Time out from the Top 

Interview with Hywel Davies (May 2002)

As the one man in crosstraining who could be crowned undisputed king, Hywel Davies is pretty much a household name in the world of fitness competitions. Many seriously fit men have spent hours and hours training to beat him, yet since he first won the Ultra-Fit in 1998, he has remained unbeaten in all crosstraining competitions. CTUK recently caught up with Hywel as he recovered from a career threatening injury, having broken his tibia and fibula in an innocuous accident at an indoor adventure race at the NEC. With Hywel on crutches, we figured we should be able to keep up with him for long enough to quiz him about his achievements, experiences and views regarding crosstraining.

When did you first start in the sport? 

Well my earliest memory is watching Brian Jacks on Superstars when I was 8 years old. He was doing dips so I got two chairs and copied him and beat his score. I then started karate and they had little fitness competitions there involving press-ups, sit-ups and chin-ups and I always used to win. I didn't really start competing though until I was at University taking circuit classes both as a participant and as a coach. I entered the Ultra-Fit Welsh Open in Newport (1995) which was my first competition and finished 8th.

What's been your inspiration to achieve the success you have? 

Throughout my life, whether I was 10, 16 or whatever, I've tried to get to the top of every sport I've done. With mountain biking, karate and athletics for instance, I've got as far as I wanted to go or as far as I could at the time and when I’ve lost motivation or not had the money  to carry on, I’ve moved on to something else. With crosstraining, I'm as good as I can be, as good as the sport will let me get. After that first competition where I came 8th, I turned to my Dad and said 'I'll win that one day'. I made a promise to him and that was my initial motivation. Two competitions later I won it. Now I'm happy staying at the top of the sport and I don't mind if I get beaten one day as I've achieved what I wanted to. I don't see it as that serious though. OK, I put on a serious face when I'm there, but that's why I win.

For how many years do you think you'll maintain your unbeaten record? 

For as long as I want to. I've been improving every year, every year I get faster, every year I find different ways to improve my fitness. My best competitive year so far was probably 2000 when I won the Ultra-Fit and the X-zone very easily and completed my first Iron Man triathlon. Yet the following year I took almost an hour off my Iron Man time. There's always different ways I can find to push myself and the gains I get from triathlon, mountain running and so on will come back to crosstraining and make it that little bit easier. So as long as I'm motivated and want to keep winning, I will do. But that motivation has to be sparked off again. Hopefully the challenge of coming back from this injury might just do that.

Lee Rankin and Adam Horder are in great shape at the moment and have done well in recent competitions. How do you rate them and how close are they to you at your best?

I think Lee's got more potential than Adam. Adam's strong and fit but I don't think he's going to improve much more on aerobic fitness. If I was head-to-head with him on the run I'd put minutes on him. He's strong and he'd do well on the weights, but I haven't got a weakness there and I don't think Adam can improve much more. As far as Lee goes, if he can get it mentally right, even though he's been on TV recently being mentally weak in ‘Tough Enough for the SAS’, I think he's got a lot more potential. If he can just get his head right for each event and train specifically to try and win something, then he should succeed in a major competition.

Who's given you the hardest race during your unbeaten reign?

Darren Robson easily. Mainly because of the events surrounding that race in 1999 and what it meant to both of us. We were fiercely competitive and the rivalry got so great at the time that we weren't even speaking. He was winding me up by telling loads of people that he was really up for it and he'd had time off work to train and he went to the Ultra-Fit in the best shape of his life. I was expected to give him a run for his money but not to beat him. I'd missed out on training for a couple of weeks in the lead-up due to pressure at work, so all I relied on at the race was will power as I wasn't in my best shape. I remember looking over at him on the treadmill and as soon as I saw him press the button and his feet slow down, I knew I'd beaten him. I stayed at 14kph while he dropped from 14.5 to 12 and then 11kph. He'd blown up but it came down to the last 20 seconds on the bench press so that was a tough one. No disrespect to Andrew Evans as he's come closer to my times but whenever we get to the treadmill together or even with me within 30 seconds of him, I know I've won. He's strong on everything else but he's never really been a threat on the runner.

So who've you got the most respect for out of all your crosstraining rivals?

Probably Andrew Evans. We're moving into another generation in the sport as I rewrote what it meant to be a top crosstrainer. Previously we'd had big guys doing well and the main emphasis was on strength and power through the weights. Since I've started winning the Ultra-Fit as well as other longer events, it's proved that you have to be very aerobically fit, but still keep your strength as well. However, Andrew Evans doesn't go out of his way to do triathlons or running events, yet he still manages to be the best of the rest. Even though Adam Horder, Lee Rankin, Steve Quick and Keith Marley are improving, Andy's still far and away the second best. I think he'd be good enough to come second in any full Ultra-Fit style course. Saying that though, I've got a lot of respect for Lee Rankin's approach to the sport. He's modeled his training on what I've been doing and entered lots of different events and used them all as a way to get fitter.

