Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Face disfigured by his notorious rictus grin, Mark pursued Dave Scott through the smoothly paved streets of Gold Coast with the cold relentlessness of a killer robot and with a newfound swiftness that came to him with god-like ease, shocking even to himself. Ahead of him, proudly clicking off 5:45 miles and aware of Mark’s misfortune on the bike, Dave knew he had the race’s massive (by triathlon standards) $20,000 first-place prize sewn up. Except he didn’t. Mark caught Dave just 12 kilometers into the 30-kilometer run.

  You again.

  Mark paused momentarily at Dave’s shoulder and then, seeming almost disappointed by Dave’s inability to counter, eased away from his flabbergasted, redlining rival. Mark completed the run in 1:41:26, having averaged an astonishing pace of 5:26 per mile. He’d outrun Dave by nearly six minutes to beat him by four.

  Mark had defeated Dave many times before, and Dave never did his best racing in April. But this kind of ass-kicking could not be shrugged off. Dave would have considered what Mark had just done to be impossible for anyone—and he still considered it to be beyond his own capacity. Dave would have been thrilled with his own run split, in fact, had Mark’s not so grandly outstripped it.

  Confidence is important in all sports, but in endurance sports it’s everything. An athlete can go no faster than he thinks he can. Dave understood this better than anyone. Confidence building had always been the explicit, overarching objective of his training. He did not plan his training by science or logic, and certainly not by precedent. Instead, he simply asked himself what sorts of experiences he needed to have in training to arrive on the start line in Kona feeling invincible. Then he executed whatever answer his intuition gave him, no matter how outlandish. This had been his way since 1980, when he had performed his epic, 127-mile Ironman rehearsal, which had left him feeling so euphorically ready that he shouted out to his friends like a streaking wassailer in the street as he ran his last mile.

  Dave was now further from that state of self-belief than he had ever been before. Mark’s run in Gold Coast had shattered Dave’s confidence in his ability to beat Mark where it mattered most: in Hawaii. In the past, confidence building had been entirely within Dave’s control. To arrive on the start line in Kona feeling unbeatable, he needed only to do more or better than he had already in his preparations. But it was different this time. Dave knew there was little chance he could match what Mark had just done with any amount of training. He somehow had to restore his confidence before October, or he was screwed. Mark had raised the bar; Dave had to raise it even higher.

  Yet why should he care? Dave had already won Ironman six times, beaten Mark five times. He was 35 years old. What more did he have to prove?

  In a word: everything. Dave was acutely conscious of having established triathlon as a legitimate athletic endeavor. But that achievement meant nothing in his own reckoning unless he validated it by remaining at the top of the sport until it reached full maturity. With each passing year triathlon became more competitive. Dave’s greatest fear was that the sport would leave him behind, and he would be remembered as the guy who had won only before the “real” athletes appeared. Already the sport seemed on the brink of passing him by as Mike Pigg and other younger racers had relegated Dave to second-tier status in shorter races, and as injuries and periods of apathy had taken him away from competition for long stretches. Dave was determined to defer his retirement until triathlon was full grown and to win at least one more Ironman while the competition was as good as it would ever be. Four years younger, Mark Allen represented that next generation hell-bent on surpassing Dave and (as he saw it) tarnishing his legacy—a legacy that was already very much in jeopardy, in his view, because he had not won a single race since the 1987 Ironman. Dave knew Mark’s best day at Ironman was yet to come, and he needed to defeat Mark on that day. His very name depended on it.

  The morning after the World Cup Triathlon, Mark frolicked on the beach and surfed with Scott Tinley, Mike Pigg, and Julie Moss, who’d won the women’s race and $20,000 to match his own. Later, over breakfast, the friends checked out the coverage of the previous day’s race in the local papers and laughed over the gossipy sidebars about Mark’s recently announced engagement to Julie. Meanwhile, Dave put in a hard day of training alone, steaming, plotting his revenge.

