Crawl of Fame

by Julie Moss

  In this way, my star shone differently from champion triathletes. Or athletes, really; as Jim McKay noted, few had experienced a more dramatic “agony of defeat” moment. I was regarded as the author of an earth-shattering event that vaulted Ironman and triathlon onto the world map. I found myself reminding people I did not win, that Kathleen was the 1982 Ironman champion. It didn’t matter. I was in high demand.

  Most athletes work their entire careers to get their signature moment, say, a Super Bowl title or long-overdue Olympic gold medal. Mine came in my first athletic achievement. Consequently, I became one of very few triathletes to receive appearance fees—a check for showing up to race. That led me to think, I’ve earned my paycheck before I even start this race. They didn’t have much prize money then, which made the appearance fees even more special. My attitude was, I’m here because I’m sponsored and I did this and I don’t have to work like that.

  I fell into a cushy place compared to my peers, who scrambled every day to synch their work and training schedules while paying for equipment and races. They wanted triathlon to be their profession. Triathlon was my new profession. Fortunately, no race directors or early sponsors expected me to repeat my Kona effort. I would just welcome everything that came my way. I’m going to keep doing this until I’m not earning money at it anymore, or it stops being fun, I thought.

  With that kind of reinforcement, race in and race out, why push to the limit? I began to feel like I didn’t need to shift into a higher gear to assure a great career. Nor did I want to experience that end-of-the-line distress again. I put in long training days, for sure, but I wouldn’t fully commit to becoming a great athlete. Why would I, or anyone, want to go through that pain again? The thought scared the hell out of me.

  After my Ironman, I sought out running races and triathlons. My early results made clear a couple of things: I had the ability to attain the highest level, but I didn’t know how to get to the top, nor did I fully appreciate the work required. Consequently, I blew up again in the run segment of my second Ironman, in October 1982. Once again, I raced more for the sake of pleasing Reed and competing with him but with the added pressure of pleasing my sponsors. I was in good shape after the bike, but the run course bit me hard. I finished fourteenth, not exactly what the world expected from the runner-up of eight months prior.

  When 1983 rolled around, triathlon was a far different sport than the previous year. My first victory came at the 1983 Bud Light USTS event in San Diego. Finally, I felt like I belonged with the other elites.

  The feeling didn’t last long. I headed back to Kona for Ironman, but Reed was done with the race. Now working in Santa Rosa, he planned to return to school for his second computer science degree. When I called from Kona to confirm his arrival, he told me he wasn’t coming and our relationship was over. I immediately flew to San Francisco to see if he meant it. He did. I flew back to Hawaii, crushed. Predictably, I finished a weak seventeenth. “I’ve come to realize that I never was a true athlete,” I said a year later. “I was always doing it for some other reason.” That reason being to impress the man I desperately wanted in my life.

  As sadly as 1983 could have ended, my final race put a light-hearted and victorious spin onto it. In late November, I headed to Rio de Janeiro for the Golden Cup Triathlon. I was in it to win it, for sure, but this was Rio, and the place was raging. A magazine article shows me being held horizontally by fellow competitors Dean Harper and Robert Roller on the crowded beach, with the caption: “Gidget goes to Ipanema.”

  That gives you an idea of the fun we had.

  Our course consisted of a 1-mile ocean swim, 32-mile bike ride, and a 10K run to the finish on Copacabana Beach. If you watched the 2016 Rio Olympic road cycling races, then you saw some of the hills on which we competed. I settled the race early, grabbing a big lead in the swim, stretching it out on the bike, and winning by fourteen minutes, one of my most decisive victories.

  When I looked down at my race singlet after crossing the line, I was horrified: it was inside out! Instead of reading pan am, for the iconic airline that sponsored the event, it read ma nap. Since I had a vested interest in flying home safely, I quickly fixed my shirt to appease our generous sponsor.

  I converted my relationship woes into training energy for the 1984 season and committed wholeheartedly this time. As a result, I jumped to fourth place on the year-end rankings and finished second to Colleen Cannon in the Nice World Championships. Bummed by my recent Kona efforts, I’d already been contemplating retirement from Ironman races—if not triathlon itself—but in Nice I proved to myself I could still compete.

