Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr Warrick Bishop and welcome to my podcast and videocast station. I'm delighted to welcome back Guy Leach, who's sharing with us. Hi, Guy. Morning, good afternoon, whatever it is. For those who may have missed the first podcast with Guy, really we talked about his early years. He entered the pool, actually, for health reasons, believe it or not, found that he had... and aptitude at it and really worked incredibly hard through to his mid teenage years and was was able to represent Australia internationally so an extraordinary journey and a lot of discipline and learning really come to terms with the formula for success and Guy what I'd really like to do is talk about how you pivoted from swimming to to what we know as your career in Ironman. And before you tell us about that, just for anyone who doesn't know what an Ironman is, could you give us a quick definition and explanation? Sure. It's not triathlon, so it's not the Ironman triathlon that some of us know. It's certainly not Robbie Downey Jr. in a movie called Ironman. I was actually the first ever professional. Ironman winner in the world. It's a race that's born out of the beach. It's born out of surf lightsaving. It's an event that has running on the beach, swimming out through the surf and back in, like board paddling, which is on your knees or lying down on those longer boards, like longer surfboards, and like a sea kayak, ocean ski type craft that you sit on with a paddle. and you'll paddle the craft out through the surfing back in. So in the 80s, 1984, there was a movie called The Cooling Out of Gold. The Cooling Out of Gold was meant to be the next big thing after Mad Max and Mel Gibson. It was a movie about two brothers that wanted to be the Ironman champion at the time. A guy called Grant Kenny was the famous Kellogg's Nutri-Grain-packed Ironman. A guy that everyone saw and knew back then at that time, he played himself in this movie, but they needed a race, a real race that they could film parts of and then interject the actors into that to get the final scene of the movie. And hence was born The Cooling Out of Gold, which was a race from Surfers Paradise. You ran, swam and board paddled. 23 kilometres from Surface Paradise down to Coolingatta where the airport is. Then you grab your ocean ski and you paddle the same distance back to Surface Paradise. At the time, the event, they put $50,000 worth of money on it back in 84. I just started doing Ironman a year earlier. I saw Grant Kenny on a Kellogg's Nutri-Granad. I said to my mum, having dinner after a swimming session, that I want to do that. That's the thing I'm going to do. And I joined the CERC club the following week. And a year later, I put my foot on the line to try to get through this 46-kilometre race on the Gold Coast. January heat, 35 degrees, 100 athletes from around the world, cameras everywhere, and a crowd of 250,000 people on the coastline watching this sort of freakish event. I know we don't have a lot of time. I could talk for an hour on it. But in four hours and 30 minutes, I crossed the finish line one minute and 30 in front of the rest of the field and picked up $20,000 worth of gold for winning it, became a household name overnight. That next day I was a household name in the country after the media covered with the race and a sport was born out of that. professional Ironman surf competition was founded by a movie and a race that happened by chance. And I did that for the next 15 years. And that was my living. And it was the thing I loved to do the most. And as I said in the previous podcast, I had the formula of how to win. I knew how to do it. I knew what it took. to be the very best you could be. I learned that in the swimming pool. I learned that from a guy called Terry Gathercole, who was my coach, who was the Olympic head swimming coach at the time. You know, we were doing things like lactic blood testing back in the 70s. We were doing hypoxia training in the 70s. We were ahead of the pack in what we did. And I took all that learning that I learned from the age of 12 to 17. And I started doing Ironman at the age of 18. By the time I was 19, I was the best in the world at it. And then I fought to stay on the top of the mountain until I was 35 and retired. So it was the most enthralling period of my life. Certainly the greatest highs and probably the greatest lows. But I was there when the sport was massive. And it was... You know, the top guys like Grant Kenny and myself and Trevor Hendy and the Mercer brothers were, you know, famous athletes in this country, you know, competing on beaches around Australia and being beamed into the households of anyone that wanted to watch on Channel 10 on every second weekend over summer. So, look, it was unbelievably exciting and gratifying for me. At the time, I couldn't have thought of anything better that I'd rather do than do that. And I loved the training. We trained five hours a day. I trained three times a day, very, very disciplined, massively hungry to win and, you know, just willing to go and, you know, do what I needed to do in training to get the best result. And, yeah, now I look back on it and wouldn't change a thing. So the initial Koolangatta Gold, presumably that