Adventure Racing
He's battled Crohn’s disease his entire life and only narrowly dodged cancer. Now, this Aussie lifeguard is taking his second chance to one of the world’s toughest adventure races: Red Bull Defiance.
It’s a typically windy day on the St Kilda shore front in Melbourne, Australia, and Quinn Darragh is in “absolute agony”. To make it here, Quinn, a Bondi lifeguard by trade, had to swim 1.5 kilometres, cycle 180 kilometres, and run a literal marathon (that’s 42 kilometres to you and me). That’s just what an Ironman has to do, you see, to get to where he’s going.
The agony Quinn’s feeling isn’t just a result of the 220+ kilometres he’s put away, but the fact that he’s only recently had two neuromas (pinched nerves) cut out of his foot. “It felt like a knife going through my toes,” he laughs in retrospect. “It’s actually pretty common in ballerinas.”
As he draws closer to the finish line, the atmosphere intensifies. A smattering of onlookers gradually swells into hundreds. Subtle cheers and 'whoops' begin to increase in volume. The Ironman-branded barricades, banners, marquees and TV cameras all come in to view. He finally sees the red carpet, which signals the very last section of this, his first-ever Ironman.
And then, having seen him coming up the red carpet, his wife leans over the barricades and hands him his one-year-old son, Xavier. The effect on his morale was immediate. “All the pain just went away,” says Quinn, looking back on the day. “I carried him that last bit, over the finish line, and then they started telling me, ‘you are an Ironman’ and I realised I’d done it. And to have my wife and son there to see it…it was a phenomenal feeling.”
Cancer diagnosis
Quinn placed 201st out of 1853 participants in the event, logging a total time of nine hours and 12 minutes (the swim was cut short due to adverse weather, much to the dismay of the semi-amphibious lifeguard). But Quinn had to overcome much more than just 220 kilometres of endurance racing to reach that finish line.
Just 11 months prior, in fact, he was hallucinating on his bathroom floor, having sweated through three sets of clothes.
Quinn was suffering from a bowel blockage – an unexpected side-effect of the life-saving surgery he’d had just three days prior. “I honestly think I know what childbirth must feel like,” he tells us over the phone from his home in Bondi, Sydney. “The pain would just shoot through every part of my body – it was the most pain I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
Quinn, who’s lived with Crohn’s disease – a chronic inflammatory bowel disease for which there is no cure – almost his entire life, needed the surgery because doctors had discovered that his bowel was riddled with pre-cancerous cells. High-grade dysplasia, they call it. “I was losing a lot of blood when I was going to the toilet,” he says. “I was super fatigued and run down.”
Surgery or not?
Quinn’s doctor said that if they didn’t operate, his chances of getting cancer in the next few years were somewhere in the 100 percent region. He needed a total proctocolectomy, which involves removing every part of the large intestine, including the rectum, and he needed it now. “I was so depressed when I got the diagnosis,” he says.
“I’m thinking that this is the worst news ever. But the doctor goes, ‘No, it’s not. If these cells flick off and hit your liver, then we have a conversation about how long you have to live'”
The immediate fallout of the surgery would involve Quinn having to use a colostomy bag – not a particularly enticing prospect for a lifeguard, nor one that he ever grew accustomed to. “I’m thinking that this is the worst news ever," he says. “But the doctor goes, ‘No, it’s not. If these cells flick off and hit your liver, then we have a conversation about how long you have to live.”
The doubts
To make matters even more stressful, Quinn’s wife, Sheree, was around six months pregnant with Xavier, their first child. Quinn, who was 35 at the time, decided to put the surgery off at least until his son was born and, in the meantime, tried an alternative, natural diet to see if it helped.
It didn’t. In fact, when he went back to the doctor for another scope, the dysplasia was worse than ever.
Still, the idea of surgery and the prospect of living with a colostomy bag for the rest of his life – which was a possibility, albeit a slim one – wasn’t sitting well with Quinn. He asked his doctor if anyone in his position had ever said no to this operation. “There was one guy,” replied the doctor. “He’s dead now.”
"You having a colostomy bag isn’t going to change anything as far as I’m concerned. But if you don’t have this operation, and you die, that would really piss me off”
Living with Crohn’s
Quinn knew he would have to make this decision one day. When he was just 10 years old, he began rapidly dropping weight for no apparent reason. His mother thought he had cancer, but the children’s hospital found multiple ulcerations through his oesophagus and his small and large bowel.
He was diagnosed with Crohn’s, and told that he’d likely need an operation to have some or all of his digestive tract cut out at some point in his life. They just couldn’t say when.
He was already a fit and active kid – growing up in Bronte, Sydney, with two older brothers meant swimming and surfing were always on the agenda – but Quinn’s diagnosis meant health and fitness were about to become a bigger part of his life than ever before.
“When that diagnosis came, my doctor told my mum that I needed to become the strongest and fittest boy I could be,” he says. “I was encouraged to be fit because it helped keep the Crohn’s at bay. The doctor told us that being fit, generally, can really help combat the disease. That was all me and mum needed to know.”
