When practice does not make perfect and why it's OK to fail.

Walking around Tenby on the Monday morning after Ironman Wales is a different experience depending on which side of the finish line you ended the previous day on. The finisher t-shirts are everywhere. They are not worn to provoke - they are worn because the people who earned them are proud, and rightly so. On the morning of the 10th of September 2018, with a DNF from the day before, they were difficult to see without feeling the full weight of what had not happened.

There are people from that day I want to acknowledge. The two police officers and the paramedic who found me on the steps where my body had stopped, the officer who gave me his jacket and called my wife, and the stranger near the start who handed me a water bottle from what was clearly a personal collection of past race mementos. The crowd throughout the run who kept checking in. I did not catch everyone's names. The kindness was entirely unprompted.

For context: I went into Ironman Wales with thirty weeks of structured training. The starting point had been close to zero - no swim training previously, running limited to short occasional distances, cycling confined to leisure rides at weekends. The training programme itself was the primary objective: to replace sedentary evening hours with something purposeful, to understand what consistent effort applied over a sustained period could actually produce.

The swim was the best I have ever done. 2.4 miles at an average of 1 minute 47 seconds per hundred yards, 1 hour 18 minutes in total - twelve minutes faster than anything I had previously thought achievable. The bike followed well. 110 miles with around 8,300 feet of climbing in 7 hours 47 minutes, under my target time and the furthest I had ridden. Six miles into the run, on the first lap, the pace was right. The race was still entirely open.

What then unravelled was not dramatic in the moment, but the accumulation mattered. Through the bike leg my stomach had been increasingly uncomfortable - persistent cramps that worsened when the temperature dropped. At one of the feed stations I mistimed reaching for a banana, lost my balance on the unclipping, and landed on my ankle. It slowed the pace for a while but I rode through it and finished the bike. On the run, six miles in, the same ankle gave way again. After that I was walking rather than running. At around the fifteen-mile mark, walking out of Tenby for the second time, my body completed what had been a gradual process of shutting down. I found myself sitting on steps.

The margin analysis matters. That morning I had left my water bottles at home. My food, intended to be carried in my cycling jersey pockets, had also been left behind. Neither of these things registered as significant at the start of the day - a kind stranger had replaced one bottle, and I had trained with the course nutrition products so starting from nothing felt manageable. But eating insufficient solids on the bike across seven and a half hours, in cold conditions, with cramps already present, was probably enough to explain what happened on the run. The body ran the numbers before I did. Total distance covered was 129 miles, from approximately 7 in the morning to somewhere around 9:45 in the evening.

What I found myself thinking about in the days afterward was the language people use around failure - specifically a distinction I had been turning over for a while: asking what could have been done differently versus asking what could have been done better. These sound like variations on the same question. They are not. "Better" implies a deficit in effort or preparation. It invites self-doubt and a quiet suggestion that the attempt was not serious enough. "Differently" is a technical question. It examines margin and process without placing blame. The distinction is not semantic - it produces different conversations and different outcomes. I had heard the "better" version asked of others often enough to recognise what it was doing. I intend to ask the other one from now on.