Against the Odds

by John L. Pendergrass

  Unless of course you’re heading back from a mission; then it seems to takes an eternity.

  For me, the flights in South Vietnam and Laos were bad, but the missions over North Vietnam were terrifying. The evenings before I was scheduled to fly over North Vietnam were in many ways very similar to the evenings before I competed in an IRONMAN® Triathlon. It was the same style emotional roller coaster, a time to question your courage, your competence, your sanity.

  In both cases I would lie in bed wondering, “What the hell am I doing?” From a distance these physically difficult and dangerous challenges had a definite appeal. It was my opportunity to rise to the occasion, to do things that few people had ever done, to join an exclusive club, to go a step further than necessary. It’s always easy to be adventurous and fearless from afar. I’ve always had great armchair courage, it’s probably more of a curse than a blessing.

  As the day of reckoning got closer, the fear and apprehension would bubble to the surface. I would get the feeling that I had really gone and done it this time, I had overstepped, screwed up royally, and now I was getting ready to pay a big price for my foolish bravado.

  Next would come an even bigger barrage of self-criticism. I knew that I didn’t have to fly over North Vietnam, I didn’t even have to fly a combat mission. I could have safely earned my flight pay bouncing around on a transport plane (what the fighter jocks derisively called “trash haulers”) instead of flying over the most dangerous place on earth.

  There are some similar emotions for an IRONMAN® event. Why did I sign up for this crazy race? I could have done any short triathlon, no one knows the difference. Who says you have to compete, anyway? Why did I pay good money to do something so stupid?

  Eventually I would realize that all the self-criticism was pointless. Even though I had beaten myself to a pulp, I knew that there was no escaping, my time was coming in the morning. I would pass the evening sleeping fitfully, mostly lying in bed and brooding, an unpleasant mixture of anxiety, self-pity, and despair.

  On the eve of the battle, voluntarily taking on the great challenge makes no sense at all. There’s only self-doubt, loneliness, and hopelessness. I wonder what happened to my brain, what was I thinking?

  The reward, of course, comes at the finish.

  After a mission over North Vietnam, the trip from the flight line to the debriefing room is one of the best walks you’ll ever have in your life. If I had encountered anti-aircraft fire it was even better. Everyone in my squadron soon learned about it. The news was included in the intelligence briefing for upcoming flights and became a part of the flight line gossip. “Hey, Doc, those Viet Cong are after your ass,” someone would say, “you’d better watch it.” “I wasn’t worried,” I’d reply; surely one of the biggest lies I’ve ever told in my entire life. Just a few hours before I had sworn to myself that I would never fly another combat mission, now I was looking forward to the next time out.

  After an IRONMAN® Triathlon, it’s a little bit of the same thing; a feeling of pride and relief, mission accomplished. Your heart rate is back to normal (it goes up in both cases for different reasons) and you start thinking about your next race. You can forget pain just like you can forget danger; it’s easy to airbrush away the bad memories. The accomplishments never go away; they can be revisited many times.

  These are rich emotions; you’ve moved a little closer to the edge without getting burned. You’ve pushed your luck in a place you don’t belong and gotten away with it. You persevered in hard times, looking for that one crowded hour of life.

  Of course, not everyone sees life this way. It’s hard to describe the joys of the slightly irrational. Sometimes I try to explain all of this to my wife. She probably thinks I’m crazy. I’m not sure how she really feels; she seems to vacillate between admiration and resignation.

  Modern life and the good old days are coming together nicely. The more I think about my return to Southeast Asia for the IRONMAN race, the better the project sounds. I was stationed in Vietnam in those antediluvian times before the sport of triathlon had been invented. In those days, there was no such thing as an IRONMAN Triathlon. Fancy bicycles and expensive running shoes were still years away, Schwinn and Converse® were the brands of the time. When you got thirsty you drank water, not a sports drink. When you got tired you didn’t reach for an energy gel, you just pushed a little harder to get to the end. It was 1974, long after Vietnam, before someone thought to put swimming, biking, and running together in one continuous competition.

