“I’m On The Bus”: How a rookie finished an Ironman
May 24, 2026, 6am
Maddy Williams came up with a novel mind hack to get through one of the most challenging days of her life. She broke up The Victoria Ironman 70.3 – an epic 113-km-long triathlon – into a series of Nows. In each of those Nows, she told herself was simply “on the bus.”
When you’re on a bus you are, in a sense, free and clear. There are no meaningful decisions to make, there’s no way out and no turning back. The bus is going where it’s going. Your job is just to ride it.
There were actually three buses on this day. The first was a water taxi (1.9 km swim). The second a rickshaw (90 km ride). The third a sneakermobile (half-marathon). Each bus delivered her right to the next one.
An Ironman is a heavy lift – especially for a newbie. The distance is long. The commitment is scary. The urge to quit is strong. Sometimes you need a psychological come-along to winch you through.
The “on the bus” technique is actually something Maddy developed during a year abroad, learning Spanish and studying in Costa Rica. She was a young woman on her own in that sultry land. Lot of unknown unknowns. She visited pretty much every corner of that country, and found herself in sketchy situations. But the buses were little oases. You get on, you hear the door hiss closed behind you and … life just got simpler. You can exhale. Knowing: Right here and now, I’m safe. Right here and now, I am enough, and I have all I need, and I’m making progress toward a destination printed right here on my ticket, a place I’m virtually certain to arrive at intact. So I can turn my brain off. For the next hour – or two, or five, or eight – my work is done.
“I’m on the bus” was a literal truth that became a metaphor she leaned into for that whole year.
And now that magical phrase would get her through the Ironman.
*
SWIM
Elk Lake, on Vancouver Island, is the epicentre of this triathlon, and the breaking dawn bronzes it up. At 6am sharp, 1480 competitors who’ve been squeezed into a holding area for half an hour are released, three at a time, to charge from the shore into the water, high-stepping through the shallows like John Cleese from the Ministry of Silly Walks, and then diving head-first into this undertaking. The lake’s cold. The athletes wear full wetsuits. A few cowboys brave the water in their Speedos.
It takes Maddy another 30 minutes to get to the start line. And now all those preliminaries – the weeks of training, the logistics of registration and travel and gear rental, waking this morning at 3am and choking down dry sourdough toast with jam – are behind her. She’s on the bus.
This is brand new to her – swimming in open water amid those churning limbs.
A couple of times she gets disoriented and an official in a kayak has to mother-duck her back in the right direction. She thinks: Look for feet. If you see feet, odds are good there is a swimmer attached to them – a swimmer who is swimming in the right direction. Follow those feet. Keep those arms moving.
I’m on the bus. Stay on the bus.
Forty five minutes later she feels the lake bottom rising to meet her. One bus trip down. She walks out of the water, then runs, too focussed to see the sign someone’s holding for the competitor they’ve come to cheer on:
No More Swimming, Ever
*
BIKE
Most tri competitors have an Achilles Heel event. For many it’s that &^*% swim. But for Maddy it’s this next one: the cycling.* She is not a cyclist. She didn’t even own a bicycle until three weeks ago, when she picked one up at the local sports-gear trade-in shop for $140. It’s a commuter bike, with upright handlebars and one gear ring; it seems more fit to deliver butter chicken to a shut-in than to compete in a race. No clip-in pedals, no nothing. (On the upside, the guy who sold it accidentally left his asthma ventilator in the seat pouch.)
This is literally the only bike in the field that’s not a sleek and expensive racing bike. It’s like competing at Wimbledon with an old Dunlop Maxply.
Turns out she’s able to use this as a kind of cheeky motivation. An hour in she’s averaging a little over 27km/hr – quick enough to put her in the middle of the pack. I went out too fast, she’s thinking. I should slow down. But I don’t want to.
Across the rolling hills of the Saanich Peninsula she rides, through rich farmland, past the fancy coastal estate where Harry and Meghan stayed when they were on the lam and seriously considering moving to Canada. Rolling hills are lovely to drive through: grinding up and down them on a cheap bike with a dicky granny gear: not so much. Willis Road, with its 9 percent grade over 2.5 kilometres, almost does her in. The bike’s making a terrible noise. It occurs to her that she could get off and walk. But nobody else is. So she guts it out, up and up and up.
Pain in the left knee registering five out of ten.
Triceps burning now as she folds herself over those upright handlebars, trying to scavenge a little bit of an aerodynamic advantage on the downhill.
I’m on the bus.
*
RUN
One thing about having a crappy commuting bike is, there’s none of this un-clipping and changing your shoes for the run. You just hop off one bus and hop on the next.
This transition is the single worst moment for many triathletes. “Your legs hit hard ground and you’re going, ‘What is happening to me right now?’”
Maddy could feel the fuel gauge dipping. She downed a fistful of Nerd gummy clusters and joined the pack already on the pea-gravel path round Elk Lake. A half-marathon to go.
The good news? Pain in the left knee subsiding. The bad news? Pain in the right knee coming on like a bear. Seven out of ten on the pain scale. Eight, now.
By the second tour of the lake she’s shuffling on one leg and pushing off with the other – “Terry Fox-ing it,” as she will later describe it.
Well-wishers line the route. Maddy’s wearing bib 316 – a Biblically significant number. Nobody comments on this. Someone is holding a sign:
All Toenails Go To Heaven
At this point she wonders if she might be doing permanent damage. Can’t think about that now. Don’t feed that wolf.
I’m on the bus. Stay on the bus.
Maddy crosses the finish line a little after 1pm. Her official time: six hours, forty-nine minutes. Which will place her 973 out of the 1331 who finished the race.
She’s a little spaced out. Tomorrow she will say that her body feels like “a box full of broken dishes.” But it’s over. She did it. She stayed on the bus. All three buses.
In the finishing-line chute, a stone-faced woman held a sign aloft for her (partner? Friend? Ex?)
Therapy Was Also An Option
In the months-long run up to this event, people asked her why she was doing it. Like, What are you trying to prove? And to whom?
Why try a tri? Because humans experiment on themselves. It’s what we do. Life is a cosmic test of character. The best challenges are the ones you have around a fifty percent chance of defeating you. There’s actually science to this: the human brain is – among other things – a machine for turning suffering into fulfillment.
Of course, the real reason to inflict punishment on yourself, Maddy reflects at the end of this very long big day:
If feels realllllly good when you stop.
footnote: *The Ironman triathlon was originally conceived of as a test of who’s the fittest athlete – swimmers, cyclists or runners. The only way to settle the argument was to put them all in the same race. “Whoever finishes first we’ll call The Ironman.”
The Victoria 70.3, brutal as it is, is technically only a “Half Ironman.”
To repeat: Therapy is also an option.
