by Julie Moss
“She was really a mess,” Sue recalled. “I remember that I called her up, did not like the tone of her voice, and I knew she was in trouble. Mats was away with Mark so I told her to get out of Santa Cruz and come stay with me and my family. When she arrived, she was really sick and I put her to bed. The next day I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk, to see if moving would help her feel better. We started, but after maybe 200 yards, we had to stop. Julie was doubled over. She couldn’t continue. How was my best friend, the Ironman legend, unable to walk 200 yards?”
Besides clove cigarettes, I developed an obsession for seashells, which my brother noticed. “I call that period the ‘Great Shelling,’” Marshall said. “She was gluing shells on anything that would stand still . . . picture frames, mirrors, boxes, crucifixes, anything she could find. She made these fantastic shell designs; she’d collect the shells on the beach and had bags of them. I don’t know how many glue sticks she went through. It was so obsessive. She was delving into depressive behavior, shelling and smoking. If it were me, I would’ve been eating and drinking. She wasn’t exercising at all, and was smoking clove cigarettes like crazy, numbing out.”
The following March, Marshall took his own final step—he drank for the last time after battling the same insidious alcoholism that contributed to my mother’s death and ran amok on both sides of my family. “I think my getting sober was an awakening to her,” he said. “If I could check myself into a detox facility, then maybe she could look at what she was doing. She was just getting back into race announcing, and spending a lot of time with Lisette and Sue. When she moved here, she could feel the veil of depression slowly lift off. Then it was, ‘What am I going to do?’”
What I’ve always done—find some fitness and see where it takes me.
Meanwhile, Cindy knew a lot about people losing contact with their greater purposes and lives. As a career officer and leader within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, she saw the best and worst among fellow officers and citizens alike. “I started running when I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, after I joined the department,” she recalled. “There were a lot of crummy days on my job, and I needed that release. In law enforcement, you see one of two things: well-balanced people who make sure to take care of themselves; and people who end up in bars after and before work, a lot of divorces, things like that.”
After I returned to Carlsbad, she grew alarmed. “I looked at her and asked, ‘What’s with the clove cigarettes? Why are you doing this to yourself?’” Cindy recalled. “I’d never seen her in such a mess. We were all worried about her, and I was hoping we could steer her back to the things she loved—surfing, her friends in North County, and being the positive, helpful, fun person we knew, the person who inspired millions around the world.”
Cindy then took action to get me out of the dark place, and toward what I did well—making people feel good about themselves. “I took her up to LA, and she did some really nice motivational programs for the officers, just sharing her Ironman experiences and how they changed her life,” Cindy said. “The officers loved her, and she loved their response. I even think there might have been a date request in there . . .”
Lisette, a life coach for many years, saw beyond my suffering. She’d also observed my breakdown building over the years. She put her professional tools to work to help her best friend find some perspective.
“Her bottoming out had the added accumulation of slowly destructive behavior eroding away her foundation,” Lisette said. “In my opinion, Julie is very good on focusing her attention on others. ‘My career is all about Mark now.’ She was his copilot, and that was great. Same thing with Mats; it was all about Mats, at her expense. By the time Mats went off, she no longer knew who she was. She’d lost complete contact with her inner self—including the realizations she had and steps she took forward back in 1982.
“She was in a really tough space. Then she finally owned it. When we own it, find our purpose and strength again, and move forward, great things tend to happen. That’s what this whole decade has been about for her. Between her athleticism and intelligence, Julie is not your average person. Her potential is enormous and on a world scale. She’s finally coming into it in her full life, not just her racing.”
I smoked my last clove cigarette on July 28, 2009.
I put myself back together, reclaiming the “no quit” attitude for which I was known. It began with surfing. After riding shortboards almost my entire life, I began surfing again on a longboard. I’d played around with one when Mats and I came down for Junior Lifeguards. As I learned the differences in balance and footing, and started styling it on a longboard, I realized I should have been a longboarder all along. I surf better now than I did when I was younger.