  DAVE WASTED NO TIME in starting the process of restoring his confidence. Two weeks after his stinging defeat in Australia, he raced at the Phoenix stop of the USTS. Also there was Scott Molina, a four-time USTS champion who specialized at that distance. Little was expected from Dave, who was viewed as too slow to win such short events now that the new breed of short-course specialists like Molina had taken over—and perhaps as too old, lately, as well. But Dave defiantly spanked Molina and the rest of the field on the strength of a dominating bike leg. Afterward Triathlete editor CJ Olivares asked Dave to respond to the circulating talk about his perhaps being past his prime.

  “I think I’ve still got it,” Dave spat. “I’ll quit when I want to quit. I don’t want people to bury me before my time.”

  Uncharacteristically, Dave raced yet again the very next week—another USTS event, this one in Miami. He won again, beating by two minutes and change a 17-year-old pro with unparalleled cycling ability named Lance Armstrong.

  Dave’s photograph appeared on the cover of the October issue of Triathlete next to the slug line “DAVE SCOTT: THE MAN IS BACK.”

  While Dave was on a roll, Mark was on a tear, winning more races (nine) and bigger races (including the first official triathlon world championship recognized by the International Olympic Committee) than his rival. “Anything you can do, I can do better,” Mark seemed to taunt through his performances.

  Dave had to do more.

  As the summer season wound down, Dave was left with one last chance to raise the bar before Kona. At the end of July he traveled to Japan for that country’s Ironman in a dangerous frame of mind—the sort that often preceded a descent into one of his dark periods. Dave had almost canceled his flight twice: first when he’d developed a pain in his left knee that had hampered his training and again when a typhoon had forced race officials to postpone the event one week, placing it just days ahead of the expected arrival of his and Anna’s first child, and a mere nine weeks before Hawaii. It was always a sense of being overwhelmed that sent Dave into a tailspin, and he was at the edge of the precipice.

  Dave was never one to taper his training much before a race, feeling that the freshness he gained from putting up his feet was not worth the cabin-fever agitation he suffered without his customary quota of kinetic release. But there’s not tapering, and then there’s not tapering. Three days before the race Dave set out on what was intended to be a two-hour ride in the Japanese countryside with his old youth swimming nemesis Murphy Reinschreiber, became horribly lost, and wound up riding for five hours. The day before the race, figuring he might as well see this madness through all the way, Dave completed a hard two-mile swim, wearing hand paddles for extra resistance; rode forty-five miles; and ran seven and a half. That’s about the equivalent of devouring a sixteen-ounce steak on the way to a hot-dog-eating contest. But there was a strange logic in Dave’s outwardly foolish behavior. It was necessary, he perceived unconsciously, to do the irrational to prepare to attempt the impossible.

  On race morning, in the same rash spirit, Dave did not even bother to fasten a spare inner tube to his bike’s seat post because he wanted to save weight. If he flatted, he was done. His pacing strategy was equally reckless. Dave decided to start the swim at a near sprint and hold the pedal to the metal throughout the race until he crossed the finish line or expired. His strategy was to go faster than he’d ever thought he could for as long as he could, because a mere win and a merely excellent finish time would not give him what he needed. Better to die trying to raise the bar than to achieve excellence by current standards.

  A quarter mile into the swim, Dave had a twenty-yard lead. He completed the swim in 48:25, one of the fastest Ironman
swim times ever. He was on his bike before anyone else had even left the water. Rolling out of transition, Dave immediately shifted into his highest gear and stomped on the pedals, daring his bad knee to give out. It did not, so he kept stomping. Dave scorched the bike course in 4:27:31—the fastest Ironman bike time ever. At the second transition he cast aside his bike, pulled on his racing flats, and dived headlong into the marathon, pushing himself as if closely chased even though his nearest competitors, Scott Tinley and Ray Browning, were insuperably far behind him. But Dave was not racing Scott Tinley and Ray Browning. He completed the run in 2:45:36—the fastest Ironman run time ever. His total time of 8:01:32 was also a record, by a vast margin. Ray and Tinley were in another postal code when Dave broke the tape.

