My first memories seem to be of watching my father, wearing a white rugby jersey, crunching someone in a tackle into touch (out of the field of play for the non-rugby playing fraternity) on a dusty field in Botswana, just north of South Africa.
My second memory is that I wanted to be big and muscular, pretty unfortunate really when I was nick-named “Billy Bunter” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bunter) by my parents owing to my skinny legs and huge stomach as a baby; actually, til I was about 7 years old to be honest. Fortunately my huge stomach disappeared at some stage in my childhood and then I was just skinny without the stomach!

But back to the very beginning; I was born in Greenwich, London in October of 1974 to Pauline and Neil Boult, a couple of youngsters living in council housing struggling to make ends meet. My mum was a nurse, just getting over having my older brother 18 months previously, and my father a computer programmer working for the local council. My brother, Oliver (who I never got along with until a couple of years ago), was to play a big part in my desire to compete at everything that I came across for the rest of my life, from tiddlywinks to triathlon… but more about that later.

My mum had a really tough upbringing; travelling around the world with her Father (who was in the British army, a nasty abusive bugger) and an Irish Catholic mother who would have won the gold medal in consecutive Olympics had the “placing guilt” event ever made the starting line-up! Mum’s upbringing would have a major impact on the family as a whole and a lot the decisions she made throughout the course of our lives can be traced back to her childhood.

Mum was my hero growing up and is now my best friend and confidant; without her support I don’t think I would have achieved a lot of what I did. A defining moment later in my life was having her there at the finish line as I completed my first (and so far only) Ironman event in Switzerland in ’98, a memory I will always cherish… she also had to help me walk up and down the stairs to the apartment we had rented in Zurich for the next 4 days when my hips and knees felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to them!

With her background of travelling the world as a youngster, mum was aware that there was more to life than a crappy council house in London trying to keep the heating going; she started looking at newspapers for jobs around the world and one day saw an advert that had been posted by the Botswana government. They were looking for programmers for some new systems they were putting in and, after applying on my dad’s behalf, he got the job. So, at 9 months old, I was bundled up with the rest of their belongings and they got on the next boat leaving from London to Africa. To think if she hadn’t been brave enough to make this decision I could have grown up in London and been a “proppa geeza, innit!”.

To Africa and beyond… To be continued.