  Back in those Vietnam days, biking was an activity for kids or for those effete Europeans or, at best, back up transportation for poor Americans who couldn’t afford a car. Swimming was something the youngsters did in summer, except every four years when it showed up at the Olympics.

  Forty years is a long time, but the whole idea sounds more impressive to me as each day passes. Time does a lot of things. It marches on, it heals all wounds, it stops for no man, and it can even fly when you’re having fun. One thing time doesn’t do is soften my enthusiasm or dampen my accomplishments. In my mind, this IRONMAN® trip is getting bigger every day.

  THIS WHOLE IRONMAN® project happened on its own. There was no grand strategy, no master plan. I’ve always been reluctant to go too far into the future; there’s enough happening in the present to keep me occupied. I never thought of traveling around the world, bouncing from continent to continent, carrying a bicycle the way most people carry a suitcase, knocking off an IRONMAN Triathlon at each port of call. That was much too grandiose an idea, too pretentious to even contemplate.

  Instead, like most of my life, I simply followed along as one thing led to another, more like a passenger on life’s train than the engineer. Small challenges begat bigger challenges, short journeys became longer journeys, friends and family grew accustomed to seeing me leave town, my partners learned to no longer count on me for any meaningful work. These trips began to seem second nature, the preparations became routine, one race led to the next. It all seemed pre-ordained.

  The IRONMAN® adventure started the year I turned 60.

  At that time, my life was rolling along smoothly, almost on cruise control. My three children were out of college and off the payroll. There was no mortgage on the home, my office building was paid in full. I had a more manageable schedule in my medical practice with less night work and more free weekends.

  As the new decade approached, I noticed how things were changing. Store clerks all addressed me as “Sir.” The folks at the AARP wrote me regularly. I could see Medicare and Social Security just over the horizon waiting to welcome me into the Golden Age, the life of fulsome leisure. My children no longer saw me as a dictator, instead I was more of an enlightened monarch. The large bumps on the road of life had disappeared for the time being. I knew that the nursing home might be just a few years away, but it was time for a new challenge. This was the 19th hole of life and I needed something big to shoot for, something to stoke the fire in this decrepit, dormant body of mine.

  There were a lot of new experiences I could have tried. I could have worked on my golf game or maybe concentrated on becoming a better fisherman or perhaps enlisted in the church softball league. By and large, these things consist of large blocks of idle time with just a few micromoments of real action. At my age I need more bang for the buck in everything I do. I needed to do something that just a few people have done, something that bordered on the impossible, something that would require a big time commitment. In other words, a great challenge for a less than great body.

  Marathons, bicycle century rides, trail runs, they’re all tough, but I decided to aim even higher. Why not shoot for an IRONMAN Triathlon, the most difficult one-day endurance event in the world?

  I thought it over. At age sixty, it required a bit of an irrational leap of faith but from my easy chair it looked very doable, and after a few beers, I knew I was up to the task.

  Triathlons have been around for a while and the IRONMAN® Triathlon is the most
iconic of them all. The IRONMAN World Championship is held each fall in Hawaii and most people have at least seen bits of the competition on television. The IRONMAN name conveys strength, endurance, determination, perseverance—all virtues that I feared I was lacking. My body was flabby and saggy and my willpower was weak, but I knew that it would be now or never. Time waits for no man.

  I didn’t embrace the IRONMAN idea outright. I sort of nibbled at the edges. Over the years I’ve run some marathons and in the last few years I’ve done several triathlons.

  Since the concepts of time and distance are vaguely familiar to me, I knew I might be biting off too much. I broke the IRONMAN idea gradually to my wife, Polly. After more than 35 years of marriage, I’ve learned how to introduce new ideas. I’m nothing if not clever and subtle.

  “I’m thinking of doing an IRONMAN Triathlon,” I say one morning over coffee.

