An Accident Took His Legs. It Didn't Stop Billy Monger From Making IRONMAN History
Billy Monger had been racing cars for years when, at 17, an accident changed his life forever. Not only did he hop back on the race track, but he soon found himself building up his strength and endurance. Below, he shares how he went from an arduous recovery to breaking an IRONMAN record in the span of just a few years.
My dad bought me my first car when I was 2 years old, and he was keen for me to give it a go because it was a passion of his when he was younger. I got into go-karting when I was 6 years old. At 8, I started racing competitively, and won my first British championship when I was 10. The following year, I moved onto a world championship stage, and won races there, too. By the time I was 14, I moved up to car racing. At 16, I moved to Formula 4, an open-wheel racing car category for junior drivers. During my second season in April 2017, I got into an accident that led me to become a double amputee. I was only 17 years old.
I was in the hospital for about 5 weeks, and had 9 or 10 surgeries during that time. I also had some follow-up surgeries a few months later. The physical recovery was a long process. But just 11 weeks after my accident, I got back behind the wheel of a car on a race circuit with hand controls. It wasn’t the level of racing I was used to in Formula 4, but it was important for me to start again somewhere.
In late January 2018, I was back in a Formula 3 race car. I was determined to stay on the career trajectory I had before my accident. During this, I was still relying on walking aids. I didn’t walk on my prosthetics independently until halfway through the year.
Once I was finally walking on prosthetics, I worked hard to build back my strength. During the pandemic lockdown, my dad and I built a home gym, and I started to play around pushing myself more physically. In 2021 I walked, cycled, and kayaked 140 miles in four days to raise money for the British charity Comic Relief. I worked with a trainer to prepare, and it gave me something to work towards after COVID.
After that, I knew I needed another physical challenge to take on. My trainer came up with the idea to participate in the VinFast IRONMAN World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawai`i in October 2024–with the goal of breaking the world record for a double amputee.
I started all-out training for it in October 2023, a year before the race. It was a completely new training methodology for me. During my racing career, I did a lot of core and neck training and working on my coordination skills, all to maintain the level of fitness that you need to race a car. But for the IRONMAN, I needed to build up my aerobic endurance.
At first, it was a lot of swimming and a lot of cycling. In the early stages, I was training 8-10 hours a week. A lot of it was steady state exercise with a few intervals to keep my heart rate up. Although I had used swimming to help me immediately after my accident during recovery (since it requires zero weight-bearing), I was basically starting from scratch and had no technique. But I caught on.
My running prosthetics took a long time to get right and comfortable enough to take on such long distances. It was the last of the three disciplines I started, and I was finally able to integrate it into my training in February 2024. To qualify for Kona, I did three half IRONMANs, which helped me feel more comfortable with the process of getting ready for the big race. By that point, my training was up to 20 hours a week–close to 3 hours a day.
I worked with a nutritionist to help me fuel up for that much exercise. I was eating between 2,500-3,000 calories a day, which was a lot for me. (My body weight was between 121-132 pounds.) I had three main meals a day, with two snacks. I ate whole, nutritious foods–like fruit, protein yogurt and protein bars. If I was doing an intense training session I would have carbs–like gels or chews. Afterwards, I recovered with chocolate milk to get some more protein in.
Kona was not an easy race. I was stung by two jellyfish during the swimming portion, which wasn’t ideal. But the biking portion went really well–I was aiming for sub-8 hours, and it took me roughly 7.5 hours. During my longest training ride before the race, I had picked up a small hamstring strain–so I was concerned about it going in, but it held up.
That said, when I got off the bike, I was absolutely destroyed physically. I was about 9 hours in at that point already, and it suddenly hit me that I had to run a full marathon—which I had never done before in training or otherwise. It was a brutal awakening. But I managed to get my way through it, and the long hours of training paid off. I ended up breaking the world record for a double amputee by over two hours–finishing in 14:23:56.
Although I was pretty broken physically after, my body has recovered–and I'm ready to get back into a proper fitness routine. I still plan to swim, cycle and run, and get back in the gym to build back my strength. I’m always competitive and set high goals and expectations for myself because I feel like aiming high always brings the best out in me. I’ve loved the triathlon community and space. With triathletes, what you put in effort-wise day in and day out is what you get back in terms of results. So it’s quite a rewarding process.
I thought I had a busy life training and traveling the world before doing this IRONMAN, that I didn’t have enough hours in the day. But when you take something like this on and you make it a priority, you realize you just weren't structuring your day in the right way. It’s the small things that make a difference. Even though you’re not feeling up for it, you have to go tick it off. If you say you’re going to do something, make it a priority and get it done as quickly and as soon as you can, and stick to it.
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