Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Carol knew Dave from his past visits to Hawaii for open-water swims. She had a bit of a crush on him and had lost her reason in the excitement of the moment. Dave had just turned 26.

  “Retire?” Dave said. “I’m just getting started!”

  Word of Dave’s stunning achievement spread rapidly through the burgeoning endurance subculture in California and beyond, and ABC’s airing of its Iron Man coverage made him an instant idol to thousands more. Somewhere in all of this, he acquired a nickname. First it was “the Iron Man.” Then just “the Man.”

  Dave had hoped that winning Iron Man would open a door, and it did. Aspiring triathletes found his address and phone number and contacted him seeking advice and training plans. Born teacher that he was, and a willing responder to the flattery of being approached as an authority, Dave doled out his expertise freely at first. Then he started charging: $150 to $275 per one-year plan. He went into business under the name Dave Scott Triathlon Training and soon expanded from coaching into daylong clinics. Verne, always watchful for ways to share in his children’s passions, organized a triathlon in Davis.

  Sponsors came calling. Nike, Anheuser-Busch, Peak Performance vitamins, and helmet maker Bell exchanged cash for the rights to Dave’s name and image.

  In the summer of 1980 Dave found himself sitting in the family room of his parents’ home, talking with Verne and Dot about what a whirlwind the past few months had been and where it all might lead.

  “You know, you don’t have to do that crazy race again,” said Verne, who may have still had a vestige of hope that he could steer his son toward a more intellectual profession than ultraendurance racing.

  “Well, I’m going to,” Dave said.

  The Man was nothing if not his own man.

  In due time Verne would come to appreciate the full measure of what his son had found in Ironman. Not in triathlon generally but in that specific event, with its crazy distances, its extreme conditions, its mystique.

  “There’s no other race that draws out my physical talents as this one does,” Dave told ABC before his 1989 showdown with Mark Allen.

  Dave was not the fastest guy over short distances, but he seemed able to sustain his maximum speed almost indefinitely. Heat did not slow him down, as it was supposed to. And most importantly, at the end Dave could, as he said, “pound it out with anyone”—because his greatest athletic ability was his inability to quit.

  Beyond matching up ideally with Dave’s talents, Ironman also made his thirty-hours-a-week workout habit something other than freakishly pointless. Suddenly it was perfectly rational. Ironman actually rewarded working harder than anyone else alive. That was precisely how you won it. And Dave set about working harder than he ever had before as he prepared to defend his Ironman title.

  TRIATHLON TRAINING METHODS had not been normalized when Dave won his first Ironman, and even to the extent that the sport’s earliest pioneers had figured out what seemed to work, Dave did not care to follow anyone else’s lead. So when he began training to defend his title, he simply continued the experiment he had started the previous summer. He discovered that about 30,000 yards of swimming, 400 miles of cycling, and 70 miles of running per week, plus four hard weight lifting sessions, were his limit. If he pushed any further, he broke down.

  Dave did most of his training alone. Each workout was a private game, like his old seventh grade game of racing the bus to school. Games provided the telos that enabled Dave to pursue his mission of “seeing what he could do.” To continually redefine his physical limits Dave could not just jump into the pool or hop onto his bike or lace up his running shoes and try hard. He needed a concrete challenge, a clear representation of his present limit, to go after. There had to be some way he could win every single swim, ride, and run he did. This approach was woven into the fabric of his nature.

  There wasn’t much variety in these games. Any other athlete, no matter how driven, would have found Dave’s training routine dizzyingly monotonous. There weren’t all that many places to ride and run in Davis anyway, but Dave waved off whatever diversity there was in favor of covering the same routes over and over again, day after day, month after month, and ultimately year after year. By October 1989, when his climactic Ironman duel with Mark Allen occurred, Dave had ridden his favorite among a handful of cycling routes, an out-and-back on Highway 31 to the hills east of Davis, some 3,000 times.

