TRIBE NATION OXMAN PREVIEW
HUGE Payne Gains From Clydesdale to OxMan to Ironman and onwards, Matt Payne’s story is a calling card for the benefits of the healthy tri – and club - life. The Canterbury Triathlon Club member shares his inspirational journey with Kent Gray.
“The thing is, when you are like really heavy, you don’t even realise how bad you felt.”
t’s no surprise Matt Payne’s training has been a little “inconsistent” in the countdown to OxMan, what with him being in the final throws of a PhD in bioengineering. If he’s honest, it’s been a little tough getting going again too after all the sacrifice that went into hearing those immortal words, “You are an IRONMAN!”, at Taupo in March. Still, all being equal, the 37-year-old won’t be last in the 5th edition of New Zealand’s newest long course triathlon, all 115km of it on the outskirts of the picturesque North Canterbury farming town of Oxford. That’s not meant as a slight, rather a contextualised doff of TQ’s cap to one most inspirational triathletes set to line up in the November 25 half. You see, when Payne committed to racing his first OxMan not long after the South Island came out of lockdown in early 2021, he tipped the scales at a hefty 136kg. That’s 21½ stone in old money or 300 pounds in the U.S., where, in 2014, USA Triathlon cleverly adopted a dedicated ‘Clydesdale’ category for men over 220 pounds (100kg), alongside a ‘Athenas’ division for females over 165 pounds (75kg). Fast-forward to today and the former bricklayer turned adult University of Canterbury student has slashed 30kg en route to two OxMan medals, a never-to-be-sneezed at time of 13:25:47 at Ironman New Zealand and a much, much happier way of life.
“Oh yeah, I feel so much better,” Payne told TQ. “The thing is, when you are like really heavy, you don’t even realise how bad you felt. When you lose the weight, you realise how good you can actually feel…like you don’t have to stress out if you have to go up three or four flights of stairs at Uni and stuff like that. “It’s so nice to go out on a bike ride for four hours where you could never do that before. Now it’s a really do-able thing, I can go out and do a really nice ride around the bays and enjoy the views, whereas before it wouldn’t have even of been an option.” The bike leg was the thing Payne feared most ahead of his 2021 Oxman debut. By the time he been cajoled into entering the race by pal Chris Cameron, they’d already been swimming to help Cameron nurse his way back from a back injury, and then stepped it up with spin classes. Payne had also run in his early 20s before everyday life – chiefly helping with the Christchurch rebuild and settling down with his partner - kept him out of sport for the best part of 15 years. That meant he wasn’t overly fazed by the 21.1km run either but the bike cutoff of 3½ hours was a worry given he was clocking best efforts of 3h 40min in training. Payne needn’t have fretted. He knocked the 92km out in 3:26:09 en route to an overall time of 6:52:03 – good enough
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106 TRIATHLON QUARTERLY