  Later in the year, I won the women’s division of the Off Road Triathlon, held in Santa Rosa, California. The race was rugged and unique, to my liking: a 175-yard swim in a lagoon, a 9-mile bike ride on dusty dirt roads, and a 6-mile ride on tough, technical, rocky trails. I’d driven all night from Bass Lake, near Yosemite, after racing in the USTS Nationals and staying late for the after-party, so I wasn’t ideally rested. I held the lead after the swim, but fell back on the bike, as my Specialized Stumpjumper wasn’t enough to keep me from feeling out of control in places. However, I clocked a thirty-seven-minute run to move into fourteenth place overall and the first woman. The men’s winner? Reed Gregerson.

  One of my most important rites of passage into serious triathlete status was getting into the group workouts with triathletes training out of San Diego County, which is to say, virtually every elite except for Dave Scott, who remained in Northern California. We had three big workouts: a set of fierce intervals at the UC San Diego outdoor pool; a bike ride from Del Mar to Dana Point and back; and the Tuesday run, a 90-minute fartlek workout in Rancho Santa Fe, hosted by Scott Molina. Fartlek, the Swedish word for “speed play,” was popularized by the legendary coach Arthur Lydiard, who guided Herb Elliott to the 1960 Olympic gold medal and world record in the 1,500-meter run. The concept is simple: run hard for a designated number of minutes, then run at recovery pace for roughly the same time. Then knock off another interval. The lengths of intervals and rests change, but ideally, each interval is faster than the previous one. It’s all about how you finish. Scott Molina took it further, leading the guys to a sub-5-minute final mile, but he was not the toughest in the group. That would’ve been Mark Allen.

  My key workout was the bike ride. We began and ended at Carlos & Annie’s restaurant in Del Mar. The Del Mar crew rode north fifty miles to Dana Point, through the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, picking up group members along the way. Dale Basescu, Mark Allen, and Charlie Graves often joined in Cardiff or Solana Beach, while Sylviane and Patricia Puntous, Marc Surprenant, Mark Montgomery, Kenny Souza, and I would often meet the pack in Encinitas. Our ride up was fun—joking, trading places in the pack, laughing, and getting a quick bite at our halfway mark in Dana Point. Then we turned around, dug in, and rode home like the world-class triathletes we were, with far less talking and much more intensity. “Coming back, you are on your own. No one waits for anyone,” Dale told a Triathlete magazine writer.

  By now, I started wrapping my press around myself like Olympic champions draping flags on their shoulders for the victory lap. Some of my comments make me cringe when I read them now. My sassy, smart-ass side came out big-time in the “Material Girl” cover article from the November 1985 issue of Tri-Athlete magazine. I was made up as a hot ginger model, with bare shoulders, curled and pouffed-out New Wave hair, bling around my neck and wrists, and plenty of sassiness. And sexiness. The author, Bill Katovsky, was the founder of Tri-Athlete (which later merged with Triathlon to become Triathlete). When he ran Tri-Athlete, Bill tended to do crazy things. He even put me on a cover one time wearing a sausage-case leather miniskirt and holding a kid’s tricycle!

  For this article, Bill decided to play on the badass attitude of Madonna, who also burst out of nowhere, crucifix dangling from her chest, to shock the world. She did it with her album Like a Virgin, her song “Material Girl,” and nonstop video rotation on
MTV. I adopted much of her attitude in the ten-page feature (the largest I’ve ever received).

  When we conducted the interview, I had just won the Yanmar Japan Ironman, which led to Bill’s telling first question: “You’ve finally won a race that counts . . . is it a dream that’s finally come true?”

  That speaks to my priorities then that it took three and a half years after almost winning in Kona to finally win an Ironman event, even though much of the world (except my close friends) regarded me as a superstar. The fact it happened months after I signed a five-year deal with Bridgestone Tires, a Japanese company, didn’t hurt. In Japan, victory brings honor to athlete and sponsors alike, and I wanted my sponsor to feel very, very honored—and to continue feeling that way.

