They've bloody done it! (Ironman Part 1)

From the generation that brought you the housing crisis, the mortgage meltdown, the financial crisis & the destruction of global warming comes… Ironman.

As I arrive at the registration venue, a chirpy young girl dressed in bright yellow and plastered with Powerbar logos runs out to me and thrusts an energy bar into my hand. ‘It’s Isotonic’ she says. I look back at her blankly. ‘It’ll give you that winning feeling on race day’. I nod obligingly. Apparently Powerbar were attendees at the PwC school of indoctrination.

Soldiering on through the maze of overpriced sporting goods being flogged, I wind myself toward the registration desk whilst valiantly trying to averting the glares of the corporate vultures looking to fleece me out of more money, as if the €300 entrance fee wasn’t enough. An obsequious young man with slicked back hair and a smile that says ‘I’ve done more push ups than you today’ beckons me toward various fluorescent concoctions he has waiting for me, but I politely decline his offer. Not after Jonestown.

Some hours later, and I am within touching distance of the pearly gates of the registration desk. Only one man obstructs my passage; his passport says Kuwait, and I assume from his expensive looking clothing that the West’s deadly dependence on Middle Eastern fossil fuels has had a significant role in bringing him to Ireland.
‘Is this your first ironman?’ the naive young girl asks him, while his partner looks deferentially at the floor. ‘Of course!’ the man barks back. ‘...I love Ironman, I do every one’ he continues, adopting a more reconciliatory tone. The girl nods meekly before making the mistake of looking up at the Sheik. He fixes her gaze with narrowed eyes. ‘Every. One’.

The journey back out of registration is an treacherous as the journey in. I am reminded how, when climbing Mount Everest, you are more likely to die on the descent than in actually climbing the damn thing. 

I stop to ponder the need anyone could have for one of the ‘reduced price’ €100 pairs of running socks dangling across the thoroughfare. Before I have time to complete my train of thought, I have an unsolicited answer. ‘Compression socks’ the sales rep interjects, smugly. Ah, of course. I’m beginning to hope this is some some of test, whereby anybody stupid enough to buy said socks is rounded up and shipped off to be used as target practice in Syria on the basis that Mammon worship has turned their brains into useless goo. 
‘No thanks, I’m fine with these’ I say, pointing the worn old Adidas socks poking through the holes in my trainers. ‘Oh no, you cannot run in those’ he retorts, seemingly offended by the sheer notion of it. ‘I’m pretty sure people have been running just fine for hundreds of years without -’ I start, before realising the futility of my attempts. Pick your battles, I remind myself, before abandoning the sales rep, presumably to the red-hot gates of Hades where he belongs.

Having navigated what will soon turn out to be the most arduous challenge of the weekend, I take my registration bag and head off in search of somewhere I can find a cheap sandwich and a hot chocolate, and return to my book on urban guerilla warfare. I’m starting to feel like some of its pointers may come in useful over this weekend. ‘Don’t forget to Carb up’ someone shouts at me as I leave the Ironman Marquee and return to the real world. Luckily for me, there are plenty of carbs in hot chocolate.

After mistakenly choosing to have my fill of liquid carbohydrates at a toilet-less eatery, I head into the city centre to satiate my now pressing desire to go to the toilet. Unfortunately, as anyone who has been to a major Western city in the last few years has found, public toilets are becoming something of a dying breed. And apparently Dubliners are not satisfied with simply forcing you to buy something to use a toilet, so they’ve gone ahead and put codes on the doors, thwarting my attempts for a sneaky piss in a starbucks. The gormless drone behind the counter tells me that the code can only be released to paying customers. When I explain that I just need to use the toilet and will be finished in no time, she rebukes me for failing to contribute to the nation’s stagnating GDP growth.
‘You’re the reason interest rates are at all time lows!’ She hollers at me, as I am whisked out the door by the four horseman of the apocalypse.

Haggard and dispirited, I find a deserted back-alleyway where I can relieve myself. ‘The spirit of James Joyce lives on’ I chuckle, my wistful remarks being carried off into the cool night’s breeze by the tumultuous winds of change.

I go in search for bench, or indeed any edifice sufficiently accommodating to my weary buttocks, on which I can sit and watch the world go by, or read up on the latest techniques for forging homemade Molotov cocktails, but alas, my search is in vain. Sitting is clearly not economically productive enough for our corporate overlords and city planners, so it seems my only option for seating is to succumb to the machine and pay for a seat at an overpriced eatery. Filled with revolutionary zeal, I march defiantly back to my hostel, lamenting to some faceless deity in the sky; ‘they’ve done, they’ve bloody done it! They’ve only gone and commercialised sitting down! First it was running, then it was pissing, now they’re fucking charging us to sit!’