Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  This idea might raise eyebrows among those who are aware of other research demonstrating that early childhood trauma, including physical and emotional abuse, compromises brain development. Numerous studies have shown that the stress of a difficult family environment alters the developing brain’s functioning for the worse, not for the better. However, this is not the effect in every case. Psychologists recognize a phenomenon they call “resilience,” whereby certain relatively fortunate victims of abuse are essentially made stronger—at least in some ways—by what doesn’t kill them.

  Psychologists have identified a few factors that seem to be associated with resilience. Among them are “external interests and affiliations” and “early temperament and behavior.” Mark had both of these factors working in his favor. His swimming outlet may have saved him from much of the developmental damage that he might otherwise have suffered as the son of his father. And his self-reliant temperament may also have helped him cope with the stress of his upbringing in ways most children cannot.

  Mark’s emotionally withdrawn adult personality shows strong evidence of childhood training in self-control. He seldom expresses extreme highs or lows, and he almost never shows anger in face-to-face confrontation. But it’s there.

  “Mark doesn’t take shit from anyone,” Phil Maffetone says. “He doesn’t really confront things head-on, but if you say something bad about him, he won’t forget it.”

  Julie Moss used to wonder if Mark ever felt anger. She had been with him for years before she saw him explode. But then he did. They were riding their bikes together when a driver cut in front of Julie, coming within inches of sending her flying off the road. Julie’s field of awareness collapsed around her as she swerved out of harm’s way, then was restored. By then Mark was gone, screaming invective as he chased the motorist for blocks at 30 mph until the offender, lucky to have the greater horsepower, escaped.

  The incident was completely out of character for Mark, yet his rage was so authentic and extreme that Julie realized it must always be there, deep inside him. Some might claim that such emotional containment is unhealthy. If so, it was a hang-up with a collateral benefit. For it seems as if Mark’s unbending efforts to keep that rage—as well as most other strong emotions—locked away served to hone a tremendous capacity to resist other physical urges, such as the urge to slow down when races became painful.

  AS THEY RUN TOGETHER down the middle of the Queen K Highway, Dave Scott and Mark Allen are, in a manner of speaking, not fighting a fair fight. Neither man has appreciably more physical talent than the competitors quarreling over third place far behind them. But disparate accidents have gifted Dave and Mark with a clear advantage in mental stamina that is rooted in the depths of their brains. Dave got his overactive ACC from nature—his genes. Mark got his from nurture (an ironic word in this instance)—a lousy father.

  Dave’s extraordinary power to persevere has come at the cost of an unremitting drive to keep moving, and moving toward perfection. He’s like a man who cannot sleep until sleeplessness almost kills him, who delightedly gets a lot more done than anyone else until he suddenly feels awful and collapses into a deep coma while the world passes him by. Then wakes and does it all again.

  Mark’s mental grip of death, his ruthless strength of will, has come at the cost of an extraordinary walling-off of natural affect, a channeling of all the rage and hurt of the proverbial unblessed son into an unbending pursuit of redeeming achievement.

  To an observer unfamiliar with the unique makeup of endurance athletes, Dave and Mark might seem somewhat psychologically unbalanced. But in the context of their competition, they are just a little crazier than the rest of us, in particular ways that happen to strengthen a tiny, collar-shaped part of the brain that renders them capable of enduring the suffering of extreme fatigue like no one else. And that’s why no one else stands a chance.

  CHAPTER 8

  SHOT OUT OF A CANNON

  Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

  —CONFUCIUS

  At last the day has come. A cheap digital alarm clock resting on the nightstand in Dave Scott’s bedroom at the Sea Village Resort displays a time of three fifty-nine a.m. Dawn remains a distant prospect. The time flips to four o’clock, and the alarm sounds. Dave is already awake. Much less than the apprehension of racing Ironman is needed to keep the insomniac Dave from getting a good night’s sleep.

  He is alone. Anna slept in Verne and Dot’s lodgings at the King Kamehameha Hotel with Ryan, whose presence would have further reduced the Man’s already slim chances for uninterrupted slumber. He climbs out of bed, stretches a bit, and puts on a set of running clothes that he laid out neatly last night.

