Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  A second blow came later when Craig Wilson, his former team’s star goalie, was chosen for the national squad. Craig did not work as hard as Dave, but he was more talented. Dave had always held fast to the belief that his hard work could trump another’s talent. This belief was, in fact, his most treasured article of faith—practically his entire life’s philosophy. Dave knew he was not the world’s most talented athlete, but he clung tightly to the conviction that he could be the best anyway by being the man who never quit. His Olympic near miss rattled that conviction.

  It did not, however, destroy the conviction. One way or another, Dave was going to persuade the cosmos to recognize and reward his work ethic. And so, when his dreams of ultimate success in the pool died, the broader dream stayed alive. Dave dropped water polo and explored different ways to challenge his body. He tried open-water swims. Then he learned about a brand-new sport that seemed worth a spin.

  DAVE’S MAIDEN TRIATHLON was, by decree of fate, one of the world’s earliest multisport races. The inaugural Turkey Triathlon was held in November 1976 in San Francisco and was organized by the local Dolphin Swim Club and South End Running Club. It was Patti, then in nursing school, who heard about it first and who invited her brother to join her. Dave not only leaped at the challenge but also recruited Verne and a few of his masters swimmers to make the seventy-mile journey with him.

  The race consisted of a 9-mile bike ride along the city’s tourist-packed, potholed embarcadero, followed by a hilly 4-mile run over Fort Mason to the San Francisco Yacht Club and back and ending with a 600-meter swim in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay. The race director was a crusty retired marine lieutenant colonel named Buck Swannack. His pre-race instructions struck Verne as little more than an excuse to say the word “survival” a couple of dozen times. There was no mention of course monitors or paramedics or directional signs or water stops.

  “You’re just going to do it!” Buck barked.

  Nursing a sore knee, Dave planned to complete the ride and stay on his bike to keep his sister company through the run, after which he would ditch the bike and swim with her. That was the plan. But when the race started and the stud athletes (or the “peacocks,” as Dave called them) shot ahead of them, instinct took over, and he dropped his sister to chase after the leaders. Whereas the peacocks who had come to race had their running shoes waiting for them in a makeshift transition area on a patch of grass at Rincon Park, Dave had to dump his bike there, run through a nearby parking lot to his car, pull his keys from their hiding spot under the bumper, and grab the “oil-changing, river-rafting, lawn-mowing” tennis shoes he had stashed inside the vehicle. Despite the detour, Dave passed every peacock but one, finishing the race thirty seconds from victory and claiming the coveted second-place prize of a frozen turkey.

  Patti knew her brother well enough to be neither surprised nor upset by the competitive fever that had taken hold of him.

  “I wanted to see what I could do,” he told her.

  “I know, Dave,” she said.

  Patti understood that these words meant something different on her brother’s lips than they would on anyone else’s, because he said them often. Coming from Dave they expressed nothing less than a soul-seizing desire to discover the ultimate limits of his physical and mental endurance and were based on his understanding that the way to fulfill this destiny was to try harder than anyone else did, or could, and to always try harder than he himself ever had. They codified the highest standard in a certain field of endeavor, a standard that very few athletes could dare to embrace. A hero’s credo.

  Dave’s search for the right fit for his unique blend of athletic aptitudes and proclivities continued. There must be some sort of competition out there whose winner was the last man standing—not the fastest or the most coordinated or the most talented in any particular way but the man who tried hardest and never quit.

  In September 1978 Dave flew to the island of Oahu to compete in the Waikiki Roughwater Swim, a major open-water race. The challenges that made open-water swimming different from pool swimming—surf, currents, brine, contact with other bodies—made the race a good fit for Dave, for whom the more grueling a challenge, the better. He did well, finishing ninth overall and second in his age group.

  Still, though. Ninth. Second. That was not greatness. Dave needed something more grueling still.

  At a meeting before the race Dave had been approached by a lanky, middle-aged navy commander named John Collins, who handed him a flyer promoting an event scheduled to take place the following January.

  “It’s called Iron Man,” he said. “You do the same swim you’re doing tomorrow, then you ride a bike 112 miles and run a marathon. We did the first one earlier this year—twelve of us. I think you’d be a good candidate.”