  Millions of laps in the pool in his formative years had left Dave with no need for variety or scenic distractions in workouts. Endless repetition in training allowed him to monitor progress easily and precisely. All Dave wanted from his bike rides and runs were the same things the pool gave him: the structure and measurability required to play the simple game of improving his times.

  Dave memorized the distance of every ride, and key segments of every ride, and memorized his best time for every ride and key segment so he could chase these standards repeatedly in his pursuit of perfection. His favorite game was time trialing the last twelve-and-a-half-mile segment of the ride that took him to Lake Berryessa and back. If asked today what his best time for that stretch of road was, he would gladly supply the number without a moment’s hesitation: 26:50.

  On those rare occasions when he rode or ran with another person (and then only one, typically), the partner became the focus of the game. Among the few athletes Dave permitted to join him on rides with any regularity was Mike Norton, who really had no business training with Dave because he was nowhere near the same level as an athlete. But that disparity was not a problem that the right game couldn’t solve. During a long out-and-back ride, for example, Dave might propose, after making some silent calculations, that Mike turn around at the next crossroads, and then he would continue for another three miles before reversing his own direction and trying to catch Mike before he got home.

  Although Mike Norton allowed Dave to dictate the games they played in their occasional shared workouts, most other athletes, and especially Dave’s fellow elite athletes, resisted such unilateral control, so Dave avoided them—which was as easy as staying put in Davis, where there were no other pros.

  He did entertain the occasional visit from an elite racer living within driving distance of Davis. Mike Pigg, who hailed from Arcata, among the redwoods of Humboldt County, visited twice.

  Pigg had been taking classes at a community college and working part time as a mechanic’s assistant for a trucking company when he saw Dave Scott win Ironman on Wide World of Sports and was inspired to give triathlon a try. He was still fairly new to the sport and as much Dave’s fan as his peer when he convinced Dave to let him come to Davis for a week of training. Dave was surprised by Pigg’s appetite, which rivaled his own. Before their first ride together Pigg poured three kinds of cereal into a mixing bowl and emptied it in minutes.

  Pigg was no less Dave’s match on the bike. On their longest ride together Dave found himself hanging on to Pigg’s back wheel by a thread, concentrating so completely on survival that he missed a turn. By the time he discovered his mistake they were far from home and badly in need of energy. They stopped at a convenience store, where Pigg inhaled a box of Ding Dongs and a bottle of chocolate milk and Dave devoured a loaf of bread. The last leg of their 130-mile expedition was completed in the dark.

  Pigg left after four days. Both men were exhausted. Dave simply couldn’t figure out how to train with Pigg without racing him. Although the two men remained friends and mutual admirers, years would pass before Pigg returned to Davis.

  WHILE TRAINING for the 1981 Ironman Dave developed a pain in his knee while running. His response was to continue running every day. The pain worsened. Dave kept running. Soon he couldn’t run at all, or even walk without pain. Now Dave was forced to rest. He took a few days off, but the pain persisted. His mood turned dark, as it always did when he was deprived of physical exertion. But this time his disappointment turned to apathy. He stopped caring—or seemed to. Dave’s knee healed eventually, but he did not resume training. Inst
ead he sat all day in a beanbag chair inside his apartment. He binged on foods he normally avoided. Within a month he had gained fifteen pounds.

  Dave’s girlfriend, who shared his apartment, became concerned. Although she had first known Dave only as a shirtless, golden-skinned man running past her dorm window, Linda Buchanan, then a member of the UC-Davis swim team, had joined Dave’s swim club after her graduation and had soon become his sweetheart, roommate, and a top triathlete herself. From her own experience as an athlete she understood the frustration of setbacks in training, but the meltdown she was witnessing in Dave was something else entirely. She tried to cheer him up at first, but he didn’t want that, so she let him be and simply rode out the storm beside him, trusting that whatever demon had a hold on him would let go eventually. Only after the 1981 Ironman took place without Dave did the storm clouds disperse.