Judgement time
While exercising, entering plenty of surf and swim competitions, and eating well minimised his symptoms for most of his adult life, in early 2012, when his dysplasia diagnosis came, it was time for Quinn to pay the piper.
Still, he was reluctant – at least until his wife told him what’s what. “Sheree was like, 'you having a colostomy bag isn’t going to change anything as far as I’m concerned,'” he recalls. “'But if you don’t have this operation, and you die, that would really piss me off.'”
Finally, the responsibility he felt for his new family – and his unflinching desire to not piss off his wife – won out, and the date for surgery was set. Aside from the ‘minor’ issue of the hallucinations and the blocked bowel (which was remedied during another three days in hospital post-op), Quinn came out the other side better for it – and with a couple of new life goals to boot.
One of those goals, which was his response to how fragile he’d felt over the past few weeks, was to compete in an Ironman. “I shouldn’t have even been thinking about something like an Ironman at the time,” he says. “But some of the boys from the beach were doing it, and it was 11 months away so I figured it’d give me enough time to prepare. I just wanted to have a different story for my son.”
Getting back to normal
All told, Quinn only had to live with the colostomy bag for a few months (“I didn’t tell any of the boys about it,” he says. “I was lifeguarding with a rash vest on”), and wasted no time in getting stuck in to training for what was going to be the toughest and most physical undertaking – aside from a charity boxing match a couple of years’ prior – of his life.
And we already know what happened next. “Being able to cross that finish line with Xavier was probably the proudest moment of my life,” he says. “It was just that feeling of bouncing back. And from that, that feeling of challenging yourself, and suffering through something like that, suddenly became really appealing to me.”
“It just reminds me how mortal we are. We have a certain period of time where we’re going to be strong and fit enough to challenge ourselves. So I just want to go out there and do that, feel good, and feel strong”
Life post-op is still no picnic in terms of his Crohn’s disease and Quinn still needs medication to help keep it in check, but he’s learned a few tricks along the way. He eats less frequently and bigger meals when he does, and he drinks a lot of protein shakes to help keep his energy levels up. He takes four high-dose turmeric tablets a day to help with inflammation, and is pretty big on apple cider vinegar, psyllium husk and vital greens.
All of that said, one frustrating side effect of his surgery is that having no large bowel means something as simple as the common cold can rip right through him and wipe him out for days. In late 2018, for example, he fell ill with a virus and lost and four kilograms in just three days. He felt as though he “belonged in a nursing home”, and he couldn’t even go for a brisk walk or climb a few stairs without feeling completely exhausted.
Stepping up for Red Bull Defiance
Instead of letting these experiences beat him into submission, Quinn turns them in to fuel to help him become as physically active and capable as possible. “It just reminds me how mortal we are,” he says. “We just have a certain period of time where we’re going to be strong and fit enough to challenge ourselves. So when I go to that place where I’m so weak I can barely lift myself off the floor, to finally feeling better again, I just want to go out there and challenge myself, feel good, and feel strong.”
Having caught the bug for long, difficult endurance events during that Ironman in 2013, it was only a matter of time before another event popped up on Quinn’s radar. And thanks his friend and Bondi lifeguard colleague of 15 years, Andrew ‘Reidy’ Reid, that event is Red Bull Defiance.
The two-day multi-sport event, coming to Australia for the first time ever in 2019, involves running, cycling and kayaking amidst the stunning surrounds of Queensland’s Mission beach.
It’s one of the toughest adventure races in the world – and Quinn, who’ll be entering in a team of two with Reidy (who already has two Red Bull Defiance events under his belt), is under no illusions when it comes to how hard it’s going to be. “I’ve never done a two-day stage race like this, and I’ve never done this amount of climbing, which is the other brutal and uniquely painful aspect of the race,” laughs Quinn. “Some of the people I’ve spoken to about it said it’s the most pain they’ve ever been in.”
Preparing for the event
In terms of preparing for the race, which flags off on August 31, Quinn already eats well by default to help keep his Crohn’s in check. When it comes to physical training, he’s swimming five kilometres three to four times a week and going for a run or a cycle four to five times a week on top of that. “I’m just trying to mix it up between long runs, mountain biking, road biking and swimming,” he says. “The more you suffer in training, the less you suffer in the race. I know that so well.”
With everything he’s been through over the last three decades, Quinn is now all-in on being the healthiest and strongest version of himself that he can be – not just because his condition demands it, but because he’s striving to set a good example of what’s possible to other Crohn’s sufferers out there too.
On an even simpler level, he just wants to show his kids (he and Sheree now have three – Xavier, Ryder and Scarlett) that regardless of what struggles they came up against, there’s always a way through. “If they ever have challenges in their life, and they will, I just want to be an example of how to respond to that,” he says. “If I can get through what I’ve been through, and still take on something like Defiance, then I feel like that’s a pretty good story for them to have about their old man.”
And after Defiance, Quinn will begin preparing to swim the English Channel. But that’s a story for another time.
Read more
Quinn Darragh and Andrew ‘Reidy’ Reid will flag off for Red Bull Defiance 2019 on August 31 in Mission Beach, Queensland. Visit the Red Bull Defiance homepage for more information and to enter your team.
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