Iron War Read online

  After meeting Mark head-on, Dave, who wore no watch, counted how long it took him to reach the turnaround—about two and a half minutes. He did a quick mental calculation and learned that he would have to outrun Mark by thirty seconds per mile over the remaining distance to nip him at the finish line. It wasn’t looking good. Dave resolved to make the best game he could of the last ten miles. At least make him earn it, he told himself.

  Fortunes can turn with shocking suddenness in an eight-and-a-half-hour race. At the Bud Light can Mark felt strong and confident. At mile seventeen, a pair of trapdoors opened in the soles of his feet, and his energy poured into the underworld with the instantaneousness of a vacuum flush. Trying to maintain composure, Mark walked through the next aid station so he could eat and drink a little more than usual. He might as well have eaten sawdust and drunk air. He resumed running but could not regain his earlier pace. Another mile down the road, at the next aid station, he pulled up and walked again. The downward spiral continued. The stretches of jogging became shorter as the walk breaks lengthened. Mark began to feel a troubling tightness in his stomach and intestines. Assuming he had to pee, he tried to go as he walked but could not urinate. Meanwhile, the time-gap reports brought ever-worsening news.

  Dave was coming. And somewhere, perhaps, Madam Pele was laughing.

  A single motorcycle bearing an ABC cameraman accompanied Mark as he struggled along the interminable “homestretch” toward Kailua. Behind him the Man chased him inside a cocoon of media and official race vehicles, a symbol of the respect he had earned through past heroic wins. As Mark approached the twenty-four-mile point, still leading Ironman with barely two miles to go, a slow tide of these vehicles crept upon him from behind. Among them was a decrepit-looking white van with a camera crew inside. It pulled even with Mark, paused momentarily, and then drifted ahead.

  Dave Scott was on the other side of that van—and for good reason. Dave himself was on the verge of collapse at this point. He had carved himself hollow in the effort to catch Mark, and as he claimed his reward for that effort, he did so in fear that if Mark was able to muster any kind of response, any answer at all, Dave would crumble to sand. So when he saw the opportunity presented by the van’s obstruction, he darted to its far side and passed Mark invisibly.

  You again.

  According to the lore of Ironman, Mark never saw him. But he says he did. He told the LA Triathlon Club, “On the other side of that camera van, I was able to sneak a look around. And, as I was walking and he was running, I thought, Damn, he looks really good now!”

  That line drew a good laugh, and Mark laughed too. But he wasn’t laughing when it happened. In fact, he cried. Grief and accumulated frustration overcame him as his personal bogeyman disappeared ahead of him, yet again.

  Then the real trouble started. Mark ducked into a portable toilet to relieve himself and pissed blood. Now he had a new reason to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. Upon finishing—still in second place, remarkably—Mark reported his condition to the medical staff and was rushed to the hospital, where tubes were snaked down into his stomach via his throat and water was flushed through in an effort to stop the bleeding. A surgeon told Mark he would have to slice him open if it didn’t work. Mercifully, it did. But nothing could be done about the pain in Mark’s spirit, which was searing. Like a heartbroken lover, he could not take his mind off his loss, his thoughts returning to it again and again with magnetic force, no matter how many times he pulled them away. Getting over it seemed impossible. The only relief he could imagine was falling asleep and never waking up.

  What could I have done differently? Mark asked himself. How could I have trained any harder than I did? What could possibly be missing in my strategy?

  Shortly after Mark woke up in his hospital bed the morning after Ironman, a nurse brought him a copy of the local paper. He read the account of the race. In it Dave Scott, who may or may not have known of Mark’s medical emergency, complained about how Mark had ridden his wake and slapped his feet in the swim. Mark was dumbstruck—and incensed. Talk about kicking a man when he was down.

  The struggle between Dave and Mark had crossed a line. It was personal now. Grip continued to brood over his tormentor’s provocation through a week of convalescence on Kauai following his release from the hospital. He spent most of his time there sitting on the beach, dictating the fresh story of his latest Ironman disaster into a tape recorder so that Bob Babbitt could later transcribe the words, polish them up, and plug them into a book that had been conceived to celebrate and cash in on Mark’s first Ironman victory. In his wounded frame of mind, Mark could not resist taking a shot at Dave that wound up on the last page of his book.