  Months later Dave was hit with another injury, and again he plunged into the slough of despond. Linda rode out this second dark period as gamely as she had the first, but after a third episode she dumped the most eligible bachelor in Davis and moved to San Diego. It wasn’t that she was fed up with Dave’s unpredictability. In fact, Linda had no idea why she had left Dave and could not articulate a clear reason when he beseeched her for an explanation. Years would pass before Linda would figure out that dashing, exciting, kind, charismatic Dave Scott did not satisfy her because what she really needed was the love of a beautiful, exciting, kind, charismatic woman.

  Dave went into a tailspin. Prone to terrible insomnia during periods of stress, he slept poorly. Although uninjured, he stopped training. He returned to the beanbag chair and went back to bingeing. His friends did what little they could to get him going again, but in vain. Dave did manage to make a trip to Bass Lake, California, to compete in a triathlon he was obligated to race for his sponsors, but he would have been better off staying home. He finished twenty-seventh, getting his ass handed to him by second-rate pros and amateurs who would forever after be able to say, “I beat Dave Scott.”

  It was that humiliation and the mockery inspired by his bad showing—which, of course, reached his ears eventually—that finally jolted Dave out of his funk and got him back on track. Like other perfectionists, Dave never tired of criticizing himself, but he was acutely sensitive to criticism from others—which is to say he fed off it.

  On the rebound from Linda Buchanan, Dave plucked another comely young swimmer from the pool, his future wife, Anna Pettis. One day they happened to find themselves in neighboring lanes of the Davis Civic Center pool. By coincidence, they also completed their separate workouts at the same time and left the building together. They stepped outside into a downpour. Dave, who’d had his eye on Anna for a while, offered her a ride home. She was a bundle of nerves the whole way, because Dave was a local hero, larger than life, and because he was 29 and she was 21, and because Dave was flirting with her and Anna thought he was still seeing Linda. When they reached her building, Dave asked her out. Afraid to say no, she said yes, only later finding out that Dave was, in fact, single.

  No sooner had Anna fallen for Dave’s looks, charm, and celebrity than Dave hit another bump in the road, and she encountered his vulnerable side. She tried everything under the sun, from encouragement to guilt trips, to coax him out the door during these low moments. When the most obvious measures failed, she got creative. She bought a bike and rode it with him but gave that up after crashing and breaking a collarbone. When creative measures failed, she tried the absurd. More than once Anna offered to drive her car ahead of Dave, blaring motivational music while he rode his bike. But for all her efforts, she never found any solution that really worked.

  The trigger for one of these downswings could be anything from stress in a relationship to an injury to simple burnout from his frenzied training highs. It was hard to predict, but Anna did her best. She developed antennae with exquisite sensitivity to early warning signs of coming trouble. But even when she foresaw rough patches on Dave’s road, she could not steer him around them. Dave had to go through them on his own, and Anna took comfort in knowing that he always came out the other side eventually.

  Anna could no more explain Dave’s struggle than cure it. Perhaps, she speculated, his energy and will were just too strong for his body, like an engine too powerful for its supporting chassis. His drive to see what he could do seemed to guzzle all his resources and then demand more, leaving him defenseless on many fronts. Dave was like a human dragster, precariously combining extreme power and structural lightness for maximum speed, hence as likely to explode as to go really fast when the lights turned green.

  Dave’s perfectionism was also mixed up in his pattern of ups and downs. The kinds of small setbacks and interruptions to his training that other people would roll right over drove him around the bend. He was like a straight-A student who, when he gets a B+ on a quiz, says, “To hell with it!” and drops out of school.

  Naturally, as a perfectionist, Dave likely hated himself for going off the rails. So he punished himself by going even farther off the rails.

  During one dark period Dave told Scott Molina that he had just eaten eleven PowerBars in a sitting instead of working out.

  “What are you doing?” Molina told him. “You’re punishing yourself—for what? You’re just making yourself more miserable!”

