Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  “It’s mine!” she teased. “You can have it after I kick the bucket.”

  They poked around a little while longer and then returned to the car, only to discover that they had locked themselves out. Toot knew about the curse of Pele, but as a self-described “good little Catholic girl,” she dismissed the curse as a toothless Hawaiian myth. It never crossed her mind that this little nuisance might be a kind of warning from the island goddess. So instead of putting the lava back where she had found it, Toot fetched a wire toilet-paper holder out of a nearby public bathroom and used it to jimmy the lock.

  Frequent visitors to Hawaii, which Space had first seen as a navy man in 1950, Toot and her husband kept a Hawaiian-themed room in their home in Elko, Nevada, and Toot found a nice place to display her stolen gem there. A few years later the couple moved to Guam. They packed up most of their possessions, including that gorgeous bit of lava, and put them in storage.

  Toot suffered no special misfortune during this time. Perhaps Madam Pele chose to hold out for later opportunities for vengeance, if not against Toot directly then against someone close to her, on her home turf.

  OCTOBER 1982

  Mark Allen returned to Hawaii in October 1982 to compete in his first Ironman. Grip was not the only newbie who had been lured to Kona by the Julie Moss effect. The previous Ironman had drawn 580 athletes. The first “postcrawl” Ironman eight months later brought in 850. And there were other changes. Race director Valerie Silk, who had taken over management of Ironman from John Collins in 1980, had signed Bud Light to a title sponsorship deal. The race entry fee was bumped up to $85. Valerie and her growing staff invested much of the additional funds in upgraded infrastructure, enhanced pre-race and post-race events, and greater governmental support. Scores of overseas athletes participated. All in all, the event had a very different feel from past Ironmans—grander scale, better organization, and slicker packaging.

  Mark was intimidated—not so much by the general hoopla as by the island. It was not his ideal place to exercise. He felt assaulted by Kona’s kiln-like heat, its choppy waters, and its defiant topography while training in the days before the race. Mark liked the island as a visitor, appreciating its beauty and especially its history and culture, but it seemed as if the island somehow did not like him as an athlete.

  The most active worry in Mark’s mind, however, on the long night before the race was the prospect of being pressed together with more than 800 other bodies in Kailua Bay as part of a floating mass of humanity that would suddenly become a seaward-drifting riot at seven o’clock on race morning. Mark’s stomach turned somersaults when he imagined himself moshing against that many thrashing bodies in open water. Contact-averse, he had little enjoyed the mass swim starts he had experienced in his first few triathlons, and this one promised to be much bigger, faster, and more violent. Mark hatched a plan to spare himself the worst of the kicking and clawing by exploiting his swimming experience and sprinting hard from the start to get ahead of the masses.

  That tactic worked well—perhaps too well, it seemed initially. When the cannon fired Mark put his head down and swam as hard as he could. After a minute or so he lifted his eyes to sight on the orange guide buoys ahead. He saw only one other swimmer, directly in front of him. At first he feared he had swum off course, but the other swimmer seemed to know where he was going, so Mark put his head back down and followed him all the way to the turnaround buoy at 1.2 miles and then back toward shore. Still not seeing the bright swim caps and wheeling arms, hearing the splashing, or feeling the presence of a single other athlete, Mark wondered if he and this man he was blindly following had been left far behind by the lead pack. But when he climbed out of the water on the other’s heels, a race official pointed at him and shouted, “Two!”

  That meant he was in second place, virtually tied for the race lead. Exhilaration filled the young first-timer, who just a few months earlier had felt he was letting his life drift away but who now seemed to encounter fresh evidence daily that he had discovered a thing he had been born to do. Forgetting himself, Mark placed a hand on the leader’s shoulder and used it to slingshot himself ahead on the ramp that led to the transition area so he could see whose wake he’d ridden with such unexpected success. It was Dave Scott. Neither Dave nor Mark could have known that the competitive dynamic just established, of Mark shadowing Dave during the Ironman swim, would persist for years to come. Nor would it be the last time the pair made physical contact during Ironman.

