10 minute read
Daniela Ryf
What’s the secret power source of the world’s greatest female triathlete? Problems. Daniela Ryf reveals how failure can unlock an untapped battery, fully charged and ready to go
Daniela Ryf is amazingly good at swimming, cycling and running fast, and incredibly bad at swimming, cycling and running slowly. “I want to give it my all every time I train,” she says. “I only want Daniela to give it her all in races,” her Australian trainer Brett Sutton counters. The search for a compromise has been going on for five years. Every couple of weeks, it escalates to shouting and screaming. Ryf isn’t nicknamed ‘Angry Bird’ for nothing. “She needs to learn to focus her strengths,” Sutton has insisted since 2015. “Nobody would beat her for years.” But Ryf wants to do things the hard way. “I can only get better when I push myself to the limit,” she says.
But what really delivers success? Strategic training or total commitment? Maybe it’s the balance that comes from this quest for a compromise. After all, Ryf is the best female triathlete in the world today. The 31-year-old from the Swiss canton of Solothurn has won every Ironman World Championship since 2015. She has picked up four Ironman 70.3 (half-distance triathlon) World Championship titles, two Ironman European Championship crowns, and at last year’s Ironman World Champs in Hawaii she set a new course record of 8:26:18. Her trainer believes that, given perfect conditions, Ryf could shave another 15 minutes off her time. That would place her in the men’s top 10.
And Ryf’s course record in 2018 was attained in the face of crazy adversity: she was stung by a jellyfish shortly before the start, and handicapped by pain and numbness during the swim (see page 40). Who knows what time she could have achieved in optimal conditions?
Is Ryf so successful because she can put herself through the ringer like no one else? Is it because she’s more talented, trains harder and has greater willpower? Possibly. But the Swiss triathlete has her own secret for success: she doesn’t solve problems, she uses them as a source of energy. Here, Ryf provides six examples of pain-driven power from her career…
Steep uphill climb: Ryf has gone from exceptional Swiss talent to the world’s top female triathlete
Acts of nature teach you patience
May 8, 2010, ITU World Championship, Seoul
The biggest win of her career at the time, this triathlon saw Ryf produce an explosive sprint finish to beat both the world number one and the reigning world champion and finally establish her place among the global elite. But following a relaxed victory celebration at a South Korean club and a short stopover in Singapore, she then endured the worst flight of her life, spending most of the 10,300km journey to Zürich in the toilet. From that day on, for almost two years, Ryf battled persistent and careerthreatening intestinal problems.
“I mostly suffered this deadening fatigue,” she recalls. “But the constant nausea was almost as bad. As soon as I exerted myself in training, I had to throw up. It wasn’t long before I felt like not giving it my all. I felt bad all the time.”
Ryf suffered for almost a year and a half before doctors finally diagnosed small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO (excessive bacteria in the small intestine). With the right diagnosis, she was back to form within a matter of months. “In that year and a half, I had to learn that I couldn’t just crowbar my way through everything. The patience I learnt at that time now helps both in training and in the races themselves.” She continues, “I enjoy training really hard a lot more now, because I remember how bad it was not being able to put my foot to the floor the way I wanted.”
Ryf doesn’t believe in relaxed training sessions
Being behind gives you control
October 15, 2017, Ironman Hawaii
For the world’s top endurance athletes, the Ironman World Championship isn’t just an opportunity to go head to head in a show of power, but also a chance to demonstrate their mental strength. Lucy Charles, Ryf’s fiercest rival that year, knew that. The young Brit set an incredible time in the 3.86km swim – Ryf’s weakest area – missing the 18-year-old record of 48m 43s by just five seconds. Furthermore, Charles went on to extend her lead in the cycling – Ryf’s strongest area. At halfway, the Swiss triathlete was six minutes behind. She needed to turn up the heat.
“Your position at the split time doesn’t matter – the important thing is crossing the finish line first,” Ryf explains. This applies to any long-distance exercise, but it’s especially true in Ironman where, she says, “the race only really gets going five or six hours in”. But how to stay cool when you’ve lost ground to your rival?
“It’s easier for the hunter to stay cool than the hunted,” Ryf opines. “After all, it’s the hunter who’s in control of the situation. The hunted is threatened from behind, whereas the hunter has a carrot dangling on a stick in front of them. The hunter can calmly observe, study and take aim at the hunted ahead of them. The hunted has to maintain their pace and hope they don’t suffer a slump in form. So the hunter can decide when they want to give it their all and overtake.”
And that’s exactly what Ryf did in Hawaii in 2017. Over the course of the final 40km of the cycle, she turned up the heat and went into the lead, then she proceeded to extend her advantage during the run. She crossed the finish line with tears in her eyes, almost nine minutes ahead of Lucy Charles.
Ryf on being stung by a jellyfish at Ironman Hawaii
What slows you down now will make you faster in the future
March 2017, training session, Gran Canaria
Ryf was preparing for a season in which she hoped to surpass herself. It was still early in the year, but she already sensed that feeling she loved so much: the relaxedness of perfectly honed muscles and concentrated energy in her arms and legs. That morning, swim training was on the agenda. Regardless of the tempo of her swimming, Ryf barrelled her way through rough water. Suddenly, a twinge between her shoulders shattered her concentration. She’d torn a muscle. She could barely turn her head the next morning and had to take a complete break for 10 days. How the hell would she be ready for her first challenge of the season, Ironman South Africa?
“The injury completely ruined my preparations,” Ryf recalls. Instead of being able to train harder every day, she was condemned to immobility. “I didn’t even feel I was an athlete any more,” she explains. But as the days passed, her thinking changed: she would no longer set her targets by the stopwatch or through clocking up kilometres; instead, she would do it by marking her stages of recovery. When she could turn her head a centimetre more than the week before, she celebrated.