  Although Dave was able to hide most of his weakest moments from Scott Molina and his other competitors by holing up in Davis, he never hid his personal struggles from the public. On the contrary, he seemed compelled to expose his vulnerabilities openly in the media. He told a Sports Illustrated writer about “personal troubles” that had laid him low lately. He seemingly mistook a CBS cameraman for a therapist during the bike leg of the 1983 Kauai Loves You Triathlon, confessing his lovelorn, lonely state to America. Later the same year he told an ABC reporter, “There are periods when I like to sit in my beanbag chair and let the days go by.” And in his 1986 book, Dave Scott’s Triathlon Training, Dave admitted to having “battled emotional problems.”

  Despite all of this, Dave’s image as “an unshakable monolith and a single-minded endurance maniac” (as one journalist described him) persisted. How? Because of Ironman. After the setbacks that followed his game-changing Ironman victory in 1980, Dave somehow always—almost always—managed to pull himself together for the only race that really mattered. His awe-inspiring October triumphs would obliterate all memory of his twenty-seventh place finishes at short triathlons in June.

  Ironman would become the balance point of Dave’s dynamic equilibrium. Year after year he would go as far off the rails as he could possibly go without flushing any chance of winning Ironman; then he would pull himself together to salvage his claim to the title that had become his identity. He was like a procrastinating genius who doesn’t read a book all semester and then crams like mad in the last week before exams, rallying at just the point where he must rely on the full scope of his genius to pass every test.

  Dave typically wallowed until he was written off—until he was able to grab on to some sign of dismissal that enraged him, putting him in that happy place of fury, discovered during his 127-mile Ironman rehearsal, where he was able to work harder and suffer more than any other athlete could. When he arrived on the starting line in Kona, it did not matter how badly Dave had embarrassed himself at races earlier in the season or what sorts of rumors about his mental state had circulated—everyone else was scared shitless of him because they remembered what he had done to them the previous year after similar embarrassments and rumors.

  He didn’t always inspire such fear, though. Dave’s jaw-dropping one-hour victory in the 1980 Ironman gave him a lot of slack to waste afterward, but his legend would not have survived if he had not eventually followed up with further feats of fortitude—and he wasted every inch of that slack. After getting injured and going off the rails in the summer of 1980, Dave did not start the 1981 Ironman, which John Howard won. The next summer the same pattern was repeated. This time Da
ve got back on track in time to cram for the 1982 Ironman but not in time to attain peak fitness. The new golden boy of triathlon, Scott Tinley, passed Dave early in the run and relegated the Man to second place, breaking his course record in the process.

  Ironman was then moved from February to October. Dave prepared for the October 1982 Ironman as just one of five one-time winners of the race. He was in danger of becoming a historical footnote. Dave felt a consuming need to win again. His usual competitive anger was intensified by a terrible fear of irrelevance as he drove his body through the heat and wind of another Davis summer toward vengeance in his third Ironman—which just happened to be Mark Allen’s first.

  CHAPTER 3

  GET A GRIP

  Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.

  —HORACE SMITH

  Mark Allen was born in a shack in Glendale, California. The shack stood in the backyard of a house whose owner rented it to Mark’s struggling parents. Mark’s father, Ken Allen, whose friends called him by his unusual middle name, Space, would later become an ob-gyn, but in January 1958 he was still a poorly paid medical lab technician who lacked any special skills that might have helped him bring his first child safely into the world. Nevertheless, baby Mark arrived healthy. Exceptionally healthy.

  Three years after Mark’s arrival a second son, David, was born to Space and his wife, Sharon, also at home. A few months later they took the infant to the hospital, worried about David’s development. The doctor ran some tests. He returned to the room where they waited wearing an expression that stopped their breath.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Mr. and Mrs. Allen,” he said.

  David had Down syndrome. Some cases are more severe than others, and David’s was very severe. Space and Sharon cared for him at home until he was 10 years old, by which time they had a third son, Gary. Then they made the heartbreaking decision to place David in an institution, where he has remained ever since.