I am an accidental athlete. Growing up disliking endurance sports, I was one of those playful kids who would do anything to escape the weekly 2.4km run round the track. While I enjoy going to the pool, I never learnt how to swim, not even in the army where I was always in so-called “chicken pox” platoons (whenever there is a person in a platoon who contacted chicken pox, the entire platoon will be disallowed from entering the pool and take swimming class).
When I was finishing my junior term in Officer Cadet School, I was hand-picked to go for a selection trial for the elite Naval Diving Unit. I refused to own up that I didn’t know how to swim, because I believe that by trying hard, I should be able to stay afloat. Not being able to swim put me in danger, as I nearly drowned and had to be rescued by the lifeguard on duty. That near-death incident spurred me to learn swimming. Around that time, in the late 1980s, triathlon was only starting to capture the attention of a small group of athletes in Singapore. I chanced upon a book written by the legendary Ironman World Champion Dave Scott. The moment I finished reading his book, I knew that triathlon is my destiny and that I WILL complete an Ironman one day.
It is apt to say that Ironman provides me the direction and target to learn to swim. Almost everyday, I will make a trip to a nearby pool to learn stroking and kicking. The process was hard and total self-coached. It took me about a year of hard training to be able to swim a distance of 1.5 km. In 1991, I successfully complete my first aquathlon that featured a sea swim. This gave me the confidence to add bicycling into the mix and complete my first ever triathlon – the NKF Life Force Triathlon – in 1992.