  “Dave felt frustration because it was a hard race,” Mark said, affecting a tone of disinterested analysis. “Dave had to deal with his race and his domain slipping away from him and the pain it took to bring it back into his grasp. He wasn’t comfortable. He was pushed beyond the point where he was in control of his own race. If you’re forced to dig deep in your reserves, you get pissed off. Sometimes after an experience like that, you are forced to look hard at the dark side of yourself. Unfortunately, you might not like what you see.”

  Sales of Mark’s book would be predictably disappointing. Pro-Grain cereal wouldn’t last a year.

  1988

  For several weeks after the ’87 Ironman Mark was through with the race forever. He gorged on fast food and drank like a college student, flouting doctor’s orders to be gentle with his stomach until he fully recovered. For several more weeks after that, beginning around the time his recurring nausea abated, he vacillated. Then he decided to give it another go. Still not knowing what he could have done differently, he did nothing differently. He skipped Nice a second time. He trained the same way he had the year before. He returned to Kona on another winning binge.

  At Thursday afternoon’s press conference Mark instinctively scanned the room for Dave. He was not there. Race emcee Mike Plant’s first announcement from the podium was that Dave Scott had just officially withdrawn from the race with a knee injury. The news was less than shocking. Dave had already missed his last two scheduled races with a bum knee. Desperate to salvage another disastrous year with another Ironman miracle, he’d come to Hawaii anyway; tested the knee with an easy run Thursday morning; and stopped almost immediately, ready to put his fist through a wall.

  Mark reflexively looked around at the remaining male contenders. He saw no one who could seriously challenge him. Oh, well. He would have liked to claim his first Ironman title by defeating Dave, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  Madam Pele struck early that year. Mark had just come out of the swim-bike transition and crested Pay-’n’-Save Hill when he suffered a tire puncture. A steady stream of competitors pedaled pitilessly past Grip during the four minutes it took him to install and inflate a fresh tube. He mounted and spurred his steed angrily. By the time he reached Hawi, he had overtaken most of the opportunists. All was not lost.

  Then he flatted again.

  “I must have hit the only two pieces of glass on the entire 112 miles of the Queen K Highway,” he said afterward.

  A classic photo, taken by Tracy Frankel, captures a moment soon after Mark’s unlikely second flat. His bike is lying on its side in the dirt like a stubborn mule that has quit at the worst possible time. Mark stands over the recalcitrant beast, looking down upon it, wearing an expression that says, I cannot believe this! His arms are splayed outward, his palms turned skyward, his fingers curled and separated into claw shapes, as though he is imploring a higher power to account for his undeserved misfortune.

  Mark wheeled into the bike-run transition a hopeless eighteen minutes behind the leader and eventual winner, Scott Molina. He ran well, but it hardly mattered. What mattered was that the world’s best triathlete everywhere but Hawaii finished fifth in the juiciest opportunity he would probably ever have to steal an Ironman win.

  Dave took
small satisfaction in watching Mark fail from the back of an ABC camera van. He was galled by how little his withdrawal from the race had affected the pundits’ predictions. It seemed they’d already written him off and anointed either Mark Allen, or the fast-rising Mike Pigg, as the next Ironman champion. Dave’s anger increased when he saw the latest Triathlete magazine readers’ poll for the best male triathlete. He was ranked eighth. Eighth! Dave flew home hell-bent on punishing every man ahead of him on that list and shaming every last person who had dared to vote for them.

  “There are an awful lot of guys who aren’t going to like getting beaten by a 35-year-old next year,” Dave told a fan before leaving the island. “If you’re betting with your buddies on any of the races I’m at, be sure you bet on the right guy.”

  1989

  Yet again Mark resolved to renounce Ironman and focus on shorter, more temperate races. The hours and days immediately following an Ironman race are not the most reliable moments to make final decisions about one’s Ironman racing future, however. It’s like trying to decide whether to conceive another child in the hours and days after a long and painful labor.

