Ray D'Arcy, Today FM's mid-morning star, begins a new radio slot in nine days. But first he faces another, more personal challenge: the man who couldn't swim a stroke one year ago hopes to complete a gruelling triathlon in Skerries. For once, he tells Shane Hegarty, he's utterly out of his depth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. "My pride has gone out the window," says Ray D'Arcy. "In deepest darkest winter, I've cycled home from work, got in the car, driven an hour over to the national aquatic centre, put my fins on and waited in a metre of water for my swimming coach. And I'd be surrounded by six-year-olds. And them going: 'Hey mister are you the man from the telly?' And they were going around in the pool like those wind-up toys you put in the bath. So the pride thing is gone."
In October last year, D'Arcy announced, live on his Today FM show, that he would do a triathlon before his 40th birthday. It was the day after the Dublin City Marathon, and he had been too easily inspired by the sight of ordinary people who had dragged their legs over the course. He reckoned a challenge would do him good. So, in "a moment of lunacy" he decided that he would tackle the Olympic distance; a 1,500-metre sea swim followed by a 40-kilometre cycle and topped off by a 10-kilometre run. It mightn't have seemed like such a bad idea if it wasn't for one thing. D'Arcy couldn't swim. Never had swum. Not a stroke. Ever.
"I was from the midlands. Even the fish don't swim there," he laughs. He laughs regularly about the challenge. More often than not the laugh tails off into a what-have-I-got-myself-into kind of groan. "This is going to sound like a Monty Python sketch, but we weren't a well-off family. I won't use the 'P' word. So we never went on holidays. And as a kid I had an allergy to the sun, which carried on a bit to adult life. And if I was learning to swim I wouldn't have got a Saturday job because that's when swimming lessons were."
As he grew older, work kept getting in the way, and he never got round to learning to love the water. Next week, he'll have no choice. Only three days before he turns 40, he will take part in the Skerries Triathlon, on Dublin's east coast. Or maybe not. It's still a close call. A month ago, he had more or less decided that there was no way he'd be able to do it. "If one more person told me, 'it will click'." He had only just removed the fins from his feet and was struggling in the pool. He set himself some goals, even though he was ambivalent as to whether he wanted to achieve them or not. "The last day of July was when I swam my first length without fins. I'd been doing 750 metres with fins, but then I took them off and that was a real downer. Literally."
Since then, he has taken to the open water for the first time. Luckily, much of the Skerries course will be in waist-high water, so he can walk the swim if he needs to. "I won't. But I might stand up and then go again," he laughs. Then groans.
It mightn't matter so much if he wasn't so well-known. He has become used to curious onlookers in the pool, inquiries on the street. "Have you done it yet?" people ask him in the shopping centre. "Not yet," he replies.
On the day, there will be a large crowd waiting to greet him as, cold, snotty and knackered, he hauls himself from the Irish Sea and stumbles towards his bike. "I'll get Today FM swimming caps made so that everybody has to wear them. Then I'll have total anonymity."
"It's not a sport in which you would want to be too self-conscious," says Hugh McAtamney, president of Triathlon Ireland. "You're doing three different sports and you're wearing this skimpy gear and getting changed in front a few hundred people." With that line, of course, McAtamney probably doubled the amount of spectators who will attend.
If D'Arcy wants inspiration, McAtamney is a good place to start. At age 27, he was three stone overweight and couldn't swim. Five years later, he has competed in World and European Championships. Next year, he and a dozen other members of Dublin's Tri-D club hope to do an Iron Man in France. That involves a 3.8-kilometre swim, 180-kilometre cycle and a full marathon. I'll repeat that for those who get tired just lifting The Irish Times Magazine. It finishes with a marathon.
McAtamney sounds like one of those ads for slimming aids. "I was a size 38 belt, now I'm down to a size 30. I couldn't run up the stairs without breaking into a sweat. So I decided to get the finger out and get fit." But he's the typical triathlete. There is a good proportion of women, but most are men in their late 20s and early 30s who woke up one morning and realised that the spare tyre wasn't going to roll away on its own. For a variety of reasons, the triathlon appeals to them.
"First of all, it looks cool," says McAtamney. "You get to spend money on lots of cool things like a bike and wet suit. The endurance element is there, but it varies in the training. It's also good for the all-round physique. The marathon on its own is a hard slog and lots of people don't like running."
It is one of the fastest-growing sports in Ireland. So far this decade, the number of clubs has doubled, as have the number of races. Charities have found it a new way to raise cash. Ireland now has two professional triathletes, Caroline Kearney and Gavin Noble. The total number of competitors is now about 3,000.