  Julie Moss, who had come to Japan without Mark, won the women’s race. After finishing ninety minutes behind Dave, she bumped into him as he was getting a rubdown in the massage area and congratulated him on his incredible performance.

  “Mark is going to shit when he hears about this,” she said.

  Dave could not suppress a smile. He was counting on it.

  The bar had been raised.

  DAVE CONTINUED to turn the screws on Mark’s mind in the last month before the “SHOWDOWN ON THE KONA COAST,” as the October issue of Competitor billed the titanic two-man battle that the whole triathlon world now anticipated. In one magazine article the Man confidently predicted that, given the right weather conditions, he could clock 8:11 in Kona (whose course and conditions were more challenging than Japan’s), a time that seemed possible to him now but that Mark, he trusted, would probably deem hopelessly out of reach for himself.

  As race day drew closer, Dave’s predictions became more aggressive.

  “I think, on a good day, 8:09 is in sight in Hawaii,” Dave said in an interview for Ironman’s race preview press release in late September.

  Sure, he believed it. But that wasn’t why he kept repeating it to anyone with a microphone.

  Mark knew as well as Dave that the outcome of the showdown would be decided in his own mind. While Dave manipulated the press in an effort to soften Mark’s mental game before he finished it off in the lava fields, Mark worked hard to get his head straight. He recognized that a big part of this effort would necessarily entail overcoming his fear of the island and the hellish conditions of the race—the bullying winds, the torturing heat, the threatening black lava fields. Somehow he had to make peace with the island—to find a way to feel at home there. But how?

  Mark was still searching for a way when he went for a run on the day before his flight to Hawaii. Leaving from his home in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, twenty miles north of downtown San Diego, he made his way down the coast a mile or two and caught a trailhead that led him into San Elijo Lagoon. He followed the soft singletrack as it wound through the soggy marshlands close by the ocean and into drier heath deeper inland. An inviolate blue sky smiled upon him from high above. Gentle autumnal sunlight warmed his exposed skin, which was massaged by a cool ocean breeze. The fragrance of sagebrush sweetened the fresh air that he drew into his powerful lungs. Birds chirped happy songs; insects buzzed.

  Ironman was close enough that Mark’s mind stayed locked on the coming race as he ran, but he was not brooding or worrying. In fact, he felt great—serene and comfortable in his bodily exertion and in his environment. He became suddenly conscious of these feelings, and the way to make himself at home at Ironman—or at least a way to try—opened up to him.

  Every time I run here I feel great, he thought. I have to have this feeling when I go to Kona. I have to capture this moment and take it with me.

  Mark stopped running and yanked up a handful of the marsh grasses growing along the water’s edge. Upon returning home he stuffed the weeds into a suitcase, making a mental note to lie when he filled out his U.S. Department of Agriculture form on the flight into Kona.

  Two days later, without Mark’s knowledge, his stepmother did something quite similar. Toot and Space had recently returned to the mainland from Guam and unpacked the possessions that had sat in storage throughout the period of Mark’s travails in Hawaii. Out came that gorgeous, forgotten bit of lava she had taken from Mauna Kea twelve years before. Toot looked at the glittering rock and reflected on Mark’s struggles. She stuffed the stolen jewel into a suitcase before leaving for the airport with Mark’s father to catch a flight to Kona, where she would return Pele’s possession and perhaps thereby lift her curse.

  CHAPTER 6

  DIG ME BEACH

  There is no terror in the bang; only in the anticipation of it.

  —ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  Kona’s airport lies smack in the middle of a lava field. Its lone runway appears to be helplessly floating in, perhaps sinking into, a bubbling tar pit when viewed from the perspective of a descending aircraft like the one Mark Allen stared down from on the afternoon of Thursday, October 6, 1989, nine days before the greatest race ever run.

  This bleak aerial panorama could not have been better contrived to intimidate athletes arriving to compete in the Ironman World Championship, all aware that they are looking at the racecourse. The Queen K Highway passes right by the airport, through the tar pit. The bird’s-eye perspective on this crucial section of the race’s cycling and running routes is particularly daunting to athletes who have experienced Ironman and know what that lava field feels like, and is especially threatening for those who, like Mark Allen, have come undone there.