  While Mark paused to rinse the brine off his body under a makeshift shower, Dave went straight to the changing room. Rolling out of transition a minute ahead of Mark, Dave hit the early miles hard, tearing along the Queen Kaahumanu Highway through the sprawling black lava fields of the Kona coast in an effort to make his youthful challenger believe that pursuit was futile. After pedaling alone for ninety minutes, Dave assumed he’d succeeded in that effort. But at thirty-eight miles Mark pulled alongside him, looking as though he’d just woken from a refreshing nap. This was the moment when Dave Scott and Mark Allen met.

  “Hi, Dave; I’m Mark Allen,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” said Dave, who not only knew who Mark was but had already dismissed the newcomer as too scrawny to constitute a legitimate threat at Ironman.

  Mark’s excitement made him garrulous, and he pressed the conversation.

  “Hey, after we finish biking, do you want to go for a run?” he joked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Dave said without mirth. He then shifted into a higher gear and pulled away from the annoying gadfly.

  Ironman’s bike course was a simple out-and-back that hugged the coast between Kailua-Kona and the small village of Hawi (pronounced hah-VEE), some fifty miles away. Mark stayed within range of Dave all the way to the turnaround. Hawi was the worst possible place for a racer’s bicycle to break down. At that point you were as far as you could get from where you needed to end up. Naturally, it was there that Madam Pele first struck Mark Allen—if you believe in such things. Mark attempted a gear change and felt something give, then heard the clatter of metal against asphalt. His machine was now stuck in its highest gear. He stopped to examine the drivetrain and found that the rear derailleur had spontaneously disintegrated—a one-in-a-million race-ender.

  Mark hitched a ride back to town with a local in a pickup truck. He arrived just in time to watch Dave Scott become the first two-time Ironman champion. Although disappointed not to have finished, Mark left the island in good spirits.

  I was right there with the best guy in the world, he thought. Who knows? If everything goes right, maybe I can win this race someday.

  1983

  When Mark returned to Kona the following October, he did so with a different identity. The talented but untested newcomer had been transformed into an established professional racer with two victories at the Nice Triathlon (a.k.a. the World Triathlon Championship), a generous contract with Team J. David, and a central place in San Diego’s elite triathlete clique.

  Mark met with no uncanny disaster during the 1983 Ironman. Instead, the race was spoiled for him before it even started by something that had happened in another race, weeks earlier. At Nice Mark utterly destroyed the 75-mile bike leg and started the run with a ten-minute lead on Dave Scott. But he began to pay for his aggression halfway through the 20-mile run. Dehydrated and hypoglycemic, he became light-headed, then dizzy. His eyes lost the ability to focus, seeing only a soup of colors, light, and shadows. He was out on his feet—a punch-drunk fighter helpless before the final blow. That blow seemed to come when, with three miles to go, Mark tilted his head back to take a swig of water from a bottle and lost his equilibrium, pivoting backward to the ground like an axed oak. He dragged himself to his feet and steadied his body briefly with his fingertips on the road, exactly as Julie Moss had done in the February 1982 Ironman. Despite his addled state, Mark was conscious of the visual echo. I look like Julie Moss, he thought with a crazy sense of inflated significance. Somehow M
ark righted himself fully and resumed running, only to stagger straight into a parking meter. Spectators’ cheers turned to gasps of horror as the race leader loped close enough to permit a clear look into his vacant, unseeing eyes. Some were so moved by Mark’s shocking perseverance that they started to run with him, urging him to keep moving as Dave Scott stalked closer and closer from behind. By the time Mark reached the finish line, a crowd of hundreds surrounded him, pleading for him.

  It was a pyrrhic victory. In winning the race, Mark had lost his mojo. He arrived in Kona with no conscious memory of his purgatory on the French Riviera, but his body seemed to remember, as he raced uncharacteristically gun-shy, losing a minute to Dave in the swim, another three minutes on the bike, and eleven for good measure on the run.

  It was not Mark but his J. David teammate Scott Tinley who nearly took down the Man that day, as he had done once before. Dave had arrived in Kona less fit than in previous years, his training having been curtailed by the dark period that followed his breakup with Linda Buchanan. But he believed he could will his way to a third Ironman title nevertheless.