It can bring out the obsessive in people. "You do get the type of guy who tries to do his fitness training even when running up the stairs." But most come in and out of the sport over three years, when family takes over or, according to McAtamney, "the girlfriends say enough. They enter that transition between an extreme sport of one kind and an extreme sport of another: marriage."
It is not, D'Arcy insists, a symptom of any mid-life crisis. He needed to learn how to swim, and this was a good target. He was fit enough beforehand, cycling to work every day, walking a bit. But he knows that for men of his age it is easier deciding to begin exercising than it is to actually do it.
"I'm going to sound like a right pain in the arse with this thing, but the problem with a lot of people is getting over that initial hump, to get into it. Especially when you get into your 30s, a lot of people find it difficult to get over that hump. I bought a bike to cycle into work, but it stayed in the shed for a year. I had every excuse, every morning for why I shouldn't cycle in today. Too wet, too cold, too hot. And then I just started, and I got over that initial hump. And it's not that your body craves it, but it requires it and demands it. You feel better doing it than not doing it."
He won't be doing it alone. His radio show's producer Jenny Kelly agreed to the challenge too. "I feel I was forced into it," she says. "He said it on air first, and then he was going on about women a bit, so I said I'd do it. I didn't know what I was letting myself into."
Kelly says she has entered a strange realm. "We went to buy our wetsuits and it was like we were being inducted into a club, a mad club. The gear is 90 per cent of it and all the guys were standing around talking about it, being really into it." She and Ray have cajoled, encouraged and driven each other demented. "It's a good thing we're both doing it, because we can bore each other. No one goes out for drinks with us any more because it's all we talk about. He's a hell of a lot more focused than me, although I've been trying to say it's an amazing thing to do, but it's supposed to be a little bit fun as well."
No it's not, says D'Arcy. He was watching some high divers practise in the National Aquatic Centre and fancied it. "That's fun, you see. I suppose the problem with all of this is that there hasn't been much fun out of this. It's drudgery, it's hard work."
Still, it'll have helped him steel himself for a bigger challenge to come. His show has been moved to the nine to noon morning slot, and Today FM has been selling it as a showdown between him and Gerry Ryan. Wrong, says D'Arcy.
"I think that too much has been made about us being up against Gerry Ryan. That's a marketing thing. In a radio schedule, nine o'clock is just a more natural changeover time. People go to work or the kids go to school. When they brought Ian in I suppose they wanted value for money because he is such a big name, but seven to nine is a more natural time for a breakfast show. It's a new challenge for us, though, because we could ease into it at 10 a.m., now we have to hit the ground running."
He has been four years at the station, moving after telling 2FM about the approach from Today FM, only to be told it wouldn't be matched and good luck in the new job. "That energises you. It gives you what I'd call the 'two-finger' motivation'."
The popularity of the show is obvious in how it sold 30,000 copies of the Fixed book, which was full of silly questions given (sometimes) sober answers. The CD Even Better Than The Real Thing, for which Irish bands performed covers for the show, raised €162,000 for the National Children's Hospital.
"That's after VAT. And when they buy equipment, they'll pay VAT on that. So from €200,000 raised, €80,000 will go on VAT. It seems strange." The equipment in question, as it happens, will test fitness levels in children, trying to head off obesity.
He decided against doing the triathlon for any charity. "If you don't do it you're not just letting yourself down, but you're letting the charity down too." Either way, he's feeling the pressure. In the pool, he's grateful for the coaching from Shane Gibney and Nick O'Hare. He's training about 12 hours a week, and has been swimming twice a day for the past couple of weeks.
After a decade without ordering a steak, he has been giving in to his body's sudden demand for red meat. "I'm resigned to the fact that it's either going to happen or not happen, but for a while there I was getting palpitations just thinking about it. It's quite a big event. And like most adults, I haven't set myself any targets since the college exams. You achieve things in your work, but they're not the same. That's your career path. So it's 20 years since I set a specific task that I had to achieve that involved a lot of work, effort and time. And then there's the fear of failure. What a waste of time if you put all that effort in, when you could have been off doing other things, all for nothing."
Next Saturday, as part of the race, there will be the option of doing the Try-A-Triathlon, which will feature a shorter, 500-metre swim to go with a 13-kilometre cycle and 3.3-kilometre run, but he really wants to be able to do the full thing. "I'd be disappointed with myself if I did that, although it would still be a great achievement, because a 500-metre swim, having not been able to swim at all, is probably a great thing."
And when it's done, will that be it? "Well, I've jumped out of a plane before. I did it once, I enjoyed it. I didn't do it again." He laughs.
Then he groans.
The Gatorade Skerries Triathlon starts at the seafront at 10 a.m. next Saturday, August 28th. Ray D'Arcy begins his 9 a.m.-noon Today FM slot on Monday, August 30th