Do you use any specific tactics to win the psychological battle or do you rely solely on your reputation to unsettle the other competitors?

I never go out of my way to unsettle my competitors but I always make sure that they don't unsettle me. In my races with Darren and Andy, I've been comfortable if they get to a station ahead of me as I know I can pull it back. It might be different if someone who could keep up with me or beat me in the last events got ahead. There's definitely a psychological advantage in winning the heats though and putting yourself in poll position. I've never come second in a heat.

Would you say your most important attribute is your natural talent or your ability to push yourself further and harder than your competitors?

It's definitely a mental thing. I can push myself until I collapse and then probably a bit further. I've always had that from a very early age. I can put my head down and go for it and do nothing else until I achieve what I wanted to. It's not that I'm genetically better or have a physically better build, but I train harder. When it comes to an event, I eat, breathe, sleep and shit my training for as long as I need to, to be the best at that event.

So is every training session a maximum intensity training session?

Yes. I take rest days when I need them, but I don't see any point in going for a recovery bike ride or run. I will train to a maximum every session, whether it be a 100 mile bike ride as fast as I can, or pushing out that extra rep on the bench. In all aspects of training I will go to a maximum heart rate, strength test, distance or speed.

And do you still eat 'sausage and mash' before training?

I do. I don't think my diet is important. Whenever I've tried eating healthily all the time and cutting out fatty foods, I lose too much weight, get tired, get dizzy during training and don't have the energy to function properly. I do eat good food but I eat a lot of so called bad food too which keeps the balance there. I burn most of it off anyway but it helps me maintain my weight. And whether or not the other crosstrainers believe me, I do eat sausage and mash as well as drink Guinness the night before a race. Part of the reason I do a lot of exercise is so that I can enjoy my life and eat what I want. There's no harm in me having a McDonalds on the way home because my training will compensate.

When you've trained for longer events such as marathons, do you find you can maintain your strength and power? 

The longest event I've done is the Southern Traverse which was a five day event in New Zealand. It took me three weeks to recover afterwards before I went back to the gym but I still had my base level of strength and could get back to my strongest within a few weeks. I only ever train specifically for 1-2 months for a long event so I can maintain my strength by cycling my training, but what I do find is that my run speed can suffer. If I do a sprint triathlon after training for a marathon, the swim and bike are good but the running is really slow and I try to push it as hard as I can but it's just not there. You've proved to be talented in a number of different sports.

Why did you chose crosstraining rather than a sport with more exposure and financial reward? 

Well I won a triathlon last year and my prize was a creme egg, an energy bar and a water bottle. When I won the Ultra-Fit in 2000 I got to go to Australia for two weeks. If the sport is there and I can exploit it I'll keep doing it. If you look at my genetic make-up I'm quite suited towards crosstraining. I'm too big built to be a serious endurance runner, I'm not tall enough to be a serious runner and I'm not really built to be a top triathlete. I played rugby to a high level but when I went to University the standard was poor so I gave it up. You need to be a professional by the time you're 18 if you're going to make it in a sport and the opportunity never really arose for me. That left me with crosstraining which I started when I was 21.

Which professional athlete do you admire the most?

Steve Redgrave. It takes a hell of a lot to be at the top of a sport for 20 years, doing the same thing day in and day out. With crosstraining, you can do lots of different training and diversify with other interesting events too. Doing any professional sport to a high level means doing the same exercise day after day which really put me off. Rowing for 20 years and being the best is very impressive.

Many sports are dogged by accusations of doping and using drugs to gain an unfair advantage. Top crosstrainers like Lee Rankin and Lisa Cox were surprised to hear rumours that they'd been taking drugs following their best performances in recent events. Has anything like that ever affected you?

When I won the Ultra-Fit fairly easily last year people asked me what drugs I was taking. If you put it in perspective, crosstraining is not a professional sport and any rewards are not worth the risks involved in taking drugs. Crosstraining exercises and courses are not demanding enough to require the use of drugs by anyone who has trained hard enough. People usually get into crosstraining to improve health and fitness so it would be stupid to destroy that by taking dangerous substances. Drug taking is something that happens in 'real' sport and I wouldn't know where to get drugs and I wouldn't even have a clue what to take apart from perhaps EPO, but then I’m not a Tour de France cyclist.