  As time passed Mark’s attitude evolved. By December he was vacillating once again, and by January he was ready for round seven of the fight of his life. Ultimately the decision to give Ironman another shot came rather easily. All Mark had to do was think through the consequences of not going back to the island. He could give up on any other dream, he realized, quit any other chase, and eventually move on. But not Ironman. Abandoning that dream would haunt him for the rest of his days. No matter how many more races he might win in his career as a triathlete, and no matter what dragons he might slay in his life after triathlon, the voice inside that called him a coward would never be silenced if he let go now. Mark did not know if his best possible effort in Kona would be good enough to allow him to beat Dave Scott and win the race. But he knew he hadn’t achieved his best possible effort there yet, and he knew he had to keep trying until he did. Only then could he move on. This particular challenge had long since ceased to be about a certain course and a certain rival. It had come to be about claiming himself, and his life—about finishing what he’d started when he cleared out his meager savings to buy a bike suitable for his first Ironman six years before.

  Having decided to go back, Mark next asked himself what was the message in his pattern of failure in Kona. Not one to believe in coincidence, he knew it was no accident that he had lost the race so many times in so many ways. What was the lesson that the race had been trying to teach him and that he had so far refused to learn? Just tell me, Mark implored of the island. I don’t care what it is. I’ll do it.

  An answer came. Indeed, the answer, Mark discovered, lay in his very questioning. At last Mark had stopped trying to force himself on Kona and on Ironman and was allowing the island and the race to guide him. And where these spirits guided him was beyond—past and through the false limits he had set.

  “The island is like truth serum,” Mark would reflect after his retirement from triathlon. “It could see that I really wanted to win this race, but I wasn’t willing to do it under the terms and conditions of the race. I wanted to win in a certain way—putting in a certain amount of training, going through a certain amount of pain—but what it was going to take was going to a whole different level.”

  Mark vowed to go to a whole different level in his preparation for the 1989 Ironman. The perfect opportunity to do just that landed in his lap when his frequent training partner Scott Molina, now the defending Ironman winner, invited him and Julie Moss (to whom he had just become engaged) to spend six weeks training with him and his wife, 1987 Ironman winner Erin Baker, a native Kiwi, in New Zealand. Rob Barel, a great Dutch triathlete, and Colleen Cannon, the reigning U.S. women’s national champion, also accepted invitations from Molina and Baker. Mark welcomed the rarefied training camp as a chance to completely eliminate all of life’s distractions and to focus exclusively on training and get his mind right for Kona. The group convened in the middle of March. Mark and Julie rented a house in the coastal village of Sumner, five miles from their hosts’ home in the Christchurch suburb of Lyttleton.

  There was nothing to do, and nothing Mark wished to do, but train, eat, and sleep. He slept nine hours a night and napped for an hour or two in the afternoons. He ate hearty meals of stir-fried vegetables, fruit salads, pasta, and other high-octane fare prepared by Colleen’s husband, Howard Kaushansky, an excellent cook and the only nonathlete in the group. Almost every remaining minute of each day was spent swimming, riding, and running.

  Molina saw the difference in Mark’s mind-set straightaway. When they’d trained together in the past, it had always been Molina who’d wanted to go the extra mile. Now the roles were reversed. However far Molina, known as the hardest-working man in the sport, wanted to go, Mark wanted to go that far plus a mile.

  Until that point in his career Mark had never trained longer than six hours in a single day. In New Zealand he routinely packed in seven or more hours of exercise between sunup and sundown. Each day the group challenged itself to do something more ridiculous than the day before. In one three-day stretch they rode 110 miles from Lyttleton to Hanmer Springs, stayed overnight and trained in Hanmer the next day, and then rode five and a half hours back to Lyttleton. On another occasion the group ran for two and a half hours, from the base to the summit of Mt. Herbert, gaining 3,000 feet of elevation, and back down.