  Pat Feeney’s backup alarm buzzes in the next bedroom. You can’t be too careful. Wake-up mishaps are surprisingly common at Ironman.

  Pat steps out of his bedroom, ready to take over. He will do everything for Dave short of spoon-feeding him and wiping his bottom from now until the race starts. The logistics of the last two hours of getting ready for Ironman are almost expeditionary in scope. Racing suit, swim goggles, backup goggles, swim cap, bike bottles, solid nutrition, tire pump, sunscreen, body lube—one small oversight could spell disaster. Dave puts it all on Pat so he can relax—sort of—and focus on the few things his friend cannot do for him.

  “How are you feeling?” Pat asks.

  “Not bad,” Dave says. “I think I could exercise a little.”

  Pat knows Dave well enough to understand that his friend is telling him he feels terrific. If he felt merely good, he would have said, “Gosh, I’m old.”

  Dave heads to the kitchen, puts two slices of bread in the toaster, and scarfs down a banana. He eats the toast dry. Pre-race nerves have given him cottonmouth, so it goes down with some difficulty, even with water. Dave puts one more slice in the toaster and eats a second banana while he waits. After dispatching the next round of toast, he eats a third banana. It’s a small breakfast by his standards, but he dares not eat more for fear of starting the race with a full stomach.

  While Pat fiddles with drink bottles, Dave leaves the condo. He negotiates his way through the darkness toward the parking-lot entrance and then eases into a jog, heading south on Ali’i Drive, away from Dig Me Beach. It is already warm—warmer than seems right in such darkness. A light breeze floats in off the water.

  As Dave shuffles along, his heart races ahead of his effort. Inside him a tug-of-war is being fought between a delicious aliveness, an instinct to capture and hold on to every sensory detail of this once-a-year (and how many more times ever?) moment, and a burning eagerness. He can’t wait to race. And he’s in no hurry. A nonspecific fear further throttles Dave’s heart, but he enjoys this as well, as an indispensible piece of the thing he lives for: the chance to see what he can do.

  It is the best morning of his life.

  Back inside the condo, Pat is joined by Mike Norton, John Reganold, and Dave’s sister Jane from next door.

  “Warming up?” John asks Pat, noting Dave’s absence.

  “Warming up,” Pat says.

  The two men trade smiles and shakes of the head. After all these years, they still can’t quite understand why Dave feels he needs to exercise before eight-plus hours of exercise. He’s an odd one. But that’s why they love him.

  Dave cruises along for half a mile before turning around, enjoying the loosening feeling in his muscles as they slough off the stiffness of sleep. By the time he returns to Sea Village, something else has begun to loosen up. This is the true object of his early-morning ritual—to facilitate the single most important pre-race act.

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK race announcer Mike Plant fires up the public address system from his perch atop the finish-line tower on Ali’i Drive. He speaks gentle words of welcome and orientation for the benefit of the few athletes arriving at the start area far earlier than they should. Bustling around them, and far outnumbering the athletes for now, are scores of race volunteers wearing pale pin
k or blue T-shirts.

  “In case anyone somehow has been on another planet the last couple of days,” Mike says, “the race will start at seven a.m. this morning.”

  Mike’s voice is muted, as befits the somnolent mood of the moment, and as it must be if he is to have any chance of being able to speak at all when the last finisher of the race passes under his tower at midnight.

  Darkness still reigns, though a perfect full moon casts a soft glow over Kailua-Kona, and event lighting creates stark visibility on and around the pier. The stone seawall bordering the sidewalk on the bay side of Ali’i Drive is already crowded with spectators. They began arriving hours ago to claim coveted parcels of the best real estate from which to watch the start. Many lie with towels underneath them, some fast asleep. By the time the cannon fires, all will be standing and crowded together with dozens of opportunistic latecomers, like Tokyo subway passengers awaiting a rush-hour train.

  AS MIKE PLANT’S FIRST WORDS of the morning boom through the loudspeakers at Dig Me Beach, Mark Allen is just waking, seven miles away, at the Kanaloa resort. A big sleeper, Mark likes to set his alarm as late as he possibly can without leaving himself unduly rushed before the race. Like Dave, he is alone in bed. Julie slept in the second bedroom so she would not unwittingly siphon his energy during the night.