  “A lot of things had worn me down that year, but that race meant a lot to me,” Dave said afterward. “I wanted to salvage the year for myself.”

  Dave, as always, led the race out of the water. Tinley, a weak swimmer, came out of the bay seven minutes behind Dave but laid down a heroic effort on the bike and caught up five miles before the bike-run transition. Tinley sportingly handed a water bottle to Dave as he passed but then negated any goodwill he’d earned by pedaling ahead and standing out of the saddle to piss on the fly, wetting Dave with the hot, rank spray.

  The bike course ended at the Kona Surf Hotel on the far end of coastal Ali’i Drive, seven miles south of the start line at Kailua Pier. Tinley charged out of the hotel’s vast parking lot to start the marathon twenty seconds in front of Dave. An ABC camera followed Dave out of the transition area and onto the run course in pursuit of the only man to have beaten him in Hawaii. As always, Dave treated the camera’s presence like a confessional.

  “I feel terrible,” Dave volunteered. For a moment it seemed as if that was all he had to say. Then he spoke again: “But I’m going to bury this guy.”

  Half a mile up the road, Dave was back in the lead. His advantage ballooned to five minutes over the next fifteen miles. Tinley conceded defeat in his thoughts and began to focus on staying ahead of Mark Allen. But Dave had dug deep enough in his effort to “bury” his would-be usurper to expose the shallowness of his fitness, and suddenly he was in trouble.

  “At about sixteen miles I was seeing dancing buffalo on the side of the road,” he said later.

  His lead shrank. Dave’s buddy Pat Feeney, whose job was to give Dave split times and gap information throughout the race, grimly reported the dire numbers in the waning miles and worsened their deflating effect on his disintegrating friend by coloring the data with commentary.

  “You’ve only got 2:20 on Tinley!” Pat shouted to Dave at the twenty-one-mile point. “He looks great!”

  Gee, thanks, Dave thought.

  Behind him Tinley had been getting similar information from his wife, Virginia. Between six and sixteen miles, it was all bad. Eventually the demoralized chaser snapped at her, “Why don’t you just go away?” She complied. When he learned later from other spectators that Dave was struggling, Tinley went after him with everything he had. Preferring to die by his own hand, if at all, Dave ran himself into a new dimension of pain over the last two miles and crossed the finish line thirty-three seconds ahead of Tinley, blind with exhaustion, vowing never to participate in this stupid race again.

  Fifteen long minutes passed before Mark Allen came down Ali’i Drive. On the one hand, he felt good about finishing third in the biggest triathlon in the world in just his second year in the sport. On the other hand, he knew he’d missed an opportunity to beat the best when he was not at his best.

  1984

  Dave’s vow to retire from Ironman did not last. Another summer of bad racing and shadowy days in the beanbag chair provoked him to return to Kona and once more exorcise his mounting frustrations in the lava fields. Mark, meanwhile, enjoyed a terrific season and came to the island not merely believing but knowing he could win. Triathlon’s fans and media largely agreed. Dave was down; Mark was rising. This was Grip’s year.

  Dave heard these prognostications and absorbed them with dark relish. He was like a loner with a triple black belt having sand kicked in his face by a lifeguard who is showing off for the popular crowd and has no idea. The first punch couldn’t come soon enough.

  On race morning Mark showed signs of cracking under the weight of expectation that had been placed on him—and that he had placed on himself. In the predawn darkness, Dave seemed loose and confident as he went about his last-minute preparations. Forty minutes before the cannon fired he was seen standing in line at a portable toilet, casually discussing how ready he felt with adoring age-group competitors. Mark, by contrast, seemed tense, shrinking into himself. There was a subtle deference in the way he sidled up to Dave at the start line.

  When the cannon sounded Mark, per routine, slipped into Dave’s wake, where he stayed for the next fifty minutes and change. In the transition area Dave was forced to stand around and wait while frantic volunteers tried to find the three-time champion’s misplaced bag of cycling clothes. Dave remained remarkably calm through the crisis. Mark did not. Seizing the opportunity, he launched himself into the bike ride, hoping to shake the Man much earlier than he’d anticipated when mentally rehearsing the race under self-hypnosis, as he was wont to do. It appeared a crafty, opportunistic move, but Dave showed little concern as he rolled off the pier in pursuit.

