Mike Harris: How to race strong into your 70s

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 different. As a new concept, no-one was quite sure what was going to happen.

“We all had lots of questions,” Harris explains. “All we knew was that the water would be cold and none of us would have much of a clue. When I saw the newspaper article, I was immediately attracted to it.

“The British Triathlon Association had been formed and it said there would be events all over the country. I was running marathons at the time with Morpeth Harriers and was very fit. I was a good swimmer, could ride a bike, and I thought: ‘Why not try it out? If it doesn’t work I can go back to running.’”

The only man to beat Harris on a balmy day at Kirtons Farm in Berkshire was British biathlete and army sergeant, the late Jim Woods. In third place was British pentathlon champion Danny Nightingale.

“I was in good company, even then,” Harris remembers. “I was always competitive so even though it sounds ridiculous, I arrived with the idea of winning.

“There was also a freshness about the sport. A little bit like going back to the 1952 Olympics where running was running and little thought was given to diet, equipment or psychology. Or school sports days when you were a kid. That is how I remember it. There wasn’t any pressure or expectation.”

Harris had left school at 15 and joined the Royal Navy before becoming a Royal Marine, serving around the world, including Singapore and the USA. At 31, he was demobbed and began work at Ashington Leisure Centre and as an athletics and swim coach.

While he had ridden a bicycle sparingly in the years preceding the Reading Triathlon, he was confident his skills hadn’t deserted him.

“As a kid, my mates couldn’t keep up, so I had a distinctive feeling that maybe triathlon would be right for me.”

“I went to Nice with the first GB team and came back with £665. I bought a TV, fridge and cooker”

Mike Harris

Too frivolous?

It rang true. Harris remembers the excitement of the early years as triathlon boomed in Europe.

His concern was that working 40-hour weeks, with a two-year-old son, cashflow tight, and a car that wouldn’t start, adding swimming and biking to the hard miles already run would be seen as too frivolous an endeavour.

“I remember Jennifer, my wife, saying: ‘How long is this going to last?!’ It changed when I went to Nice as part of the first British Triathlon team and came back with a cheque for £665. We bought a TV, fridge-freezer and new cooker.”

Harris says he has visionaries like Alec Hunter and Dick Poole to thank for the energy they put in during the formative years of triathlon in the UK, and his early success only triggered more ambition.

For the next decade, each season was meticulously logged in training diaries, with the routine – the fartleks, intervals and long slow efforts all mapped over from running – tweaked to eke out improvement.

“Even in those early years I was competing with people 10-15 years younger than me,” Harris explains. “I was unfashionable. Never on the front page of a triathlon magazine and had few sponsors because they thought I wouldn’t be around for very long.

“Whereas Glenn Cook – a wonderful guy who I have total respect for – would have been in his early twenties, there was no-one else in my age category anywhere near close to where I was.”

Perhaps Harris’ fondest race memory is of victory in the 1987 National Championship in Otley, where he managed to defeat Cook, who would go on to finish second to Mark Allen in the first ITU World Championship in 1989.

“It was tailor-made for me. Glenn would have probably beaten me in most events, but after descending into the water on ladders, it was a 1km downstream river swim, then enormous hills on the bike and the first two miles of the run were uphill. It suited my strengths.

“From January through to July my training had been phenomenal. If it wasn’t written down I wouldn’t believe I could do so much. I felt it was my last chance of winning another British championship and the title of British champion has a lovely ring to it.”

A different life

Harris also became British Grand Prix champion in 1987, travelling to events all over the country and winning the final round in Milton Keynes, but was always aware how his life differed from many of those he faced.

“The likes of Glenn, Howard Jones and Sarah Coope were travelling to California, Zimbabwe, New Zealand for winter training… I was up here with the northeast weather and a 40-hour-a-week job. My life has been so so different from anyone else I know in this sport.”

By 1994, Harris was ready for a break from triathlon, bowing out with an eighth-place finish, aged 43, in the National Long Course Championship in Guernsey.

It would be two decades before he wore a tri-suit again (the same tri-suit, remarkably), as a new passion for cycling took hold and with it more success, winning 80 open time trials, most of them in his fifties.

But it was also lining up to pay £5 to take part in the regular Wednesday night TT that triggered his return to swim, bike and run.

“I’d listen to the cyclists talking about how the time trial would benefit their triathlon,” he says. “It made me wonder what it would be like to get back in the water. So I swam 2,500 yards in the pool no bother and started running again.”

Harris entered a triathlon at the same Druridge Bay Country Park on the northeast coastline between Cresswell and Amble where he completed his final race this June, and finished 20th from over 200 starters with the third-fastest bike split. It justified his return, and even better, he completed the run injury-free.

“That was almost 10 years ago but was the beginning of me getting back into the sport,” he adds. “I’d like to say there wasn’t as much pressure, but there was. You still feel it, even when you’re very old.”

The former 2:25hr marathoner was soon back running 18mins for a 5km parkrun and once more back on the winning trail. “Sixty-four is young when you’re 72,” he reflects.

Eat plain, don’t stop exercising

In 2023, Harris wanted to sign off with a personal statement of his athleticism and answered any lingering self-doubt in fine style with duathlons, aquathlons, cycling time trials, triathlons and 20min parkruns.

“Forget about the past. I can say I was phenomenally fit when I was 72. All my events are still performed flat out,” he says.

Is there a secret? “If there is, it’s simply this: eat plain but nourishing food, and as far as exercise goes… don’t stop.”

With Harris still so competitive, why the decision to step back now? Partly it’s due to stress around events: the attention to detail of race week, those early nights, structured diet, pre-race butterflies, and the toll of pushing, pushing, pushing all the way to the tape. None of it wanes with experience.

“I’ll always continue with biking and running, I just don’t intend to compete anymore,” he explains. “My son, James, took up triathlon and won an event a few weeks ago. On James’ race day, I was up at 5:30am with him, processing those same feelings, feeling the tyres, looking at the sky to judge the conditions. If he continues, I’ll no doubt live more events through him, and my grandson is 10 and also a wonderful little sports person.”

One point he is keen to convey – that could be dismissed as a cliché if it didn’t come from a serial winner – is that it’s the taking part that counts.

“There are no losers in triathlon,” he explains. “That was my view in 1983 and it’s still my view in 2023. To finish is a statement, not just regarding physical attainment, but mental tenacity, discipline and resilience. A great achievement that sits well on any CV – not just a sports-related one.

“As far as being a healthy population, we are falling apart at the seams. Less than 5% can do what a triathlete does: dive into a lake, cycle as hard as they can and still have the determination to finish the event running. And when it’s all over, we go quietly back to work or cuddle and tutor our kids and take almost nothing from a struggling NHS.”

It’s the reason why, when asked by Northumberland Triathlon race organiser Barry Taylor if he could
hand out the awards following his final race, he was only too happy to oblige.

“Barry found out it was the 40th anniversary and gave me a special plaque to commemorate it,” Harris adds. “I went home with a smile on my face. Just as I did in Reading back in 1983.”

Top image credit: Jamie Tyerman