  While hardly the insomniac that Dave is, Mark always has trouble sleeping in Kona before Ironman. He becomes afraid of the dark in Hawaii and has nightmares about people breaking into the condo and attacking him. Last night, however, Mark was spared such awful visions. His subconscious did no worse than conjure up a version of his usual Ironman-eve dream of (what else?) oversleeping and arriving at the start line late, already too far behind Dave Scott to catch him.

  Mark moves about the condo in total silence, taking frozen water bottles from the freezer, drinking a liquid breakfast of Exceed meal replacement (his stomach being too knotted up to handle solid food), gathering his stuff together. He does not bid good-morning to Julie, who, also racing today, is similarly occupied. Julie respects but does not share her fiancé’s preference for silence. Early in their relationship she turned on some psych-up music on the morning of a race. Without a word Mark walked over to the source of the noise and silenced it, not in a dramatic display of annoyance but matter-of-factly, as though it had somehow turned itself on.

  Mark’s silence is not evidence that he is more nervous than triathletes who do talk before races. He is, however, nervous. It is impossible not to be anxious when facing hours of guaranteed intense suffering. Every athlete is prone to feel some anxiety over what’s at stake in a major competition and what the outcome will be, but for the Ironman triathlete, this disquiet is rooted in a fear of imminent, prolonged agony.

  As she stares without appetite at an egg she just scrambled, Julie thinks the same thought she thinks every year: This is the worst morning of my life.

  At another hotel in Kona Rob Mackle is so traumatized by the suffering at hand that he’s weeping. Rob is a strapping young man, exceptionally strong and muscular for an elite triathlete, and no crybaby. A former scholarship swimmer at Indiana University, he has a good chance of leading the race through the end of the swim and into the start of the bike leg later this morning. Technically an age-group competitor, not a professional, Rob knows he cannot run well enough to win, place, or show, and his highest hope is to claim the last spot on the fifteen-deep podium. So he does not bear a heavy burden of competitive pressure on his broad shoulders. But he raced his first Ironman last year, and he remembers what it felt like. He knows he’s about to feel the same misery again. It is the worst morning of his life. And that’s why he’s crying.

  Mike Rubano knocks on Mark and Julie’s door at a quarter past five and is quietly admitted. He does little more than take a seat and observe while the betrothed athletes complete their rituals of preparation. Mike is just about the only person who never sucks energy from Mark. Their energies pulsate at the same frequency.

  Fifteen minutes later Charlie Graves and Brian Hughes arrive.

  “Ready?” Charlie asks.

  Mark nods. Charlie and Brian lead Mark and Julie out to a rented Jeep. Mike returns to his bed to get another forty-five minutes of shuteye before heading into town to catch the start. Charlie steers the Jeep through the front gate and then the snoozing neighborhoods surrounding the Kanaloa. He turns left onto Ali’i Drive, blindly tracing the early miles of the marathon course that Mark—barring catastrophe—will start upon at approximately twelve thirty this afternoon under blinding sun and in 90-degree heat.

  As they cruise along in the warm darkness, wind tousling their hair, Julie watches Mark out of the corner of her eye, wondering, as she often does, and as everyone who knows Mark often does, what is happening inside his mind, behind the silence.

  Mark is probably thinking about an article he read in a triathlon trade publication a few days ago. Its author was handicapping the top contenders for today’s race. The same writer had predicted that Mark would win past Ironmans. This time, however, he demoted Grip to dark horse on the grounds that, over the past several years, Mark had proven himself all but fated never to win the only race that really matters. It hit Mark like a slap in the face. No one had ever told him he couldn’t win Ironman before. A lifetime’s worth of other reasons for wanting to win were instantly replaced with a somehow even more intense desire to win only to make this guy eat his words. He’s been brooding over payback ever since. Mark wants to mentally rehearse the coming race right now. But a subconscious part of him keeps changing the channel back to this grudge. This consuming need to prove he can to one who says he can’t speaks to Mark’s deepest reason for wanting to win.