Surfing was so incredibly healing. I couldn’t believe I’d unplugged from it. That Beach Boys lyric describes how surfing makes me feel: “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.” Paddling back out reminded me of the innate connection between surfing and triathlon. In surfing, there is a very big ohana, a family of surfers everywhere. We’re a huge tribe. There’s also an ohana among triathletes. When the two intersect, it is really fun, and it intersected often with my generation. The most noteworthy examples were Mark Allen and Scott Tinley, surfers and lifeguards well before they became triathlon legends.
I really loved my new longboard, a gift from Wingnut. I also noticed more balance, probably due to the yoga classes I was taking to return to emotional and physical relevance. The one-legged yoga postures certainly didn’t hurt. When I get a good wave, it touches my heart as deeply, or more so, than a good workout. Nothing beats having someone yell, “Great wave!” When you get a great ride, part of you hopes someone saw it, and when they do . . .
When I’m surfing, I feel like I’m fourteen and with my girls Emily, Robin, and Cindy, or watching my personal idol, Barbie Baron, showing us how it’s done. With triathlon, when I’m training and in really good shape, I feel twenty-three—my age at my first Ironman. I feel youthful, vibrant, powerful, and fierce. My body doesn’t betray me; it lets me think I’m that young.
As I settled into my routine of surfing, training, and yoga, I felt better. Fitter. Younger. Yoga is all about breath, and as my lungs healed, I could breathe again. I also started to dream, to visualize a purposeful life, one that took me away from the devastation of a lost marriage and the dark years in Santa Cruz. I started to reconnect to my inner self. How can I get beyond this and help nurture others, help them find their larger potential, become empowered in themselves?
First, I had to reclaim my inner Wonder Woman. I’d covered her with a cloud of smoke and negative thoughts and experiences, as well as the thick armor plate around my heart slowly building for over a decade. It would take some coaxing this time.
As I worked within, I also worked out, and plunged into training and competing. You know how some advise, “Throw yourself into your work?” when you’re going through something scary, difficult, or life-altering? Triathlon training was my work. It had paid the bills for many years.
I started getting my life back together. I put my Santa Cruz house on the market in April 2011. It sold within days. I had until June to move out—the month Mats graduated. A month later, I returned permanently to North San Diego County. I moved in with Sue and her husband for a month, while Marshall finished the remodel of the condo my mother left us in Cardiff. Then I moved into the place that remains home today.
Sometime late in 2011, wouldn’t you know it? Kathleen McCartney called.
She wanted to know if I was planning to run the 2012 race, the thirtieth anniversary of her victory and my crawl of fame. I was feeling better, noticing some fitness, and healing well. It took me five months to say yes to Kathleen’s suggestion, but the second I did, something else fabulous happened. After thirty years of circling each other’s orbits, only intersecting at races, we now lived in the same general vicinity at the same time. We started training together, and finally
became the friends both of us secretly wanted, but neither of us could really put together.
I flew to Kona, stepped to the starting line for my thirtieth anniversary race, and proudly made it all the way through. My time was quite slow, 12 hours and 35 minutes, but when I consider the decade that preceded that race, it was a very big inner victory.
Then Kathleen and I moved on an idea that first sprang up during a training ride, one that involved our 1982 race and a way to make it inspirational to others now.
CHAPTER 19
Can I Go Faster?
Kathleen and I didn’t want to end a wonderful year of reuniting, training together, and building our friendship at the Kona finish line.
We further discussed the possibility of reenacting our 1982 race, and drawing out the themes and lasting messages from it. Since we have such a great story, and stories drive themes and conversations, we decided to create a wider story that would serve audiences of women and men looking for that “spark,” or place to find fitness or whatever impassions them—and then to act on it.
Kathleen and I hatched something entirely new on a training ride in the Cuyamaca Mountains, east of San Diego. “We would sometimes spend weekends riding with the ‘Give ’Em Hell’ bike group, this amazing group of mostly men,” Kathleen said. “They were very, very good cyclists. I got Julie to go out, and one of the men was Bill Bachrach. ‘Oh my God, I know Bill,’ Julie said. ‘He’s one of the best motivational speakers in the world, and he helped coach Mark when Mark got his motivational speaking going. And Mark got him into Ironman one year and coached him in turn.’”
