My First Full Ironman: South Africa 2015 in 15:21:35

I booked my first full Ironman before I owned a road bike. That is the honest starting point of this story: not a finish-line photo, but a decision made after Madeira in April 2014 by someone who still had most of the skills left to acquire. The race was Ironman South Africa in Port Elizabeth, and on 29 March 2015 I finished it in 15:21:35.

Lausanne first: learning what a triathlon even was

My first triathlon was not the Ironman — it was an Olympic-distance race in Lausanne in August 2014, months after I had already booked South Africa. The diary of that day describes a 1.5km swim, a 40km bike and a 10km run, attempted on a borrowed mountain bike with a short preparation window. The title I gave it tells you how it went. Part two keeps the rest of that story in its own place.

That ordering matters to me. It would be easy to tell this as though ultrarunning naturally led to an Ironman. In practice they were different challenges: being able to run for a long time said nothing about handling three disciplines in one day, and Lausanne proved it.

Learning to swim in Turin

By early 2015 I was living in Turin, and the weakest discipline needed the most work. The diary from those months describes asking at a local gym about swimming instruction and ending up coached by a former paratrooper who had moved to Italy and kept working in swimming. His past is the colour of the story, not a qualification I acquired — the relevant part is the front crawl, practised in an ordinary short pool that involved constant turning.

That is what the preparation actually looked like: borrowed bikes, municipal pools, and a booked race in South Africa getting closer. No heroic training montage. The work happened in ordinary facilities while life carried on around it.

The official record

The reference is the published official results PDF: page 37, Deepak Shukla, GB, M25–29, bib 235. The splits make the scale of the day visible — particularly the eight hours on the bike before the marathon — but they do not tell you what I thought at any particular turn, and I will not invent it. Fifteen hours and twenty-one minutes is not a fast Ironman. It is a finished one, completed by someone who had committed before he had much idea what he was committing to. The preparation diaries explain that beginning more honestly than a reconstructed finish line would.

Port Elizabeth and Maastricht are not the same chapter

I also remember a nonfinish at an Ironman in Maastricht; its exact date remains unverified, and the South African PDF does not resolve it. I keep that DNF visible as a separate recollection rather than guessing a year to complete a tidy timeline. The wider history is not a sequence of guaranteed successes either — the Salisbury Plain 50-mile attempt in 2023 ended around mile 32, and the verified 2024 results (Torino 100km, South Downs Way 100, Winter Downs 200) came nearly a decade later.

The route through the original stories

For the decision, read booking my first Ironman after Madeira. For the first triathlon, Lausanne part one and part two. For the swimming, the Turin coaching diary. The endurance reading order places this finish on 29 March 2015 with the official PDF beside it, and Madeira's 2014 report supplies the previous chapter. The original posts and their publication dates remain intact.