The agony of the champion long-distance runner (and swimmer and cyclist)

Triathlete Lucy Charles-Barclay tells Lawrence Ostlere about her journey through relentless injury and grief to a 'lightbulb moment' that led to an emotional victory at the London T100

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Lucy Charles-Barclay is not a household name, and yet she might be the most complete female athlete on the planet.

There is no purer sporting test than a triathlon, which makes demands on every muscle in the body, and the Ironman distance takes those demands to ludicrous extremes: running a full marathon after a refreshing 2.4-mile swim and an invigorating 112-mile bike ride, covering the distance from London to Sheffield in eight-and-a-half hours.

Charles-Barclay won the Ironman World Championship in 2023 and broke the record for the iconic Kona course in Hawaii, in which the best long-distance triathletes compete through crystal blue waters and black lava fields.

She will be back at Kona in a few weeks' time to try to regain the title, and the 31-year-old is in the form of her life after an emotional win at her home race in the London T100 last weekend.

Yet the road to this point has been a brutal one, after three years spent battling a series of mysterious injuries from rib fractures to muscle tears to a rip in her hip cartilage, after which she was told she might never race again.

She embarked on an investigation into her own anatomy, travelling to Red Bull's high performance centre in Salzburg to undergo testing. “We really couldn't find a reason,” she says. Finally, last year, she received an answer: a diagnosis for Celiac disease, the serious autoimmune condition triggered by gluten. “It was a lightbulb moment. Before a race I would carb load, so I would just eat pizza, pasta, all these things. I was basically poisoning myself before going into a big event.”

Charles-Barclay had often competed through the pain. She won the Ironman world title after tearing her calf muscle at the start of the marathon, which crept open like a zip so that by the time she finished 26 miles later, it was 14cm long.