  “That’s nice,” she replies. “You’ve done those before, haven’t you?” My wife is an intelligent woman in good physical shape. She’s a great walker, covering several miles a day. However, race details and distances are a little foggy for her. Marathons, fun runs, triathlons, duathlons, 5 kilometer runs—they’re all one big blur to her.

  “No, I’ve done some triathlons before,” I say, “but I’ve never done an IRONMAN Triathlon.”

  “Is that the one in Hawaii?” she asks.

  “That’s the main one,” I reply, “but they have them all over the world.”

  “How far is the race?” she inquires.

  “The swim is 2.4 miles in open water, a lake or ocean,” I tell her. “Then there’s a 112 mile bike followed by a full marathon, 26.2 miles.”

  “Good Lord, how long does it take you to do all that?” she asks.

  “The race starts at 7:00 a.m. and ends at midnight,” I reply. “I’ve got to finish in 17 hours or less or it doesn’t count.”

  “Are you sure you’re not too old for all that?” she asks. “You complain about how hard it is to take out the garbage. Every time you cut the grass you need a couple of beers to recover. You know you’ll be 60 in a few months.”

  Uncertainty hovers, maybe she’s right. Things don’t move like they used to and getting out of bed in the morning takes a little longer. The other night while watching television I got stuck in my recliner chair. Maybe my day has come and gone.

  Then, with a reassuring smile, she looks at me and says, “I know you’ll do well.”

  IF THE sporting world was like the stock market, triathlon would be the great new growth stock for the modern era. Much like Google, Facebook, or some other high tech company, the sport has seemingly emerged from nowhere to become a widely recognized part of today’s culture. A few decades ago no one had heard of triathlon. Now most everyone has done a triathlon, wants to do a triathlon, or knows someone who has done a triathlon. Triathlon started slow and grew modestly for years before coming of age in the twenty-first century.

  It’s a young sport. The modern version of swim, bike, and run only began in 1974. Like a lot of modern trends, both good and bad, triathlon started in the land of milk and honey, the great state of California, before spreading to the rest of the country.

  Today, the principal governing body for the sport in our country is USA Triathlon (USAT), an organization responsible for selecting and training the elite athletes that represent the United States in the Olympic Games, the Pan Am Games, and the World Championship. Just as important, USAT also sanctions the many hundreds of triathlons held each year in this country, events ranging from short sprint triathlons all the way up to the full competition.

  The distances of the various triathlons vary. There are long ones and short ones, hard ones and tough ones, but they all have a common thread: swim followed by bike followed by run.

  In 1978, a group of endurance athletes living in Hawaii debated the merits of their particular sport. Is running a marathon harder than a 100 mile bike race? What about open water swimming with miles of big waves and strong currents? Who are the most fit—runners, cyclists, or swimmers?

  U.S. Navy Commander John Collins knew how to settle that question. Rather than argue about which is the most difficult event, he decided to do all three. Collins combined the three long-distance competitions held annually on the island of Oahu—the Waikiki Roughwater Swim (2.4 miles), the Around Oahu Bike Race (115 miles), and the Honolulu Marathon (26.2 miles). The races would be run in succession on one day, Collins decreed. He tweaked the bike course, reducing it from 115 miles to 112 miles for logistical reasons, but the swim and run were left unchanged.

  Three events, no breaks. The clock starts at the beginning of the swim and stops 140.6 miles later when you cross the finish line of the run. This is an IRONMAN® Triathlon.

  What a punishing mixture of events. Mile on top of mile, hour after hour, no respite from the moving clock. An IRONMAN Triathlon is cruel by design, a race without symmetry or logic. Many thousands of future athletes would have Collins to thank for creating one of the most daunting physical challenges of all time.

