and couldn’t train for six months.
September 2017 arrived – and it was a stormy affair in Tenby. Facing a swim of over 2.4 miles in the sea, followed by 112 miles on the bike and rounding off with a full marathon run, it was going to be a challenge.
“The day was horrible,” she said. “A lot of people got blown off their bikes. It was raining and stormy winds from the minute it started. In my head was to stay on my bike and finish.
“I got on the start line and something kicked in. I was going to do it. I actually really enjoyed the day. The weather added to it. When I finished I just thought, ‘Yes, I’ve done it’.”
But Emma didn’t know immediately that she had come third in her age group – women aged 50-55. It meant she’d qualified for one of the hardest races in the world – the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii.
In just three years she has gone from being a mum who hadn’t been on a bike in years to being accepted as a world championship competitor at one of the hardest sporting disciplines on the planet.
“It’s been life-changing really,” she said. “I feel proud to be able to be in a position to do this. A lot of people don’t have the opportunity to do that – whether that’s financial or life circumstances or health.”
■ Anyone interested in helping to fund Emma should contact Llandeilo Cycling Club – facebook.com/pg/ cmcllandeilo