You also won the X-zone quite easily last year. Did you realise the treadmill was on zero incline when you started?

I was too concerned with the competitor next to me holding on to his machines while running. What it shows though is that competitions should be controlled by the judges. I pressed the right buttons and got into my running and after 200m the judges said I was running on the flat. They should have noticed straight away and put it up. To be honest though, when they increased the incline I didn't even notice the difference.

When you're not training you work as a PE teacher. Are you a bit of a celebrity at school and do you push your students hard in PE lessons?

Crosstraining is quite an abstract sport really so not everyone at school hears about my achievements. I win events that claim to find the fittest man in Britain and when that appears on the TV or in the newspapers, people at school wonder why on earth I'm working there. I've not made it in an Olympic sport so they never see the competitions and it's hard for them to visualise what it takes and the training I do. The only thing they see is an event I do once a year when I run a marathon around the track at school and we get about 100 children joining in to raise money for charity. I don't think that my sport has any bearing on pushing kids hard though. I'm not an army PTI and the amount I push myself is personal. I can push other people if they want it, but school isn't the place to do that. Children are generally becoming more sedentary though and teenage obesity is on the increase.

Have you noticed any changes in the children at your school and do you do anything specific to educate them about the importance of physical exercise and healthy living?

I don't think children have changed very much since I began teaching. It's the same contrast it's always been between kids from the town and kids from the country. A lot of my natural fitness is down to the fact that I had to run and cycle everywhere as a child, usually over mountains. In towns kids get buses and lifts everywhere and hardly any of them walk or cycle. If I wanted to play football as a kid I'd have to walk two miles up a mountain to get to the pitch. It's surprising how many kids at school can't climb a tree or throw stones. Something just doesn't happen in towns. As far as lifestyle goes, I'm trying to get a wider variety of sports into schools rather than just ball-games. Footballers at school are fitter and healthier and there's a lot of pressure for children to do well in such sports. The government needs to realise that if so much emphasis is placed on ball-games we're always going to get kids who drop out and become unhealthy because they aren't any good. We're trying to encourage these children with activities they can cope with and find fun, such as orienteering, triathlon, fitness and so on.

So what advice would you give to one of your pupils who aspired to beat you at crosstraining? 

Win the mind game first. Believe you can beat me and you will.

Which of your wins or achievements are you most proud of?

I'm proud of the fact that I've been unbeaten for so many years. That took some doing as there used to be a new winner of the Ultra-Fit title every year before I came along. I was the first to win back-to-back titles and then 3 and 4 and so on. That was good but my biggest personal achievement was completing an Iron Man in nine and a half hours in Holland. I never thought I could do it.

Are there any goals that you've not yet achieved?

Not really now. I've done everything I wanted to in crosstraining. I've got bigger goals than just winning things. I'd like to do an Iron Man in under nine hours by the time I'm 30 and whether I'm first, last or half way down the field, I'll get a bigger buzz out of achieving that goal than winning any fitness event. My goal a few years ago would have been to win a world or European crosstraining event but despite promises from the Ultra-Fit and the X-zone, I don't think it'll ever happen. The organisers are trying to make too much money so that nobody ever really wins anything. The Ultra-Fit really pissed me off after I won the 2001 event, as the prize I won couldn't be taken in school holidays. I couldn't swap with Andy Evans as his wife's a teacher and eventually I booked unpaid time off work so I could go on the trip. Then of course I broke my leg but when I asked Ultra-Fit to assist me with these problems they didn't want to know. Charles Mays told me that accidents happen and I couldn’t have the holiday but I could try and win next year. I've told Ultra-Fit that I'll stop after the treadmill next time so that I come 2nd and at least get a prize. Sarah Coope couldn't take her holiday and they didn't help her either.

When will you be back competing for the top prizes then?

I can't say for sure. I'm not going to be back to the person I was until I can run off road and at present I've still got one of the screws left in my leg. It would be great to be back in time to win the Ultra-Fit in December but for now I've just got to stick to cycling.

So after everything Hywel has done for crosstraining and more specifically for the Ultra-Fit competition, he was treated at best indifferently when problems arose for him. Nevertheless, Hywel's motivation was been fired up again recently and he'll be challenging all-comers to match him at press-ups and bench presses at the 'DB' on the 22nd June.

Who's your money on...?  

Well as we now know, Hywel has made a fantastic recovery and returned to competition in style. He inspired the DB Boys to a second place finish at SuperTeams and followed this up with a win at Thruxton Rowathlon and an emphatic victory at the Netfit X-Training Championships in December.

To contact Hywel for tips or training advice email us at enquiries@dbmax.co,uk and we'll pass your messages and questions on.