  It was from none other than Dave Scott that Mark borrowed the notion of challenging himself with training days whose duration more closely matched that of Ironman. Mark had seen many interviews in which Dave had talked about how different an eight-plus-hour race was from a six-hour race, contending that Ironman becomes all mental after six hours and never failing to point out that although any fast fellow can win a six-hour race, a special mental toughness is required to win Ironman.

  “I think I have the mental perseverance to outendure anyone in this race,” Dave told ABC in 1983. “The topography and the terrain are mentally stifling. I think that most people lose their concentration after about five hours. They give up. It’s not physical; it’s the mental concentration. If you’re used to having a partner to train with, or a nice pretty setting to work out in, you come over here to Kona, it’s like training on the moon.”

  Mark had previously dismissed such remarks as digs at himself—attempts to belittle his wins at the Nice Triathlon, which happened to be a six-hour race. But now, scarred and smarter, he realized that although Dave undoubtedly was needling him, he was also speaking the truth. Surviving beyond six hours really was more a mental than a physical challenge, and to meet that challenge he needed more practice in facing it than he got from Ironman itself.

  Grip got that practice in New Zealand, and he noticed an immediate payoff. He survived workouts he never would have imagined he could have done before, and his confidence soared. Nor did he merely survive. The harder he trained, the stronger he became. The training was like a code that unlocked a secret door to a whole new level of fitness.

  While in New Zealand Mark also took a long, hard look at himself and admitted that fear, above all, had held him back in Hawaii. He recalled the 1987 Ironman, when he had stepped off the plane in Kona into a blast of incredible heat and recoiled, intimidated both physically and spiritually. He recalled the 1984 Ironman, when fear of Dave Scott had impelled him to sprint recklessly ahead of the Man out of the swim-bike transition, only to implode in the marathon.

  “I realized the race was intimidating to me,” Mark said in a 2002 interview. “I didn’t like the wind. I didn’t like the heat. I didn’t like the humidity. And the race was just a little bit too long. And I was afraid of Dave Scott. Aside from all of that, I loved it.”

  Ironman was the only race on earth—and Dave Scott the only athlete—that still made Mark feel like the choker he’d been as a young swimmer. Mark had almost completely conquered his feeble former self. Almost. Ironman and Dave Sc
ott had become symbols of unfinished business, jeering voices in his mind, pushing him to just accept that he was and always would be a coward. There was nothing Mark Allen desired more than not to be a coward. So he chose to face those fears squarely.

  To face his fear of Ironman’s elements Mark imagined that the bleak, sun-browned hills of New Zealand’s South Island were the baked black lava fields of Hawaii’s Big Island, which was not a difficult thing to do. He went out of his way to ride against headwinds and waited for the hottest part of the day to run.

  To face his fear of Dave, and his own fearfulness in general, Mark performed regular “prayer-like meditations,” as he described them, in which he psychoanalyzed himself, digging up the roots of his fears in the hope of killing them by exposure. This may have been the hardest thing of all.

  IN MID–APRIL MARK FLEW to the sultry Caribbean Island of St. Croix to get his first real taste of the fruits of his New Zealand training. The America’s Paradise Triathlon was a traditional season-opening event of roughly half the Ironman distance that always attracted a number of top Kona contenders. Scott Molina traveled there with Mark. Mike Pigg, second at Ironman the year before, and Ken Glah, third, were also present. Dave Scott was there as well. But chance thwarted Mark’s anxious wish to measure himself against Dave when Dave suffered a flat tire that took him forever to fix, allowing Mark to win easily. Dave did, however, salvage the moral victory of recording the fastest run of the race, besting Mark’s time by nineteen seconds.

  The rivals had not squared off for more than a year before that day, and they met again just one week later, at the World Cup Triathlon, a race of roughly three-quarters the Ironman distance, in Gold Coast, Australia. This time Mark flatted, and although he was quick with his tire change, he wheeled into transition one minute forty-one seconds behind Dave, who was gleefully attempting to drive the last nail into the coffin of Mark’s race with an aggressive running pace up the road. If Dave sustained that pace—and he would—Mark would have to produce the single greatest run in the history of triathlon to win. And he did.