Mike Harris, 72, raced his last triathlon on 5 June – 40 years to the day since he took part in the UK’s first-ever swim, bike and run. Here we celebrate a true pioneer of tri…
It still feels like only yesterday. The memories of wheeling the Motobecane bicycle from the garden shed to the local station in Widdrington to catch the 7:45am train to Kings Cross, stopping overnight in Waltham Abbey, before travelling on to Reading.
No bike box – not invented yet – and eager expectation for an event advertised in the Daily Mirror, with renowned distance runner Brendan Foster gushing how the sport had captured the imagination of the United States and was ready to become the next big thing in endurance.
Memories are a funny thing. Mike Harris’s reminiscences of the first triathlon ever held in the UK are as crystal clear as those of his final competitive outing this summer, the Northumberland Triathlon. Both events held on 5 June. Only 40 years apart. “It was a good time to bow out,” Harris recalls. “Five miles from where I live, a scenic route on roads that are relatively traffic-free and a run around the lake. It’s a lovely event.” ←
Harris has an understated warmth and wealth of knowledge to pass on from decades in sport. A half-century of training diaries and an autobiography, Sixty Years An Athlete, will attest to his dedication. “If I went through the details, it’d bore you rigid,” he adds with a wry smile. Yet it truly is a blueprint for health, longevity, and no little success.
The Morpeth athlete, who coached upcoming British professional Dan Dixon for three years when Dixon was a junior, has won hundreds of endurance events, including finishing eight times on the podium at the British Triathlon championship, and it’s a measure of his competitive instinct that he rarely speaks in age-group terms, just overall positions. Part of the reason why he has retired from racing this summer is that he feels he can no longer compete at the very front of the race. Harris is 72.
“I finished 40th,” he says, recounting the Northumberland Triathlon, his disappointment still palpable. “But between 25th and 40th it was marginal, and I lose time in transitions these days. There were 120 entered, so I was in the top third, I suppose.”
When pressed, Harris admits he won the Over 60s category despite yielding 12 years to the “youngsters”, but given last year he took part in a national championship and won his own division by 14mins – in a sprint race – it seems something of a mismatch.
⌘ LOTS OF QUESTIONS
In Reading in 1983, things were a little differen