  Bad memories threatened to creep into Grip’s consciousness as he took in the severe vista below. He pressed them back by reminding himself of his new attitude of embracing the island and its harsh elements. He remembered the reeds he had pulled from San Elijo Lagoon and stashed in his suitcase, which now lay in the plane’s hold.

  The big jet landed, taxied, and stopped. Mark and his soon-to-be bride, Julie Moss, stepped from the air-conditioned cabin into the equatorial heat of the Kona afternoon as they followed other passengers down a portable stairway and onto the tarmac.

  Keahole (as it was known until 1993) is an outdoor airport. The waiting areas at the gates are outdoors. The ticketing area is ceilinged but unwalled. The baggage claim also is shaded but otherwise unprotected from the elements. Mark and Julie sweated through their light, loose travel clothes as they waited for their suitcases and cumbersome bike boxes. Mark again reminded himself of his new attitude.

  They packed their belongings into a rental van and left the airport by a narrow two-lane access road that led to the Queen K Highway. At the intersection they made a right turn onto the thoroughfare that accounted for almost 100 miles of the Ironman racecourse. A few minutes down the road they reached the spot where, heading in the same direction, Mark had been forced to begin walking in the ’87 Ironman. Another few minutes brought them to the place where, walking in the opposite direction, Mark had been passed by Dave Scott in the ’84 Ironman.

  The corridor was filled with ghosts of Ironmans past.

  Seven miles from the airport they came to the base of Palani Hill, a long, shallow incline that led toward the highway’s intersection with Palani Road, marking the edge of Kailua town proper and the starting point of the race’s last mile. As they began to ascend the rise, Mark thought, It could happen here. He pictured himself running next to Dave in the race’s final moments and considered that, in such a scenario, this spot represented his last best chance to make a winning move.

  “It could happen here,” Mark said.

  Although these words were spoken apropos of nothing, Julie knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “It could,” Julie agreed. “But only if you stay with him.”

  She meant “stay with him” in the sense of resisting the temptation to break away earlier, a strategy that had yielded such cataclysmic results in ’84 and ’87. But after the phrase left her mouth, she realized it could also be taken to mean “if Dave doesn’t drop you earlier,” as the Man had done in ’82, ’83, and ’86. She judged it best to leave this ambigui
ty hanging in the air, but Mark caught her intended meaning.

  “I’ve learned my lesson,” he said. “I can be patient. I will be patient.”

  Julie already knew the strategy Mark had settled on for the race. So did most of the triathlon public, as Mark had made no secret of his plan to shadow Dave through the whole swim leg, the entire bike leg, and most of the run, then try to get away from him at the very end. Even Dave knew about it and had expressed his candid opinion of the strategy in print.

  “If I were coaching him I’d tell him to do his own thing,” Dave said in Competitor. “I think following me would be a big mistake.”

  Easy for him to say, but following Dave was really the only strategy that made any sense for Mark, considering everything. Dave never screwed up at Ironman—he had never walked a single step of the marathon in seven races. He was certain to be either in the lead or approaching it in the last miles of the marathon. There simply was no better place to be than with Dave Scott at that point in the race. Ahead of him had once seemed a better position. But Mark had tried to put himself ahead of Dave in the past, and that tactic hadn’t worked out.

  Grip knew he was a better uphill runner than Dave, so the plan of sitting behind him all day and kicking past him on the last climb was almost a no-brainer. It might not be the most daring way to win, but it was the most likely way, and it would still take everything he had. Plus no bad luck.

  Mark and Julie crested the hill, floated down the gentle descent on its back side, and came to the Palani Road intersection. Instead of making a right turn and rolling into downtown Kailua-Kona, where the race would start and finish, they continued along the Queen K for another six miles in a mostly inland and upward direction. When at last they turned right onto King Kamehameha III Road, they were 500 feet above and 3 miles away from the glassy ocean, which lay majestically before them.