After crossing the finish line behind Mark, Dale approached him and shook his hand. Mark was still hyperventilating, but he was ecstatic in spite of his exhaustion. Having congratulated Mark, Dale walked away in search of friends and told them about his race.
“I think I just got beat by the guy who’s going to be the greatest triathlete ever,” he said.
MARK AND DALE struck up a friendship after their duel. They didn’t train much together, but they sometimes hooked up for a bite to eat. Dale had no clue how adrift Mark had been before the moment of their meeting, but he could plainly see how excited he was about triathlon. He seemed reborn, almost manic in his blind optimism for a wide-open future, like an infatuated new lover or a freshly baptized believer.
“I really found what I’m supposed to be doing,” Mark told Dale more than once, over tacos. “It’s the right thing for me. I know it.”
Mark told his dad the same thing in their next call. He shared the results of that talk with Dale during another cheap Mexican dinner. More than a few young men and women were having similar conversations with their parents at that time, and Mark’s had gone no better than most.
“Are you saying this is what you’re supposed to be doing as a job?” Space had asked, incredulous.
“Well, yeah, maybe.”
“But you haven’t done anything. You haven’t won anything.”
“No, but I’ve been right up there with the big dogs. Dad . . . ”
Silence.
IN 1982 SAN DIEGO was the center of the triathlon universe. Most of the top talents who weren’t there already when the triathlon bug bit them moved to “America’s Finest City” sooner or later. Nearly every bright light in the young sport’s constellation of stars, with the notable exception of Dave Scott, called San Diego home. As a fanatical young triathlete with tremendous promise, Mark was quickly drawn into the orbit of San Diego’s elite endurance set. He soon found himself sharing lanes with Scott Tinley, Julie Moss, and other big names at the UCSD pool and trading pulls with them on weekly group rides along the Pacific Coast Highway.
One morning Mark rode through Otay Lakes, an area of suffocating inland heat and relentlessly rolling hills south of San Diego, with Scott Tinley and Murphy Reinschreiber, the very guy who had beaten Dave Scott in twelve out of thirteen races at the 1966 California State Fair Swim Meet. Mark dropped his partners repeatedly throughout the long ride. About three hours into the ordeal, Tinley noticed something about Mark’s hands.
The standard hand position on a high-performance road bike is at the outer sides of the top portion of the handlebar, right next to the brake levers. Cyclists typically drop their hands into the bullhorns, or the lower section, when they wish to become aerodynamic and ride fast on flat or downhill terrain. They move their hands close to the center of the handlebar when climbing, to attain a more upright position. Tinley noticed that whenever Mark moved his grip from the standard position to either the bullhorns or the climbing position, he and Murphy began to suffer. The next time Mark moved his grip, Tinley drew Murphy’s attention to it.
“See that?” he said. “It’s the grip of death.”
When Tinley next rode with Mark, he did not call him “Mark.” He called him “Grip.” The nickname quickly spread; eventually its literal source was forgotten, and it came to be understood as a reference to the mental death grip Mark put on other athletes through his newfound capacity to outsuffer all comers.
On another ride, after his grip-of-death reputation had been cemented, Mark was joined by Paul Huddle, then a newcomer to the San Diego scene who had not yet experienced the death grip. He didn’t have to wait long. Mark effortlessly dropped Paul on the way out from their starting point and collected him again on the way back. Paul was once more hanging on to Mark’s back wheel for dear life when he heard Mark’s rear tire spring a leak. Paul eased up, expecting Mark to stop to fix it, only to watch him disappear ahead. Five miles up the road Paul caught Mark, who had at last stopped to change his tube. He had ridden five miles on a deflating rear tire before he noticed it. On subsequent rides Paul made a game of seeing what else Mark wouldn’t notice, which turned out to be anything short of being hit by a truck, so singularly internal was his focus when pedaling hard.