  Dave had finally discovered the particular athletic calling he’d been looking for his whole life. But he didn’t know it yet. He was more than a little intrigued by the challenge and flattered by John’s suggestion that he would fare well, but the event was too small. Twelve people? Come on. Dave craved glory on a big stage. And so, upon returning to Davis, he crumpled the flyer and threw it away.

  The following spring Dave visited his sister Patti and her husband, Rick Baier, in Los Angeles. On a previous trip there Dave had met and befriended Rick’s friend Mike Norton, a radiology intern at UCLA and a runner. Dave and Mike ran together whenever Dave came down from Davis, and they did so again on this fateful visit.

  While they ran Mike told Dave about a lengthy feature article on the second Iron Man, which had also drawn only twelve participants, recently published in Sports Illustrated. When they got back to Mike’s place he showed it to Dave.

  “You should do the next one,” he said, agreeing with John Collins’s assessment that Dave was a good candidate for the three-sport, all-day endurance test.

  Dave read the article with undisguised interest and some dismay. Sports Illustrated. If he had only accepted John Collins’s invitation, he could have been reading about himself right now!

  “Look at the times,” Mike urged. “It took the winner more than eleven hours to finish the damn thing. You could beat that. You could win it!”

  Dave needed no more convincing. A new vision took shape in his mind. Suddenly this Iron Man thing was a big deal. And it truly seemed custom-made for the unique athlete he was. When he left Los Angeles Dave was buzzing with the feeling that the pathway to his destiny had at last opened up before him.

  When he got home Dave called his folks. Dot answered.

  “Mom, I have a plan,” Dave said. “And it starts now.”

  DAVE BEGAN TO TRAIN. He dropped $900 on a Raleigh Professional racing bike and rode it all over Yolo County, through blazing summer heat and valley winds. He ratcheted up his running and signed up for September’s Sacramento Marathon, figuring the marathon leg of Iron Man should not be his first 26.2-miler. Knowing no better, Dave blitzed the race in 2:45, finishing twenty-third in a field of 1,850 runners, most of whom were far more experienced than he was.

  One day in the middle of all this Dave’s friend John Reganold bumped into Dave’s girlfriend Sasha and asked about his training.

  “Do you think he can do it?” John asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He already has.”

  “What do you mean, he already has?”

  “He already did those distances. In a workout.”

  She was only exaggerating slightly. As a sort of dress rehearsal for Iron Man, Dave had risen very early on a Saturday morning and swum 5,000 yards at Emerson Pool, then linked up with a bunch of local cyclists who happened to have a 103-mile bike tour planned for that day—but Dave had not toured, he had raced, dusting everyone.

  When he finished the ride Dave was met, by prearrangement, by Sasha, Jane, and Dot, whom he had instructed to bring drinks and snacks that he would use to refuel his muscles before he set out on the twenty-one-mile run that would complete the workout. They screwed up his order, bringing oranges when
he’d asked for bananas. Dave threw a fit.

  Dave harangued his volunteer support crew without pause as he drank and ate and made ready to run. Future viewers of his Ironman performances on ABC television would become familiar with, even charmed by, Angry Dave, but in this surprise debut, Dave’s small audience was not amused. Dot, with a mother’s tolerance and long-suffering, was probably more hurt than upset. Sasha, whose bond with Dave was not so deep, would not be his girlfriend much longer. And Jane, if she was like most sisters, would have been half annoyed, half amused by Dave’s antics. Perhaps she would even have bitten her lip to suppress a laugh as Dave struggled to squeeze his feet, swollen from five hours of pedaling, into his running shoes.

  Sasha went home, abandoning the plan to supply her boyfriend with additional drinks throughout his run. When Dave reached the next designated refueling stop eight miles down the road and found nobody there, he became even angrier. Within a few more miles he was so dehydrated that he no longer had the energy to be angry. Sixteen miles into the run, Dave saw—in double vision—the family sedan approaching. Dot had decided her boy had been punished enough and had come to his rescue with water. Dave thanked his mother by yelling at her some more.

  He could apologize later. This new rage gave him energy, and he needed all the energy he could get.

