Faces of Nice Part 3: Chasing Mission Impossible
Photos: Kevin Mackinnon
Everyone racing at the IRONMAN World Championship in Nice this weekend (or at any triathlon, for that matter) has a reason they’re doing it. They have their why. For some, it’s about reaching their physical and mental limits. For others, it’s to cross an item off their bucket list. For the UK’s Luke Ambler, it’s not really about himself at all. For Ambler, the IRONMAN World Championship is a chance to show people that even a seemingly insurmountable hurdle can be overcome.
This is all part of a bigger cause in ANDYSMANCLUB, a men’s mental health charity that Ambler started after his brother-in-law, Andrew Roberts, died by suicide in 2016. Ambler launched ANDYSMANCLUB alongside his mother-in-law (Andrew’s mom), not long after Roberts’s passing, and what began as a single group of nine men chatting has grown to a massive peer-support program with more than 300 groups and over 6,000 attendees every week around the UK.
The Path to ANDYSMANCLUB
When Ambler was eight years old, his parents got a divorce. Soon after, his mother was in a car accident that left her with serious brain damage. All of this was understandably too much for the young Ambler, and he turned to food as a source of comfort. As he gained weight, his schoolmates bullied him, but his life changed when his father suggested he try using sport as a new, different coping mechanism.
Ambler started playing rugby, and this is when he found his passion. He went on to become a professional in 2008 and spent his career playing on various teams in the UK (including for his hometown club of Halifax, where he closed out his time as a pro). Ambler also played internationally, representing Ireland (he is of Irish descent and therefore was permitted to play for the Irish team) between 2009 and 2016 — a run that included a selection for the 2013 Rugby World Cup.
Ambler didn’t travel to Nice alone — his family and friends are here to cheer him on this weekend.
Ambler retired from professional rugby in 2016 — the same year his brother-in-law passed away.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “Back then, nine years ago now, I didn’t know anything about suicide.”
Ambler says he had never thought much about the concept of suicide, and he didn’t know anyone who had attempted it or ever talked about it with him.
“It hit the family really hard,” he says.
Looking to make sense of the loss of Roberts — and to help other men in his position so they wouldn’t follow through with taking their own lives — Ambler decided to form a support group.
“I was sat in a coffee shop and I had this idea,” Ambler says. “I thought wouldn’t it be good if we could get guys up here, we’ll go use sports hall, we’ll play some sports, maybe we have a chat after.”
That was the key, he thought. The chatting. Roberts never talked about his struggles, so Ambler thought it “might work” if he could get other men to open up about theirs.
“That first night, everyone told me no one would turn up,” Ambler says. “Blokes don’t turn up to stuff like this.”
But nine men did show up. Nine men, Ambler says, who didn’t fit the image he had in his head of individuals who are suffering from mental health struggles.
“I had this idea of suicidal people as people in straight jackets,” Ambler says, acknowledging that he would “probably be told off” for saying something like that nowadays. “But that’s what I thought.”
The men all seemed like they had fine lives, steady jobs and that they had things under control.
“But everyone struggles,” Ambler says.
Thinking back on that first night, he recalls holding a foam ball and picking at it nervously. One of the men looked at him, looked at the ball and told him to toss it over.
“I chucked him the ball and he just opened up about losing his son,” Ambler says. “Then he passed it to someone else and then they tossed it to another guy.”
Ambler may have been the one to come up with the idea of a peer-support group, but he was still shocked at how quickly these men opened up to one another. He realized that, once they were in the room, they were eager to talk about the things they were dealing with in their lives.
After that, the group grew each week. Soon enough, people were asking him to start a group in other towns and cities around the UK.
“It was like, ‘Let’s just see what we can do,'” he says. “Now, we’re nine years old and we’re 320 clubs deep.”
Even with such a widespread movement, Ambler says there is still a long way to go, and getting to the place he wants to be with ANDYSMANCLUB includes doing initiatives like one he has dubbed “Mission Impossible,” a challenge he is completing with his friend, Jonny Mason.
Mission Impossible
The challenge was simple in theory: Ambler and Mason decided they would race all five IRONMAN and 70.3 events in the UK in 2025. Of course, theory is much different from reality, so there was very little that was simple about this challenge.
Mission Impossible kicked off in June with 70.3 Bolton, followed by 70.3 Swansea a little over a month later, then IRONMAN Leeds two weeks after that. They were supposed to race 70.3 Weymouth this weekend, but when IRONMAN reached out and asked if they would like to compete in Nice as part of the ambassador program, the pair decided they couldn’t turn it down.
The already brutal challenge grew by 70.3 miles, making it even more difficult, and now Ambler and Mason will be racing full-distance events on back-to-back weekends, as IRONMAN Wales is on Sept. 21. It is going to be a very difficult way to close out the challenge, but that’s what it’s all about for Ambler and Mason.
“The pain that you feel in the middle of an IRONMAN, that’s going to be gone tomorrow,” Ambler says.
He says he realizes that mental health struggles are much more long-lasting than the pain of an IRONMAN, but he also says he knows that even the worst situations “will pass, you just have to believe.”
“What we’re trying to do with this is to give people hope,” he says. “Hope is the belief that tomorrow can be better than today.”
That is going to be a helpful mantra for Ambler and Mason (and anyone else racing) in Nice. The IRONMAN World Championship will be far from easy to complete, but they have both been through tough times — on and off the race course — before, and they’ll know how to navigate the struggles when they come their way on Sunday.
To learn more about ANDYSMANCLUB and Mission Impossible, click here.
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