In 2013, Shirin Gerami became the first woman to represent Iran internationally in the triathlon. This alone says something about her character: she is brave, ambitious, and passionate. But ultimately her story illustrates more than just passion for sport and competition; it is a story of ishq, which is, in Gerami’s words ,“a very powerful word in Farsi”, combining “the highest sense of love and passion together.” And this story of ishq, unexpectedly, became bound up with my own.
Seven months ago, I received a call from my mum telling me that my dad had had a heart attack and died. I was living in Jordan and immediately I began searching for the next flight home.
On the plane, I began to write about my father – a piece of writing I would later read at his funeral. It may seem strange to begin writing a eulogy so quickly, but somehow even in that state of shock I found an intense clarity, and I knew exactly what I wanted to say: that my father lived his life for love.
Grief revealed to Dad the full strength of love. His father died prematurely and Dad would always remember the last loving caress his parents shared. In this, he realised the absolute bravery it takes to love another person in full knowledge that you can lose them.
This realisation changed his life; my dad was a Catholic priest, and after witnessing his mother’s grief he began viewing his celibacy as cowardice. He left the Catholic priesthood. He met my mother, confident that his love for her posed no conflict with his love for God or his role as a vicar.
After the funeral Shirin, who had been a student at St Chad’s College, Durham, when my dad was the Principal there, contacted me. She had read the eulogy and was struck by how far his attitude towards love and grief reflected hers. Shirin’s own father died when she was nine. We were keen to talk to each other further and I asked if she wanted to meet.
Today, in Taylor’s on St Giles’, we smile at each other over our food and talk about her studying PPE, living out in a student house, her memories of my father – dodging the issues somewhat. I had watched a TEDx talk in which Gerami said that an attack she experienced aged 18 was the beginning of her journey towards the triathlon.
I ask about this. She explains that she and her friends impulsively decided to hike the Alborz mountains from Tehran to the Caspian Sea. Shirin describes how she “remember[s] the fourth night ever so clearly, completely and utterly overfl owing with a sense of love and appreciation; that immense sense of gratitude to be alive.”
But on the fifth night they were attacked by a group of men. “I really thought I was going to die that night,” Shirin tells me. “The experience still affects me today, helping shape who I am and what I do.”
She looks down at her food: it is clear that this is a painful subject. “After this, you still went on another adventure to Antarctica. Was that more difficult to do in light of what happened?” I ask.
“I was in pieces,” she replies. Soon after this she was diagnosed with a mental illness. She did not agree with the diagnosis, but was told that she had to take medication if she wanted to receive further help.
But the pills did not help; they made her worse. She wrote to the organisers of the trip, asking to drop out as she did not think she was mentally healthy enough. But the trip’s leaders persuaded her. Again, Gerami set out on an adventure. Once en route, however, she became ill and had to stay behind in her tent alone.
“That time still feels an eternity,” she says to me. Eventually, she recovered enough to leave her tent. As she crawled out, “I felt the warmth and the rays of the sun on my skin. It warmed me up from the core of my being. It set the beautiful landscape alight, and I realised that the universe doesn’t judge.”
She poured the pills into the sea.
Of course, trauma is not solved in an instant, but a process of healing was underway. That year she went to university in Durham and it was there that she found triathlon. It let her be “back in nature, doing something physically demanding”. It filled her with “selfconfidence; it was, and is, therapeutic and empowering.”
Gerami wanted to get permission to represent Iran in triathlon races. Permission had not been granted to Iranian women to race, previously. At this point, she looks up at me with a wry smile: “What does challenge mean?” she asks. Clearly she would never have backed down.
The process of getting permission to compete took six months. “It made me question everything,” she says. “Everyone was saying no. I had so many near yeses but they always ended in no. “But I had a ray of hope. Everyone was telling me to stop, but where there’s a will there’s a way…I arrived in London just before the competition and I still had no permission. I thought, ‘Let’s just crawl into bed.’ But then I thought to myself: there’s one last chance of staying positive, of not giving up.”
Permission from the Iranian government arrived that day and she competed. I ask her if this is something she wants to see more Iranian women involved in. “Of course,” she replies, explaining that she wants other women and girls to benefi t from the therapy and empowerment that sports can provide.
“No one’s willing to hear them, believe them,” she says. “This was the tool I had as therapy. It’s enlightening, empowering.”
After recounting these struggles, Shirin suddenly reiterates the philosophy that had connected us: that the very real pain caused by losing her father, being attacked, and nearly being prevented from competing in the sport she loves due to her gender had ultimately only strengthened her faith in ishq – her faith that love coexists alongside and within the pain.
As I was walking from Taylor’s back to my class, I thought about how, a few days before my father died, as part of a sermon for a friend’s wedding, he had written, “Life is ultimately all about love; life must ultimately be about love; if it’s not about love… well, it’s not about anything.”
This is the truth by which my father lived, and the truth by which Gerami works to bring the triathlon to others. This is ishq.