was the first major race and your first major race, isn't it, right? Yeah. So it was a race of unknowns. So previously an Ironman race at a surf lifesaving carnival would go for about 15 to 20 minutes. Oh, okay. In total, depending on how big the surf was. It would be like you paddling out with your stand-up paddleboard. A Clifton Beach behind you there. And if the surf's flat, you'll get out the back very quickly. But if the surf's five or six foot, then it takes a lot longer. Well, you won't get out at all, depending on your skill levels. Now, it was the same in Ironman racing. But the cooling out of goal went from being a 15 to 20-minute race, and that was four and a half hours for me to win it against the field. And some people finished an hour behind me. You can't even compare it to squash or tennis, the difference between that. It was so different from anything else that, you know, it was like I remember walking off the beach, winning that race. I'd been doing Ironman for a year. I knew swimming was the thing that got me through. I came from the first run league being 11 kilometres along the beach. I was back in 25th position to 30th position out of 100 athletes. And I swam myself into equal first place. So swimming was the thing that got me through. And my endurance from all the years of swimming training was up my sleeve. And I believed in myself. And the thing is, I remember on that day, they had a bookie taking odds. I was 40 to one to win. I was the youngest in the field to race it. I didn't know I could win. I didn't. know that I'd be in front at all. But I remember saying to myself when I hit the lead at the one-hour mark of a four-and-a-half-hour race, so I left for the next three-and-a-half hours, I remember saying to myself, you might not win today, but don't walk off the beach feeling like you let yourself down. So I did everything I could do with the most amount of effort and the most amount of concentration. to give myself the best chance. And, you know, and the thing was, as I learned, as I, and I walked off the beach, obviously winning that day, and I woke up the next day and I went from being unknown to being on the front page of every paper the next day, the lead on every television show, the lead on every radio station news, and my life changed on that next day to where we are now. And to the point where the fame factor became so drastic. There were times where I had to sell houses because school kids learnt where I lived and they'd be camped out the front of my house. So, you know, in perspective to how I live now, it was a completely different existence with the fame that the sport attracted by the time I was at the peak in it. But the thing I learnt and we spoke about last podcast was the thing that got me through. And the thing for me was I never lost a race in my career over two hours, ever. And I raced over two hours a number of times. And the reason why that happened was that I learnt in the pool that the platform you laid leading into a race, if you laid the platform correctly and you ticked all the boxes that needed to be ticked and you went about it the correct way, then... you raced with courage and you raced feeling like you deserve to win, which means that for me, I raced with no negativity in me whatsoever and always got the best out of myself. And as I said earlier, I learnt that through just the education I got from the coaches from the past, which today still... holds me in good stead with what I do in business and everything else. Yeah. There's no question that failing to plan is planning to fail and putting in place the appropriate training regimes is crucial. But presumably some of the guys you were training with were doing the same stuff and you were still ahead. So have you ever been checked for things like VO2 max, which is the way your body can? So I was very, very good with. So, like, for instance, I wouldn't sweat as much as, like, release as much fluid as someone else. I wouldn't dehydrate. So that was an advantage over summer. I had that up my sleeve. My max VO2 was high, but my greatest asset was the recovery of my heart rate. We do tests where you go to maximum up a hill running, as an example, and then take your heart rate and then take it a minute later. And I could drop my heart rate by more than 100 beats over that gap between when you finish the effort and when you took your heart rate for the second time. So my recovery rate was amazing. And I had a really good ability to absorb a lot of training and not break down. So I could do a lot of miles through my body and be an athlete that could withstand that without getting, injured and spending time on the sidelines. So that was an advantage. But you know what, all that I think is by the by. The thing is, there's training and training. You can train five hours a day, but if you're training cleverly for the five hours, then that's better than someone just doing the five hours. You've got to make sure your training group's got the right people in it. to get the best out of you. You've got to be brutally honest with yourself when you're not doing something correctly. You've got to be inquisitive to look at what everyone else is doing and constantly tweak what you're doing to get the most out of what you're