Mark and Paul became close friends and seasonal housemates in a house they rented with a couple of others every summer in Boulder, Colorado. One morning they were eating cereal together at the breakfast table when Paul realized that Mark was staring at him. Mark did this often, and it unnerved Paul. The most unsettling thing about Mark’s wordless watching was the Mona Lisa smile that accompanied it, an almost perfect facsimile of the world’s most enigmatic smile: faint and frozen, simultaneously demanding and defying interpretation. Suddenly Paul couldn’t take it anymore.
“What?” Paul shouted.
Mark flinched, seeming to return from somewhere far away.
“What?” Mark quietly echoed.
“What the hell are you staring at?”
“Nothing.”
Paul realized that Grip was not, in fact, trying to read the secrets of his soul. Mark’s mind was far away; Paul might as well have not been in the room.
The more time Mark’s housemates spent with him, the more mysterious he became in some ways. Living with Mark exposed them to his spiritual practices, of whose existence they saw no hint in the workout experiences they shared with him. Mark kept crystals in his bedroom, which he used to heal himself by placing them on his body at chakra points and which the clownish young duathlete Kenny Souza, who also shared the house in Boulder, liked to rearrange when Mark wasn’t looking. Mark also practiced self-hypnosis, and he habitually regaled his roommates with descriptions and interpretations of his frequently fantastical dreams. One day Mark excitedly told Kenny that he had fallen asleep wishing he could make time stand still and then dreamed of a square waterfall floating in a void. He explained that it was not water falling but time, and the pink mist rising from the bottom of the waterfall represented eternity in suspension.
Mark read a great deal of spiritual literature. His roommates became accustomed to seeing all kinds of spiritual reading material left around the house. For a while Mark’s personal bible was a book titled Constructive Living by David K. Reynolds, which presented a self-help philosophy based on the tenets of accepting the reality of everything you feel and unswervingly doing what you need to do in life. There was a spirit of self-reliance in Reynolds’s philosophy that validated Mark’s natural outlook.
“Feeling pressured by others, by time, by circumstances is just another feeling,” goes a typical Reynolds teaching. “The feeling causes you trouble when you believe you must respond to it or fight it or remove it. Just feel the pressure and continue doing what you need to do.”
One night Mark dreamed that he was surfing at Torrey Pines State Beach, the site of his first triathlon. He kept trying to paddle through the whitewater to reach the break but was repeatedly waylaid by other surfers who were struggling and needed his help. Mark got so caught up in helping others that he never did reach the break. When he woke up Mark decided the dream was telling him he was giving too much energy to his training buddies, and he needed to pull back from them for a time and focus on himself.
Losing energy to others was a constant concern for Mark, one that caused him generally to keep a certain distance from his friends. Most of the other guys trained together daily, but Mark ran and rode alone at least a few times every week. It was a matter of rational self-interest. Mark saw plainly what everyone else seemed to miss—that it was impossible for a bunch of world-class endurance athletes with healthy egos to train together without being sucked into a back-and-forth game of mileage one-upmanship that flung one athlete after another into the abyss of overtraining fatigue. Mark had been quick to realize that his body could not handle the volume his peers shouldered, so he stayed away from their most epic group rides and runs and attempted to compensate for doing less by doing it faster, developing a reput
ation for the brutal intensity of his regimen that the media celebrated.
Among those who read about Mark’s high-intensity training approach with dubious interest was Phil Maffetone, a New York–based chiropractor and endurance sports coach who had recently developed a training philosophy, based on the use of heart rate monitors, that was well summarized in the slogan “Go slow to get faster.” Phil cold-called Mark and volunteered his opinion that Mark was training too intensely. Phil advised Mark to get a heart rate monitor and to avoid letting his heart rate creep above 155 beats per minute while riding his bike and running, except during the thick of the racing season, and then only a few times a week.
Dave Scott probably would have told Phil to get lost. Mark found Phil’s system appealing, mainly because Mark’s current “go hard or go home” approach, although effective, left him constantly nursing minor injuries. He tried the method and discovered that he had to reduce his cycling speed and running pace to a grandmotherly crawl to keep his heart rate below the prescribed threshold. Phil told him to stick with it and explained that in doing so he would teach his muscles to function more and more efficiently, enabling him to ride and run faster and faster at that threshold intensity. Mark stuck with the program and discovered that it worked.