  Mark took the lead from former Olympic swimmer Djan Madruga at twenty-three miles. Shortly thereafter a car pulled alongside him. Inside were Mark’s current fiancée, Bunny Stein, and his future fiancée, Julie Moss. (Things were getting complicated.)

  “You’ve got a huge lead!” Bunny shouted through the wind.

  “How much?” Mark demanded, disappointing his betrothed by failing to respond with the ebullience she’d expected.

  Nearly three minutes, he was told. He picked up his pace. Let’s finish this now, he thought.

  By the halfway point in Hawi, Mark’s advantage had grown to eight minutes. Nevertheless, he wore a grim expression as he made the turn, whereas Dave managed a smile for the spectators gathered there.

  With thirty miles left in the bike leg, a press car pulled up next to Dave. Inside were Dave’s friend Liz Barrett and a few other partisan journalists wearing forlorn expressions.

  “Don’t give up on me yet!” Dave shouted. “I haven’t even put on my running shoes!”

  When Mark arrived at the Kona Surf Hotel and hopped off his bike, he learned that he had an insurmountable lead of nearly twelve minutes. He removed his cycling togs and suited up in a red-white-and-blue running outfit with the letters “USA” stenciled on the shirtfront, an odd choice in a race where athletes did not officially represent their nations and where almost all of the top male contenders were Americans. At last Mark not only relaxed but openly celebrated. He knew there was no way Dave could catch him now. He could cruise the marathon at 90 percent and still win comfortably. Intoxicated by the certainty of his victory, Mark traded high fives with spectators as he ran down Ali’i Drive toward town. He was so happy that he didn’t even notice it was 98 degrees and he was becoming severely dehydrated.

  Mark was all smiles as he passed the Hot Corner, a rollicking spectator zone featuring music and a live announcer at the corner of Ali’i Drive and Hualalai Road. After blazing through Kailua Village, he made a right turn onto Palani Road and began to climb Pay-’n’-Save Hill (as it was known, owing to the presence of a certain supermarket on its north side) toward the Queen K Highway, where he would turn left and enter the desolate, scorching lava fields. At the base of the hill Mark felt fantastic. At the top of the hill, not even half a mile later, h
e was out of gas. His pupils shrank to pinhole size; his terrified eyes seemed to see Dave in the distance behind him, closing in.

  Back at the Kona Surf, Dave looked anything but defeated. He blazed into the bike-run transition barking threats and commands at the race volunteers. The time for smiling had passed.

  “Don’t knock me off my bike!” he roared.

  The volunteers, none of whom was positioned to knock him off his bike, scattered like zoogoers fleeing an escaped tiger.

  “Where’s my bag? Where’s my bag?” Dave yelled as he yanked off his cycling shorts, mooning a TV camera behind him.

  A surviving volunteer handed Dave his transition bag with a flinch, as though handing a morsel between cage bars. Dave dressed in such furious haste that he pulled his singlet on backward. He sprinted under the marathon “START” banner with his eyes far down the road, behaving very much like a person who believed he had a chance.

  At the base of Pay-’n’-Save Hill, with twenty miles yet to run, Dave had already swallowed four minutes of Mark’s advantage. Mark should have known that the only way to build a twelve-minute lead on a fit Dave Scott in the bike leg of Ironman was to ride too hard to survive the marathon. Letting fear get the best of him, he had written a check on the bike that he could not cash on the run.

  Presently Dave learned that Mark was walking. He licked his chops. Mark looked like a drunk driver failing a roadside sobriety test when Dave glided past him at twelve miles, his lips briefly forming a faint, pitiless smile as he took the lead.

  You again.

  Sometime after Dave had vanished into the horizon, having replaced the old game of catching Mark with a new game of trying to better his course record and left his rival to fester in the searing heat, Mark became aware that a moped bearing a race medical volunteer had pulled abreast of him. Mark intensified his concentration on the movement of his limbs, trying to appear sober—or sane—or whatever.