  My answer revealed a lot about my headspace: “After the race, I spent ten days traveling in the Far East.” I’d headed off to China to visit Robin Donaldson, one of the girls in my high school surfing crew. “I didn’t even think it would be worth talking about when I got home. I was pleasantly surprised that word did get around and people took notice.” I heard that Mark Allen said, “God, we’re going to have to go down to San Diego, and try to pry her head out of the 747.” (Probably because my ego would be incorrigible.)

  Then, in another response, I revealed how unfamiliar winning was to me. “Before the Japan race, I had an athletic breakthrough. I felt I had finally come of age in terms of where I’m at in the sport. I had an inner feeling of contentment the entire time I was racing. It wasn’t a smile that meant I was going to win; it was a relaxed, calm inner knowledge that if I didn’t screw up, I was going to win that race. I kept saying to myself, ‘Don’t start smiling now, because you haven’t gotten to the finish line. Just take one step at a time. Afterward you can smile all you want.’ I went on a smiling binge for about a week.”

  False modesty aside, I told Bill that Japan was a huge victory for me. It also validated a comment I’d made in Triathlon earlier in the year, one my fellow competitors weren’t accustomed to hearing from me: “I have an ideal that I still want to achieve. It is to enter a race where I know I have done everything I can in preparing and training to win it. I would love to see how I feel about the outcome under those circumstances,” I said.

  I arrived in Japan a couple weeks prior. Bridgestone officials kept me busy with events and appearances. “I really felt like part of a team,” I said of Bridgestone at the time, “and after they arranged the seminars, set up the bike mechanics’ tents at the race and everything else, it was my turn—I really wanted to win the race for Bridgestone.”

  I also prepared for my race differently, visiting meditation gardens and shrines in Kyoto and using mantras for the first time in competition. I’d spoken to Mark Allen about visualization, which he used for racing. My goal was to overcome another Achilles heel, trying too hard too soon in Ironman-length races and making terrible tactical mistakes as a result, such as speeding up with eight miles to go in a marathon when you have an eight-minute lead. This time, I felt calm, knowing what I had to do to win. Except I almost missed the bike check-in, because Kathleen McCartney and I were absorbed in a shopping spree. Of all reasons . . .

  Race headquarters were in Hikone, a resort town of 12,000 in Shiga Prefecture, on the shores of massive Lake Biwa, the water-filled crater of an ancient volcano about 250 miles east of Tokyo. It is a beautiful, mountainous region. The Lake Biwa surface was subject to sudden changes in wave size and water temperature when the winds whipped up. We found out what happens firsthand when a bypassing typhoon brushes the area.

  The start was epic. The event aired live to an estimated 60 million Japanese viewers. Samurai warriors performed a ceremony, accompanied by fireworks and boats spraying fountains of colored water. Tens of thousands watched as the major fired a black powder, hand-held cannon to start the race. The recoil knocked him on his butt.

  I had a strong swim despite the wind, clocking one hour, three minutes and six seconds for the 2.4 miles. I emerged from the water in fourth place—overall. Only Dave Scott, Scott Molina, and women’s leader Robin Beck were ahead of me. Sally Edwards, Ardis Bow, and Kathleen, my chief competitors, all trailed. This was Kathleen’s first Ironman in almost two years. She had “retired” after the 1983 season, so she didn’t expect much of herself. I knew better after watching her morph from hospitalized sick person to 1982 Ironman champion in a day’s time.

  As I left the transition area to ride, the threatening skies opened up. The course was harrowing, with narrow eight-foot-wide roads, no shoulders, and dropoffs hundreds of feet in height. Imagine riding at high speed along California’s Big Sur coastline and negotiating the cliffside curves minus guardrails. That was the challenge. I relished it. This time, a melted Snickers bar did not ruin my day. I brought far healthier Japanese snacks, like inari, a seasoned and fried tofu bean pouch filled with vinegared sushi rice and topped with sesame seeds, roe (fish eggs), and avocado. I then attacked every hill and squeezed the juice from each mile. My plan on the bike was simple: to get so far ahead that the run could not take me down. I wanted at least ten minutes before starting the run. As it turned out, I hammered the bike, and reached the transition with a thirty-two-minute advantage.