  The closer they come to town, the thicker the traffic becomes. Most of the 1,286 athletes competing in the race slept somewhere along Ali’i Drive last night, making for a weird predawn rush hour along a stretch of road that is normally calm even at midday. Not a single word is spoken inside the vehicle for the full twenty minutes it takes to reach a VIP parking area near the finish line, right next to the official Ironman T-shirt booth and across from the local dive shop. Charlie finds a spot and kills the ignition. Just as everyone puts a hand on a door handle, Mark breaks the silence.

  “Let’s do it,” he says.

  For Charlie, these three words change the meaning of everything that came before. Mark sounds calm and ready, whereas his silence had seemed fearful. In fact, like everyone else racing today, Mark is fearful—but he is also calm and ready. And a little angry.

  The scene at Dig Me Beach has transformed in the hour since Mike Plant first picked up his microphone. At that time his greetings and instructions and sponsor plugs were spoken over a soundtrack of mellow music played at modest volume. Volunteers, many of them swim-course safety crew members carrying surfboards, were then streaming in, athletes trickling. The roads were still open, and the last bits of race signage were going up.

  Now the music is louder and more up-tempo. Athletes come thickly, slowly, silently walking in from two directions, Ali’i and Palani. Most have been dropped off a few blocks away by family or friends. Some wear warm-ups, others just their swimsuits or triathlon racing suits. Many carry bicycle tire pumps. The sidewalk along Ali’i Drive is a crush. Restive lines have formed at the portable toilets. First light appears above Hualalai Volcano on the left shoulder of the bay, like the gap beneath a rising curtain.

  “Once your body has been marked, you can proceed to the pier,” Mike Plant announces, continuing his helpful stream of consciousness. “You can check your bike, make those last-minute adjustments, get your water bottles in, pump your tires up, and get ready to go.”

  Veterans Mark and Julie have no need for this guidance, but they behave as if they are heeding it anyway. After parting from Charlie and Brian, the couple walks toward the pier and joins the line for body marking. When Grip reaches the front, a volunteer wielding a Marks-A-Lot marker asks him what his race number is and then draws a “5” on
his upper arms and lower thighs. This figure matches the number on paper bibs affixed to his bike jersey and his running singlet and represents his finishing place in last year’s Ironman, thanks to Pele’s curse and two flat tires. An “X” is inked on his left calf, indicating that he is racing in the professional division. Age-group racers have their age written on that spot. Julie gets the number 53 and an X of her own.

  Access to the pier is constricted and controlled. Athletes push toward the pinched entry point in a dense herd. Two of the more menacing-looking race staffers check for body markings before allowing admittance to the athletes-only zone. Once inside the transition area, Mark and Julie hug and separate. Julie knows Mark needs total isolation now. It’s just the way he is—or has become.

  Leaving Mark at his racked bike, Julie moves toward hers, stomach twisted in worry, but not for herself. She has told Mark often that she believes he can win this race. But in her private thoughts she is not nearly so certain. She has seen too many things go wrong too many times.

  Eyes crawl all over Mark as he wades through the crowd of nervous triathletes, one after another of whom is briefly distracted from his or her own fear by recognizing Grip’s iconic chestnut curls and green-eyed stare. Although he does not return their smiles, Mark does not avoid their looks, and so begins his last pre-race experiment. Mark decided this year to withdraw and isolate himself from his fellow humans so completely in the last days of Iron Week that a part of him welcomes this fleeting contact with dozens in the final moments of the countdown. The idea was that instead of taking his energy, the people would feed him energy. It’s working.

  When Mark gets to his bike he sees Dave already busy at his own machine farther along the same rack. Dave looks sharp in a white Brooks tracksuit with black accents. Having missed last year’s race, Dave has been given the number 23, which he takes as an insult even though he knows numbers are distributed through an impartial formula. His bike is accordingly racked in the twenty-third slot from the end of the row allotted to male professional racers. It feels like a ghetto in contrast to his familiar number-1 slot. Charlie Graves and Brian Hughes have taken up a position in the spectator zone of the pier and look on as Dave and Mark consciously ignore each other, concentrating more intently than necessary on inflating their bike tires and placing fluid bottles in their cages.