To compete in the Hawaiin Ironman, athletes push their bodies to the limit. Stuart Lines pushed to the brink of death.

Stuart Lines should be dead. He endured nine days in a drug-induced coma with his legs sliced open; 23 days in intensive care; kidney and liver failure; three weeks of dialysis; 23 blood transfusions; EPO; 48 staples in each leg. To be accurate, thanks to his 40-day stint in hospital and his body going into meltdown, the doctors reckon he should be dead three times over. But he isn’t; he survived. The irony is that the only thing that saved his life was the very thing that got him into trouble in the first place: his extreme fitness.

Stuart Lines lives in Queensland and is an experienced age-group (amateur) triathlete. He got into the sport in 1990 and raced hard-core through to ’94, when he took a break from competition. In ’96, he moved to the Sunshine Coast and took up triathlons again, and in ’04 he qualified for Ironman Australia: a 3.8km swim, 180km cycle and a 42.2km run, all back-to-back in one day.

In short, the triathlon bug had bitten him hard. He was hooked, and he soon qualified for the ’05 International Triathlon Union World Championships in Honolulu, over the more sedate format of a 1500m swim, 40km cycle and 10km run. And just like many other competitors at the race, afterwards he went across to Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii to watch the grand-daddy of ’em all, the Hawaiian Ironman, raced in part through the blast-furnace conditions of the lava desert that skirts the island’s volcanic coastline.

Kona, as the race is known by those in the sport, can be a real bitch. Temperatures routinely exceed 50ºC and the bent-over palm trees that line the route are testament to the powerful trade winds that whip in off the sea. It takes months of preparation to tackle the gruelling race. Each year 20,000 people around the world try to qualify. Only 1500 ever make it to the starting line. Fewer make it to the finish.

Lines knew in “an instant” that he wanted to become one of the chosen few. It’s that decision that nearly cost him his life. To get to Hawaii, he had to first qualify for the Australian Ironman, and it was about 12 weeks into his training – in preparation for the Yeppoon Half Ironman (a sedate 1.9km swim, 90km cycle and 21.1km run) – that things started to go pear-shaped. “On the Sunday morning, I did 180km on the bike at an average speed of about 28km/h. It was to be the end of my easy aerobic training block,” he says. “During the ride I felt fine, but that night I came down with a nasty gastro bug. I was losing food and fluid from both ends.

“The following Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I was bed-bound with the flu and a fever. I couldn’t eat or drink; my fiancée is a doctor and she was getting concerned. On the Thursday, we went to see another doctor and he took a urine sample, found I was dehydrated and gave me some IV fluids – no big deal. They checked my blood chemistry that afternoon and everything was fine.

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