Triathlon: Ex-Bay GP keen to tri until she's 100

Dr Lauren Roche creates time from her hectic GP practice in Whangarei to write and train as a triathlete. Photo / Darryl Carey

It was the book of Hastings mother Tracey Richardson that inspired Dr Lauren Roche to venture into the daunting domain of triathlons.

"I was overweight, tired and not very athletic," says Roche, a former Hawke's Bay general practitioner who, to this day, does ironman events while living and practising medicine in Whangarei.

Richardson wrote the book, Going The Distance, a motivational autobiography of a morbidly obese mother of two children with cystic fibrosis.

Clinically depressed, Richardson embarked on a two-year physical and mental journey to find some value and purpose in life.

She completed the gruelling Ironman New Zealand triathlon - a 3.8km swim, 180km cycle and 42km run before tackling the Hawaii Ironman while simultaneously raising the profile of cystic fibrosis.

Roche, an author in her own right of best-selling Bent Not Broken and Life on the Line, embarked on her own odyssey in 2006 in a sport that had hit fever pitch in the Bay.

"I needed to lose weight. I was over 100kg and not a good role model for my patients," says the GP who later met Richardson in person while training with coach Ken Maclaren.

She commends Maclaren for his input because it isn't easy to mentor adults, including her.

"I didn't like to be told off when I was not fit enough a lot of times," she says with a chuckle.

The three disciplines of triathlon have posed myriad challenges but swimming was her biggest mental hurdle.

"I could do only three strokes when I started and six weeks before it [the Taupo Ironman] it was very hard to swim so I couldn't have done it without him."

Roche conquered Ironman Taupo in 2007 at the age of 46 and then returned for another in 2012 but a weather bomb that year, amid controversy, prompted organisers to reduce it to a Half Ironman for safety reasons.

She was going to compete this year but her partner, Graham Allen, got ill in the middle of last year.

"He's been a lot better so I'll do it next year in Taupo."

Ironman Melbourne's "coming up and looking good so that's not too far either".

Her training regime is a mixed bag these days, including boxing pads, CrossFit twice a week, as well as swimming, biking and running.

She's healthier, fitter, wards off stress and an even better role model for people around her.

"It's good for mental health and there's less depression and anxiety," says the Wellington-born GP, who sports tattoos.

So how long will Roche keep it going?

"Until I'm 100. I want to be older than Garth Barfoot, the legendary Ironman," she says of the 78-year-old Kiwi businessman who is part of the Barfoot & Thompson real estate empire.

Barfoot, who has an autobiography, On The Move, completed his maiden triathlon at 56, doggie-paddling the swim leg and riding on a borrowed bike.

However, he has more than 30 triathlons to his credit around the world and holds the ITU long-distance world record for his age group.

Roche adheres to the simple philosophy of dieting, eating well, sleeping "and drink little".

Her autobiography is the stuff Hollywood movies are made of.

In her 53 years of playing the game of life, she has been a prostitute, a stripper and a stowaway.

She has seen the inside walls of a prison, grappled with the demons of depression and shrugged off the shackles of bankruptcy.

Violence and sexual abuse marred her childhood but she went on to become a mother of two boys, Christopher, 36, and Paul, 29.

Her sons are out of bounds during the interview.

It's well documented that she befittingly arrived on earth to the pomp and ceremony of firecrackers and bonfires on Guy Fawke's Day in 1961.

She is the child of parents who were good people but under-educated, fond of a drink and ill-equipped to rear children.

Dr Lauren Roche with Winnie the Poodle, a 7-year-old dog a patient bred and sold to her in Napier. PHOTO/Darryl Carey

The parents split up after moving to Australia with two of her sisters when she was six.

School truancy prevailed and a chain of violence had kicked in. It began with her mother's partner, Stretch, and trickled down to the six children, who in turn were not only mean to each other, but to animals as well.

She was a victim of sexual abuse to Stretch's father and brother at 8, but found refuge with her grandparents in Wellington.

Her mother was in and out of Porirua Hospital with drug and alcohol abuse before fatally overdosing at the age of 32.

Roche found work cleaning corridors at Wellington Hospital before stowing away to the US on a ship at 16.

She hitch-hiked for three months but one day "got into the wrong car" and was raped.

After three weeks in a Dallas County jail on immigration charges, she was deported home.

A stint at a takeaway joint gave way to three years of prostitution at an inner-city massage parlour in Wellington.

She became the first pregnant teenage G-string-clad fire eater and even tried unsuccessfully to score a job as an embalmer in a funeral parlour.

Petrified and fearing she'd never escape the jaws of the world's oldest profession, it took an overdose for Roche to receive treatment for depression.

At 20 she returned to high school for three years before making the cut for medical school in her second attempt.

The teenager who scrubbed the Wellington Hospital corridors was a few years later running the gauntlet as a fully-fledged doctor.

But the switch from the red-light district to a remarkable white-collar precinct didn't quell her demons.

A few years later as a GP at Paraparaumu, Roche found herself popping up to 100 sleeping pills a day to battle insomnia.

Bankruptcy followed but she put herself under intense self-cross examination to pen Bent Not Broken in 1999.

She moved from Palmerston North to the Bay for space, quiet and better climes. She had built a house in Poraiti where she did more writing.

Life on the Line was published in 2001.

She practised medicine at The Doctors in Hastings, the Shakespeare Road Clinic (Napier), Greendale Medical Centre (Napier) as well as Hastings Girls' High School and William Colenso College.

Dwelling on the past is no longer her style. She harbours no regrets and has moved on a sobering prescription of realism to become the architect of her own success or demise.

"You can't change the past. Even the gods can't do that because the Greeks tell us that."

She accepts some of her misfortunes in life were self-induced and she has to persevere with that now.

"I made some poor choices in life, more than once, but not again.

"It opened my eyes and, in some cases, I had them open to what went on so I'm acting on that."

She has no plans for writing any more autobiographies, although she is "playing around with another book".

She struggles to describe the latest literary work except to say it's motivational and pertaining to skills she has gleaned.

How does a GP find time to train and write?

"I make time - from 100 hours a week to 32 hours for more balance and it's healthier."

Things she loves doing include spending time with "Winnie the Poodle", a 7-year-old dog a patient in Napier bred and sold to her before she left in 2008.

Roche still thinks the Bay is distinctly different and ideal for biking.

"I miss some of the friends I've made and I hope to catch up with them some day."

She relishes her affiliation with the Bay, visiting once a year "to do a little job" for the police through its Camp Blue Wahine Toa campaign for young women who are victims of crime.

"I have been an after-dinner speaker for about a decade."

Northland is her home now and Tutukaka Coast, which takes in panoramic views of the ocean, is where her heart is.

"These days I have a nice quiet life close to the beach.

"I'm steadily moving north. Soon I'll be in Fiji, chasing the sun," she says with a laugh.