After buying into the Maffetone Method, as it became known, Mark began to moderate his efforts even in many of the workouts he did with friends, who quickly learned to exploit Mark’s restraint for their own self-preservation. Ray Browning, another top racer of the day, figured out that when two or more athletes wearing heart rate monitors rode close together the monitor with the freshest batteries would overwhelm the signal of any other devices in its vicinity and display its wearer’s heart rate on those other devices. Ray had just installed fresh batteries in his monitor before starting one long ride in the hills east of San Diego with Mark and a few others. As they climbed an especially tough hill, Ray began to struggle, and his heart rate spiked to 178 beats per minute. Meanwhile, Grip was cruising along comfortably at his limit of 155. Ray pulled his bike close to Mark’s, and suddenly the reading on Grip’s device jumped to 178. Alarmed, Mark slowed down dramatically until the reading dropped back to 155, and Ray survived to the top, snickering at his cleverness.
Mark not only allowed himself easy days in training; he gave himself a whole season of rest each year, quitting his training cold turkey after his last race of the season, usually Ironman, and waiting until New Year’s Day to resume. For six weeks he would not swim a single lap or run a single step, and his bike gathered dust in his garage. Instead he surfed and indulged in other interests. When ABC’s coverage of Mark’s first Ironman was broadcast, Mark missed it because he was attending a meditation retreat. This habit of letting his fitness fields lie fallow and getting away from sport in the winter was an early indication that, as much as Mark needed it, triathlon did not give him everything he needed.
MARK TOOK THIRD PLACE in his second triathlon, USTS Los Angeles, and won his third, the Horny Toad Triathlon, in San Diego, defeating Scott Tinley and Scott Molina and picking up $1,000, or as much money as he made in a month of lifeguarding. The funds were badly needed. Mark was practically living on ramen noodles in those days. When he told his father about the prize haul, Mark noticed a change in Space’s tone. Suddenly he wasn’t so skeptical.
A photograph of Mark taken during the Horny Toad Triathlon appeared on the cover of the September 1982 issue of San Diego Running News. When it was published Mark stopped by a running-shoe store to grab a few copies. He found the publication stacked near the checkout counter and began to browse through a copy, lingering in the hope that the pretty girl behind the cash register would recognize him. She did not. Mark knew his disappointment was juvenile, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d always wanted to do something that truly impressed people, and as a 24-year-old man he valued the fair sex’s attention more than anyone else’s.
A few weeks later Mark flew to Hawaii for Ironman. Unable to afford a hotel room, he slept on a pullout couch in the apartment that Reed Gregerson and Julie Moss had rented in Kailua-Kona while they slept together in the bedroom. Mark was still dating Bunny Stein, who had just started medical school in Texas. But would anyone have blamed Mark if, as he lay on that pullout couch waiting for sleep to overtake him, he imagined being in his friend’s place—in the arms of the woman who had inspired his rebirth?
Ironman did not go well. Mark failed to finish. Nor did he finish his next race, the Malibu Triathlon, in which he developed hypothermia. Officials pulled Mark from the race when he came out of the ocean with blue skin and started shouting, “Where are the bikes?” as he stood right in front of them. Nevertheless, Mark had shown enough promise to receive an invitation to join the J. David professional triathlon team after that race. The offer came through another of Mark’s lifeguarding buddies, George Hoover, whose mother, Nancy Hoover, was the romantic partner and a business partner of Jerry David Dominelli, head of the La Jolla–based J. David brokerage firm. Judging by his lifestyle, Jerry had more money than God, and Nancy used much of their wealth philanthropically. When her son got into triathlon, he and his sporting friends became one of her pet charities. Mark immediately quit his lifeguarding job and joined his new teammates on a flight to Nice, France, where a new event calling itself the World Triathlon Championship was to be held. Upon arriving, they checked into one of the finest hotels in the city.
