EVEN when Debbie Moore was lying on the road, badly injured having just been knocked off her bike by a car, she refused to believe that her sporting career was over. It is this indefatigability that set the 28-year-old from Aberdeen on a most unexpected journey towards the 2018 Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast although she has had to overcome some almost insurmountable obstacles on her way to this point.
Moore has a remarkable backstory; she began her career as a swimmer but having missed out on selection for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, hung up her swimsuit at the tender age of 18 and went to university to study law. Retiring from sport at any age can be a traumatic experience — retiring while still a teenager must be unfathomably hard.
“When I stopped swimming, I thought that was my chance of ever being a professional athlete gone,” Moore recalls. “At the time I was devastated but I thought ‘Well, that is just one chapter of my life over’. I felt like I could have done better. I was also proud of myself — and there was no point in dwelling on it, I decided I would move on and do well in something else. But I did not realise how much I would miss the intense training.”
Moore did very little sport while at university but having graduated into a job she hated, she began jogging in her lunch break. Having decided she “quite liked this running thing”, she set herself a challenge — to do the Great North Run in 2011. Moore’s time of 1 hour 35 minutes is an impressive half-marathon at the best of times, even more so when you take into account that she had only been running for a couple of months.
So she set herself another challenge; to break three hours for a marathon — and if she did that, she resolved to buy herself a bike and try triathlon. Unsurprisingly, Moore duly broke the three-hour barrier at the Edinburgh Marathon two years ago. So another challenge had to be set; this time it was to complete an Ironman triathlon, which involves a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and then a marathon.
Moore targeted an event in Sweden and began training towards that. This is when disaster struck.
“I was less than one mile into a training ride and when going round a roundabout, I was hit by a car,” she says. “The top of my knee came off so I had to get surgery. When I was lying on the roundabout I thought that I would never be ready for the Ironman in four months but I never thought that was me out of sport completely. A few weeks later though, I bent my knee a little and I thought to myself ‘I am going to do this Ironman’. I was a crazy person with my training— it was like I was possessed. I could not walk because my leg was in a splint so I would sit in my wheelchair at the gym and go on the arm bike.”
Moore’s fight to regain fitness would not be smooth though; she developed a blood clot in her leg, which moved up to her lung, causing permanent damage. Against all the odds though, Moore made it to the start line of the Ironman competition.
“It felt amazing to be there — I could not believe that I had made it,” she says. “When I had eight miles left on the run, I knew that I was going to do it and that was when I got emotional and had a wee cry to myself. It made me think that if I could do that, I could do anything.”
Moore had caught the eye of Triathlon Scotland who do not support Ironman athletes but were looking for women to join their Girls For Gold Coast programme — a project designed to train women to a standard that they could compete for Scotland in the sprint triathlon at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. That Moore has risen to this challenge is hardly surprising.
“Missing out on the Commonwealth Games as a swimmer was a regret of mine so it was always a dream to get there,” she says. “This opportunity really excites me and the support I get from Triathlon Scotland is brilliant. The Commonwealth Games is always on my mind — I think about it every day. It will be a huge challenge to get there though and I need to learn a lot of new skills in the next two years, like the transitions which are so important in triathlon.”
Moore’s top priority at the moment is to get as much race experience as possible. She will gain further experience when she races in the Strathclyde Park Triathlon Festival event tomorrow, an opportunity she is relishing.
“I am really excited about it — I think my training is starting to pay off and I am feeling good,” she says. “This will be an outdoor swim which will be a big challenge because I am not used to that. I think it is going to be fun though.”
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