On the eve of the year’s first Ironman, it was still unclear whether Ryf would be able to complete the swim at all; she was still receiving treatment from a chiropractor shortly before the event got underway. But still she threw herself into it, completing the swim, giving everything on the bike and eventually winning the race. A happy ending, then? No. This was just the salutary opening gambit of a powerful, secret mental weapon. Anything that slows you down is a dead weight that you can throw off next time.
“I’ve started every race since South Africa with less weight on my shoulders,” explains Ryf. “I think of the extent to which that injury put limitations on me and yet it couldn’t stop me winning. And then I’m happy that there’s absolutely nothing putting limitations on me right now. I imagine myself throwing off the dead weight from back then, and I think of how I can do even better now. That thought is like an extra ace up my sleeve.”
Ryf says she’d rather be the hunter than the hunted
Mistakes bring wisdom
July 3, 2016, Ironman European Championship, Frankfurt
This was an important race for Ryf. She wanted to win it, as she had done the year before, both to assert her position and to gain greater confidence for the next race. She was also aiming to qualify for the season highlight in Kona, Hawaii.
But there were already signs of things not going to plan during the swim. It was a cool day, the water wasn’t warm, and Ryf couldn’t get into her rhythm. She placed all her hopes on her specialist field – the cycling – but her problems just seemed to get bigger. Travelling at speeds of 40kph with a cold wind to contend with, Ryf’s skinny frame – she’s 1.75m tall and weighed 57kg – cooled down ever further, then went on strike. Her pedalling had no more power and she was dropping down through the field. For the first time in her life, she ended up retiring, bitterly disappointed and humiliated.
“That was an abject day for me,” Ryf says. “But I learnt a lot.” She took away two valuable lessons from Frankfurt. The first: “I’d always thought I could achieve whatever I wanted as long as I trained hard enough and got the most out of my body. But I also have to pay attention to the small details of what my body needs to be able to work perfectly.” In this case, it might have been enough to put on an extra layer of clothing when she got on the bike, maybe just a pair of arm-warmers. The second lesson? “It doesn’t matter how good I am when I’m good, it matters how good I am when I’m bad. Ever since that day, I’ve known I’m only really seriously prepared when I can win a race on a bad day.” The most important realisation was that while mistakes may drive you mad, it’s better to learn from them.
Defeat focuses your senses
October 11, 2014, Ironman Hawaii
A month after winning the Ironman 70.3 World Championship in Canada, Ryf lined up at the start in Kona for her first Iron Man Hawaii. She’d already had an extremely successful season, winning more World Triathlon Corporation (WTC) prize money than any other female triathlete, and now she was in the World Championship. Ryf demonstrated her superiority on the bike to the full – eightand-a-half hours in, she was way out in front, about to take the title – but 5km from the finish, the fire inside went out. Australia’s Mirinda Carfrae had made up the 10 minutes between them. She closed in on Ryf, overtook and set a pace that the Swiss athlete couldn’t keep up with.
“After the race, I might well have been proud to have given it my best,” Ryf says. “But when I crossed the finish line, I was already thinking about the next year. After all, I now knew how close I’d come to victory.” Since then, she has woken every morning with the same thought, playing and replaying the moment Carfrae closed in, then passed her at an irresistible pace. Ryf promptly started the following season with a string of wins. “The fact I couldn’t keep pace with Mirinda still motivates me in every training session,” she says, even though younger athletes are now more of a threat than Carfrae. “If I imagine Mirinda drawing up beside me, I immediately pedal harder or run 1kph faster.” Ryf has transformed a defeat into the perfect mental stimulation to give purpose to her exertions, and it’s been the basis for dozens of subsequent victories. A pretty good deal.
In 2018, Ryf won her fourth Ironman World Championship in Hawaii in a row – and set a new course record in the process
Bad luck mobilises your energy reserves
October 13, 2018, Ironman Hawaii
As she prepared for the start of the year’s most important race, the defending champion felt unbeatable. Ryf was in fantastic form and had done all of her homework. But with just two minutes to go before the swim began, a jellyfish stung the underside of both her upper arms. The pain shot through her entire body, right to the tips of her fingers. The previous year, a competitor was forced to retire from the race for the same reason and was rushed straight to hospital. Ryf didn’t let anything show and set off into the maelstrom with the others.
But the pain soon grew worse and she began falling metre upon metre further behind. Then her arms went numb and she began to doubt whether she would be able to complete the 3.86km swim. Ryf had already given up hope of a finish near the top of the leaderboard, but she was determined to carry on out of respect for the race itself. She now thought of finishing the race in 14, maybe 15 hours, way down in last place. But when she climbed onto her bike, Ryf realised she was only 10 minutes off the pace. Maybe this wasn’t over after all.
“In the water, I went through all the emotions you can imagine,” she says. “But once I was on the bike, I could think clearly again.” Ryf decided to ascribe new meaning to the jellyfish sting: “I imagined how an extra dash of anger and additional energy had entered my body with the pain, and that I’d only be able to get both out of my body the harder and more relentlessly I pedalled.” She rode faster than she’d ever ridden in her life.
Ryf picked off her rivals one by one, and by the time she started the run, she’d notched up the fastest-ever bike ride by a female athlete at Kona. She finished the race in 8:26:18, which made her not only world champion but the holder of a new course record. In doing so, Ryf proved that our inner transformer can turn negative energy into something productive. Pain can give you extra power.
danielaryf.ch
Words Alex Lisetz
Photography Philipp Mueller, Agnieszka Doroszewicz