Kathleen and I discussed her idea further, then I rode up to Bill. “Hey, Bill,” I asked, “do you think Kathleen and I have a good story to speak?”
“Absolutely.”
Kathleen takes it from there. “We went back and had some Mexican food. Afterward, we said, ‘We’ll see you next week.’
“‘Well, I’m headed to a National Speakers Association convention in less than a week. You guys should go.’”
We went to the NSA National Convention in Indianapolis and started to build our story. It was very rare for two people to publicly speak together. We got the motivation and inspiration from Bill, who said, “You could go back and forth. You could take people through the [1982] race through your different perspectives, and weave your messages through that, and have a great story. Plus, you have incredible footage to share. You just have to craft it, work hard, cold call, and get your story together. Don’t wait. Get out there and do it.”
With that, Iron Icons was born.
Buoyed by Bill’s advice and support, we also spoke to thousands of Jazzercise franchise owners at their national convention in Las Vegas. That was redeeming for me, since Jazzercise, which started in Carlsbad, turned down my request for sponsorship in 1982. Ironically, newspaper publisher Tom Missett, the brother-in-law of founder Judi Sheppard Missett, was among those watching the Wide World of Sports broadcast at Dooley McCluskey’s. Judi created Jazzercise in the old Mayfair Market in Carlsbad, a grocery store staple in my childhood. While I was making news in the triathlon world, she was redefining dance in a sense by putting it to remixed music and presenting it in a very hip way to a nation and world looking to move more. Like Jimmy Watson said, there must have been something in the water in Carlsbad.
Kathleen and I explored the impact we could make on people trying to gain self-esteem, lose weight, find new purpose and meaning, and empower themselves. We talked about the fitness community as a proponent of not only personal health, but family and social health. We all want to be healthy winners, right? Aren’t we all, in different ways?
Before the 2012 Ironman, I’d told a reporter, “I hope I can incorporate all this swimming, biking, and running into my life in a way that feels more like a hobby, a lifestyle, instead of something that I cram in every ten years toward racing Ironman.” I was going to talk about bringing out the inner Wonder Woman and Superman in everyone, even as she was still in the process of reemerging in me.
Lisette felt I had something else to offer through speaking: how to pick ourselves back up when we fall, hard. “When we bottom out, we have to reassess everything. Starting with, ‘Why am I here?’ In retrospect, that was the biggest gift she could have in her life,” she said. “Didn’t feel like it, and we were all very worried about her, but look at where she stands now. I believe most of this decade, how it’s turned out for Julie, doesn’t happen if she doesn’t bottom out and doesn’t have to reassess her life while hurting and not sure what her next step is—or if she even wants to take it.”
For the next two years, we took those messages on the road with the Iron Icons Speaking Series. While we wrote a back-and-forth script, we made a solemn decision to speak extemporaneously after fumbling around with index cards at our first presentation.
I also made a commitment to see how fit, focused, and inspired I could become as a woman in her fifties. I vowed never again to take my health or fitness for granted. While many might have thought, “There she goes, diving back into another Ironman,” my inspiration drew from a far deeper source: the place that I determined to honor in myself and bring out in others, the place of deepest inner power and authentic truth, from where our larger voice and purpose rises.
In 2013, I stepped into age-group racing. When I was a professional, I never imagined myself sticking with the sport long enough. Young rock stars know this feeling as well; who imagines still being out there at fifty or sixty when you’re conquering the world at twenty-three? But I wanted to race again, and when you are aging through a sport, you move into age groups. “As my friends like to remind me,” I told a reporter, “I was famous for saying, ‘I’ll never race as an age-grouper!’ Well, you know those age-groupers are badass athletes.”