  The most welcoming layout was the marathon course, flat and fast. I extended my lead over Sally Edwards while reciting my mantra: “Patience. Patience.” I didn’t overcook the opening miles, my fatal flaw in Ironmans past. A few hours later, I stood in Konki Park alongside Dave Scott and Scott Molina, third place overall, in addition to winning the women’s race by fifty-one minutes over Sally. Spectators and media were amazed that the only people who beat me out of 424 finishers were half of triathlon’s Big Four. “I don’t think anything like that will ever happen to me again,” I told the press.

  As for Kathleen? Considering it was her first race in eighteen months, she did great, finishing fourth among women, an hour and nineteen minutes behind me. Yet, I couldn’t help think of our history. No finish-line drive-bys this time, honey . . .

  In the “Material Girl” story, I had not yet embraced consistently winning and performing at the championship level, even though results like Japan showed I was doing just that. “The sport is going to do what it’s going to do—it doesn’t need me,” I said. “I don’t see myself having a big impact on the direction of triathlons, yet I perceive my attitude toward the sport as having a big impact on what I plan to do. I used to take a blasé attitude, ‘Well, we’ll see what comes up next year and then the next year.’ Now, instead of just looking ahead to the next season, I’m looking ahead to three years down the road. I’m really thinking career now.”

  Did I believe this deep down? Perhaps. But it wasn’t set in stone, or even a consistent thought. I loved the sex appeal and sizzle of the sport, and the bling that came from being famous because of it. “What a lot of people forget about those first few years is that Julie became famous to the general public first because of Wide World of Sports and how everyone reacted, and then she became famous within her sport later,” Sue Robison points out. “That’s backward from how it normally works.”

  Plus, it was the mideighties, triathlon was rising like a bullet, and the Southern California beach lifestyle was crossing over into music, fashion, surfing, and beach-oriented sports. The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles galvanized this buzz. I was right in the middle of it and the influence of triathlon on it. I kept seizing the moment. “I suppose I’m a material girl,” I told Tri-Athlete, playing being the athlete picked for the “Madonna” cover. “The business side of the sport is what interests me now. When I got back from Japan, I went out to dinner with several friends. After a few bottles of sake, I said that I only saw three or four triathletes who were really going to make it, and I wanted to be in that group. Once you see yourself in that position, it’s important to start taking the proper steps.” A Madonna-like comment, to be sure.

  I constantly took steps to shine in the eyes of promoters and the media. Today, we call this branding. Tr
iathlon became a major PR mission for me. Unlike many of my American peers, I competed in Europe, where appearance fees were plentiful and prize money was improving. Plus, fan response was through the roof. European fans are rabid about their sports, and a mighty endurance challenge plays into their deepest, most revered legends and myths. We were treated as heroes, pure and simple, and it factored into how I started to view my role. “I feel that’s one of my underlying goals—to spread the sport of triathlon worldwide,” I told Tri-Athlete.

  I also picked up on something else. If you were a non–ball sports athlete in the 1980s (in any era, really), you had to make yourself louder and bigger to get attention, and dollars. Since I sat atop the mantle of a sport, in a sense, I made sure to be noticed. It’s far easier to portray yourself with the bravado of a Madonna than to reveal insecurities of your true self. This led to a cringeworthy comment in the “Material Girl” interview:

  “My idea of fun has changed. Fun is flying first class, or at least business class, to new countries. When I’m traveling now I see guys and girls with their backpacks who haven’t had a bath in days. Well, that used to be my idea of fun. Now my idea of fun is being met at the airport by journalists and photographers, being whisked off to interviews and having interpreters run around with me wherever I go.”

  Or, how about this blast? “It’s really hard to get out in the morning and go for a run. They’re just piled up at my doorstep. Sometimes I can’t find the paper . . . but I still like doing triathlons, because it’s fun, and oh gee, I like doing them because I can meet guys and go to really neat places and go shopping.”