  Fifteen madmen started the 1978 race, and each received the now famous charge, “Swim 2.4 miles. Bike 112 miles. Run 26.2 miles. Brag for the rest of your life.” Collins proceeded to coin one of the most iconic names for a sporting event: “Whoever finishes first, we’ll call him the IRONMAN®.” What a great choice. What a stroke of genius. IRONMAN athlete, the name says it all. The IRONMAN Triathlon was destined to become the world’s premier multi-sport event, a brand that will eventually rival the Super Bowl®, the Masters, the Kentucky Derby. Collins surely had no idea of what he had created.

  Most of the credit for the boom in today’s IRONMAN race goes to Dr. James P. Gills and World Triathlon Corporation (WTC). In 1990, Dr. Gills, a well-known Florida ophthalmologist and an accomplished endurance athlete, bought the IRONMAN branded series of triathlon races and formed WTC. Since then, everything about IRONMAN racing has gotten bigger and better.

  Looking back, the men of 1978 were the founding fathers; they were present at the creation, the first of many thousands to nearly kill themselves for no logical reason. For special occasions like the 25th anniversary of the first IRONMAN race, these athletes return to Hawaii for recognition. It’s sort of like Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, but without the pinstripes. Today, these guys are older, they stoop a little, they are a little heavier, and their hair is thinner. They suffer from a variety of ailments, but that’s okay. These are men I can identify with, they look just like me.

  Like many people, I’ve been watching parts of these televised IRONMAN events for years and the special stories from the competitors are very moving. The courage and tenacity of these athletes are amazing and inspiring. Those who succeed are overcome with joy, it’s an elixir of euphoria. Those who fail, and there are always some, are crushed. Their disappointment and despair are so real, so deep. IRONMAN® racing is drama and suspense piled on top of sublime pathos.

  Probably the most memorable event in all of IRONMAN history happened at the 1982 IRONMAN World Championship. It was an historic finish shown repeatedly on Wide World of Sports and picked up by many regular news outlets. If your brain has room for just one IRONMAN memory, this is probably the one.

  Viewers of the day watched as Julie Moss, a 23-year-old former college student headed toward the finish line about to win the 1982 IRONMAN World Championship. She was tall, thin, and dressed in blue and white shorts and singlet with a funny-looking trucker cap anchored over her blond hair. Moss appeared to be moving along nicely but then, unexpectedly, as she approached the finish line, she began to weave and stagger. She fell on the ground, turned on her back, and then regained her feet. Race officials clustered around her, looking uncomfortable, confused. When someone collapses, the normal reaction is to come to the rescue. The officials wanted to help but may have been unaware of what they were permitted to do.

  Moss stumbled and fell again, probably no more than 30 yards from the finish line and victory. There was a growing cro
wd around her, encouraging her, doing anything legal to help. Several male competitors ran by headed to the finish, and then on the periphery of the crowd, another female runner flashed by. Katherine McCartney passed Moss in the final yards to win the IRONMAN title.

  Moss didn’t quit, though. She was on her hands and knees crawling like a toddler toward the elusive finish line. Not just a few feet, but 5, 10, 15 or more yards. At last, she collapsed on her back astride the finish line.

  Here is an athlete, crawling like a baby, totally exhausted, unable to walk, determined to finish no matter what the cost. The impression is dramatic and durable. An IRONMAN Triathlon isn’t just physical, it’s spiritual. It challenges the body and soul.

  So how can I earn the glory that comes from being an IRONMAN® finisher? Where do I go to put my name on the list?

  The IRONMAN triathlon in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii is the original IRONMAN race and also serves as the IRONMAN World Championship. In most cases you must qualify for the IRONMAN World Championship at another IRONMAN race, so that’s out for me. I’m going to be doing my very first one.

  There are another thirty or so IRONMAN races held around the world. These events are the same distance as the race in Hawaii and they are open to anyone willing to ante up the entry fee (some $500 or so and headed much higher) and sign away all their free time for four to six months.

  But my choices are limited. Because of the logistics involved, each race handles a maximum of around 2,500 athletes. The events in the United States are very popular and sell out quickly. Normally registration for the following year begins online the day after the race concludes. Usually it takes less than a day for the race to fill.