about. So we talked, part of the learning experience as a kid were things like the coach would say sixes and sevens, sixes and sevens. And we knew sixes and sevens meant If you're not improving at that 6% and 7% a year, then someone's going to go past you if you're the best in the world. Now, 6% and 7% wasn't exactly the number, but it was the ideology and just the way we thought that gave us that edge over someone else. I made sure that my training regime was 10% better than what someone else's was. Now, could I measure 10%? No. But what it did was for me was make me realise that if I had a day where I came out and raced and I was 5% down on what I normally was, then theoretically I was 5% up on the pack. You know, it's just you don't win by luck, you know. Like you can, most of the guys that did my sport out in the surf and all the rest, like how can you win every two-hour race or above that you've ever done in your whole career when you're talking about surf as well and getting hit by waves? And, like, it's really impossible unless you do other things so well because there's luck in the serve. But I negated that through being good at other bits that other guys weren't as good at. So, yeah, like, you know, and then belief. You know, the thing is there were athletes that I trained with that in training could keep up with me most of the time. And I thought, oh, you know what, this kid's got a chance of knocking me off. eventually or but they never did and you wonder why and they literally would end up making a mistake at the back end of a race nearly sabotaging themselves to not win and it you know it it the mind is such an important part of what you're doing you can either enhance your performance through what you think between your ears and what you're saying to yourself or you can just totally go and hamstrung yourself through the negative talk that you give yourself that you can't control or that person can't control. So, you know, that's another podcast by itself, it really is. To a large degree, you're covering, if you like, concepts of success which go across almost every aspect of life, whether it's sport or... So I remember my first talk I had to do for a corporate company years and years ago. And I said, oh, can you come in and do a talk on success and what it's like to win and all the rest of it? And I was perplexed in that I thought, oh, yeah, I train three times a day and, you know, and I set a good training program and I go really hard when I train. And there was nothing about any of that, right? Like you said before, all the other athletes did all that. It was all the little things that you did above that was the difference between winning and not winning. And once I realised that, I could get up in front of corporates for an hour, CEOs of companies and the like, and start telling the story around the nuances of what we did that was different to the rest of the pack. And it was captivating for them. And for me, it was just like, that's what we did, you know? There's a state of mind, there's a state of mind that I lost and I retired off the back of losing. And I realised it was time to get out. And so for me, the platform that we set and the process that we went through made me feel every day under my skin. uncomfortable with not improving yeah i had this sense of today's another day and if i don't improve and i don't do something today that's going to get me closer to being better then you know i'm not doing and it wasn't forced it was just in me and so i could turn it off on a sunday on my day off to a degree but it lived in me all the time it was like this living organism and i lost that on the last year of my career. And that was when people go, how do you know when it's time to retire? Well, I knew because I didn't feel uncomfortable inside me about wanting to get better. And that was it. That was the time to get out. I was still competitive, but that edge that I had above everyone else was something that was just dissipated enough that I went, I'm not the same person. I've changed a bit. Well, that's an insight into a champion, actually. I appreciate you sharing it, Guy. You wonder, like, so with that, you wonder whether that's genetic, environmental. It's the process as well and the process and the environment that creates the feeling or whether you've got that in you already and it's that other things that bring it out. compared to other people. I don't know. I don't know. Well, look, it's a perfect spot to wind up. Going through my mind are the international athletes, the people who have been on the world stage who I'm sure hold similar feelings. Which are those feelings of success and improvement? Winning, really. Look, I really do thank you for sharing. For those listening, I hope you got a lot out of this. I certainly did. Thank you, Guy. Good on you, Doc. Thanks, mate. For those listening, if you've got any queries or questions, drop us a line at info at drwarkbishop.online. Otherwise, till next time, I wish you the very best. Please live as well as possible for as long as possible. Goodbye. You have been listening to another podcast from Dr. Warrick. Visit his website at drWarrickbishop.com for the latest news on heart disease. If you love this podcast, feel free to leave us a review.