I qualified for the World Ironman 70.3 Championship in Las Vegas. While dismounting the bike, I knew I had no shot of placing, but enjoyed the greatest experience with Cherie Gruenfeld, an eighteen-time Ironman age group winner, thirteen-time World Champion, two-time Ironman 70.3 World Champ, and the record holder in the women’s 70–74 division. Talk about excelling into the golden years! She emailed me:
Julie, you came by me, and didn’t offer one excuse. You just supported me, said ‘Great Job.’ Obviously, something bad had gone on in your race, but do you know how many athletes would have tried to explain every little thing that went wrong? And why they’re so far back? You didn’t do that. You supported me.
To which I responded:
Cherie,
I never imagined having so many bike issues in one race but also never considered the possibility of not finishing. The flats took me out of racing, the overwhelmed tech crews did their best but I figured that after the 3rd flat I could walk the 6k in as fast as they could get back to me. The result was the surprising gift of being able to run with a sense of gratitude and joy. I ran to honor the time I’d invested to qualify and to see my season through all the way to the finish line.
I will be in Kona, not to race but to enjoy and support. I will look forward to seeing you there.
Three years later, I asked Cherie if she would send a few words to say to the ladies who participated in my Hoka One One #RunWithJulie fun run before the 2017 Ironman in Kona. The words of this beautiful, powerful woman ring true for anyone:
I wish I were with you here today and I’m sorry I won’t be there to see Julie write the bookend chapter in her unique story that started with her courageous finish in 1982. Enjoy your time with her today.
Each of you is in for an experience of a lifetime on Saturday—whether this is your first or you’ve been here many times—whether you’re racing or you’re a supporter. We’re all privileged to be a part of this wonderful Ironman family, in whatever capacity.
If you’re racing on Saturday, I would remind you that during the long day, there will ups and there will be downs. Throughout it all, remain Calm, Courageous, and Confident. And always remember, no matter how you’re fe
eling, that this is what you have been dreaming of and you’re on your way to realizing that dream.
For those of you here supporting, your smile and encouragement from the sidelines, whether for your loved one or a stranger, will give them strength and make them race stronger.
One final word to racers: At the end of the day, regardless of whether you met your goals or fell a bit short, what you have accomplished is something very rare and very special. Whether you finish in the glaring sun or under the Kona moon, you’ve done something to be very proud of.
Have a wonderful race day. Go make memories that will last a lifetime.
As I started racing more consistently. I took note of the dramatic changes in triathlon since my first Kona. Advances in technology, science, nutrition, and training programs allowed our sport to evolve into a highly technical, strategic athlete-to-course operation where every calorie is measured, every mile digitally logged. Now, you qualify for Kona by winning or placing highly in your age division in official Ironman qualifying races. In 1982, I signed up, stepped to the line in my oversized T-shirt, shorts, and a Bud Light trucker’s hat, and rode a ten-speed bicycle. The entry fee was $85. Today, it’s $950. “In 1982, we ate bananas and oranges from the aid stations and rode with PB&J sandwiches stuffed into our back pockets,” I told a reporter. “The sport has changed light years with improvements in nutrition and aerodynamics. I wouldn’t consider racing Kona now without my fuel belt loaded up with electrolytes and gels.”
We were wild entrepreneurs. We could get appearance fees; we could negotiate all kinds of things. It was really fun, and, thank goodness, Hawaii was seen as an exotic location, because race producers chose great locations in order to get airtime. The travel was awesome.
In 2013, one of those wild entrepreneurs—yours truly—received a wonderful honor. I joined Missy LeStrange and the late Jim MacLaren, the father of paratriathlon, as USA Triathlon Hall of Fame inductees at San Diego’s posh Bahia Resort. We were the fifth selection class. Missy won fourteen age-group titles in Kona after being introduced to the sport by her Masters swim coach, the great Dave Scott. Meanwhile, MacLaren finished the 1989 Ironman in 10:42—four years after his leg was amputated. Then he suffered another accident that left him quadriplegic. That led to the creation of the Challenged Athletes Foundation (CAF).