Mark could not sleep the night before the race. He had never been to Europe. He was about to make his debut as a professional athlete. His mind and heart raced as he lay in bed. At one o’clock in the morning, giving up on sleep, Mark laced up his running shoes, left the hotel, and went for an easy run along the Promenade des Anglais. Pacing beside the water under the soft light of elegant streetlamps, he savored the fresh night air. A deep satisfaction washed over him. Its origin eluded him for a moment, but he soon traced it: He was going to win. Not just that—he was going to be a winner. He stood on the verge of escaping the sea of the ordinary once and for all.
It’s all in front of me, he thought.
Hours later, 24-year-old Mark Allen won the World Triathlon Championship.
GEORGE HOOVER lived with his mother, who lived with Jerry Dominelli in a sprawling estate valued at $2.2 million in Rancho Santa Fe, one of the most exclusive zip codes in America. After Nice in 1982 George invited Mark to occupy one of the mansion’s many spare bedrooms, and he did. Although Mark was not hung up on material things, his splendorous new lodgings surely enhanced the excitement of his new beginning—and Mark’s exclusive new address could not have failed to impress his dad, which was worth something in itself.
One day, several months later, George Hoover returned to the boys’ wing of the Dominelli estate looking distressed. He had just seen his mother.
“Bad news, Grip,” he said.
Mark had felt it coming. Something had been not quite right from the beginning. The money had been almost too easy, coming with too few strings attached.
George informed Mark that Jerry Dominelli had just fled the country, and that J David was bankrupt. The operation had not actually invested any money but instead had shifted it from the base to the peak of a pyramid of suckers and exploiters—a Ponzi scheme. George was deeply distressed. He felt responsible for having ruined the careers of several of his closest friends.
In fact, the only athlete whose career was ruined by the fiasco was George. He never quite recovered from the blow of his mother’s downfall and imprisonment and quit the sport three years after the scandal broke, at age 25. For Mark, the worst of it was perhaps having to endure an I-told-you-so monologue regarding the viability of triathlon as a career in his next monthly call with his dad. But Space had precious little time to gloat before Nike, exhibiting once again its uncanny ability to identify the single best athlete to sponsor in a given sport before anyone else did, swooshed in to grab Mark ahead of the 1984 racing season, making him the highest-paid triathlete in the world—fifty grand a y
ear plus bonuses.
Among the next-best-compensated triathletes was Julie Moss, who had optioned the story of her Ironman crawl for a TV movie and been sponsored by Speedo, Yoplait, and Specialized bikes, and whom Mark continued to see often at races. She broke up with Reed Gregerson one last time and started dating Dale Basescu. Mark got engaged to Bunny Stein. Then Dale broke up with Julie. Mark broke up with Bunny.
Dale received a call from Mark shortly after these latest decouplings. Mark asked if Dale cared to join him for an easy run the following morning. They agreed to meet at Dale’s place. From the moment Mark arrived, Dale could tell Mark wanted to talk about something. Not until they were midway through the run did he come out with it.
“So you and Julie split up, right?” Mark said.
“Yeah, we’re not together anymore,” Dale said.
“Do you mind if I ask her out?”
Dale laughed in appreciation of Mark’s old-world propriety.
“Of course not,” he said. “Go for it!”
Mark did not go for it right away. Handsome yet reticent, Mark was more often the pursued than the pursuer with women. In the end he and Julie met in the middle. Mark next bumped into Julie at a triathlon in New York City. After the race she mentioned to Mark, feigning offhandedness, that she had neglected to reserve a hotel room before making the trip east. Mark, playing along, invited her to stay in his room.
She did not sleep on the pullout couch. They became a couple. Mark now had the love of the woman who had inspired his rebirth. He had become a winner and muzzled the inner voice that called him a loser. He had a job that entailed playing outdoors all day in the most beautiful city in America and traveling around the world to show off his talents on destination beaches. He had a six-figure income, including prize winnings. And he’d even won back his father’s support. There were moments when Mark Allen was able to convince himself that he had everything he would ever need.
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