  The water blessed Dave with a strong second wind. As he floated blissfully through the last mile, he passed a group of friends standing together on the curb of a downtown Davis street. Unable to contain himself, Dave spontaneously shouted out a short description of the “workout” he had just done. All of them burst out laughing—not at what he had just done but at the childlike euphoria with which he shared it.

  After completing his 127-mile Iron Man dress rehearsal, Dave reviewed it and concluded that, aside from the dehydration episode, it had been easy. It had been, in fact, the most fun he’d ever had. He then analyzed his times, extrapolated, and estimated that he could complete Iron Man in less than ten hours—or more than seventy-five minutes faster than anyone had done it yet.

  Dave arrived in Oahu—accompanied by his ever-supportive parents and his best friend, Pat Feeney—brimming with confidence but outwardly humble, secretly intending to race an event that everyone else viewed as a test of survival. His goal was not merely to win but to blow people’s minds.

  Dave was not the only hotshot who had been lured to the third Iron Man by the second’s publicity. More than 100 men and a few women had filled out the one-page registration form and paid the $5 entry fee, including some ringers. Future mountain bike world champion Ned Over-end had come with his roommate Bob Babbitt. Future Boston Marathon race director Dave McGillivray’s name was on the start list. He had recently run across the United States. Olympic cyclist John Howard had also made the trip and was considered the favorite to win. Dave was not intimidated.

  Shortly after arriving on the island Dave learned that ABC had dispatched a television crew to film the race for Wide World of Sports—a Sunday-afternoon show that everyone watched in those days of thirteen channels. That buzzing feeling of stepping toward a long-awaited destiny returned.

  Better still, someone tipped ABC’s Jim Lampley that Dave was an athlete to watch, and so, as the sun peeked over the watery horizon off Ala Moana Beach on race morning, Jim hauled Dave in front of a camera and jabbed a microphone in his face.

  “Dave, what athletic background do you bring to this event?” Jim asked.

  “Uh, limited,” Dave lied, chuckling. “I had a swimming background. I swam in college, and I’ve done quite a few rough-water swims over the last four or five years. My running background? I’ve only run one marathon. I’ve been running for about two years. Cycling? It’s an unknown.”

  “Do you think the fact that you’ve only run one marathon is a big disadvantage here?”

  “No,” Dave said. “I usually train pretty hard year-round, so I think I can hang on with everyone at the end. I think I can pound it out, so to say, with anyone at the end.”

  Forget about athletic backgrounds, Jim. Forget about swimming, cycling, and running experience. My edge is mental. I can pound it out with anyone at the end. Nobody can outlast me!

  The Dave Scott who introduced himself to the world in this manner was the Dave Scott the world would always know. In almost every interview after the first he mixed self-mockery and sandbagging with cocksure, often antagonistic, bravado. His answers always delivered a version of the same basic message.

  I’m really not at my best right now, Jim, but I’ll probably destroy all the clowns in this race anyway.

  The 1980 Ironman was over as soon as it started. Dave had a four-minute lead when he waded out of the placid waters of Ala Moana Basin, where the swim had been moved, over Dave’s protests, when a gale producing twelve-foot waves had come along and made the original Waikiki Beach swim course too dangerous to use. (This did not stop Dave from practicing there at the height of the storm on the day before the race, along with a friend who wound up having to be rescued by Coast Guard helicopter.) He ran straight across the beach and into the women’s changing room. No matter. The first of the three women in the race would not need that space for another thirty minutes. Dave exchanged his swim brief for a pair of wool cycling shorts, a white cotton muscle shirt, and long tube socks, as if deliberately aiming to make ABC’s footage of the race look vintage within just a year or two.

  Dave threw a leg over his bike. Pat Feeney, who would serve as Dave’s Ironman factotum throughout his career, then set about duct-taping Dave’s right shoe to the right pedal. This was a trick they had picked up from the recently released film Breaking Away. Taping the feet to the pedals—a technique that would be made obsolete by the advent of clip-in shoes and pedals five years later—was purported to provide the advantage of better pedaling efficiency. It came with the obvious disadvantage of causing the rider to fall over if he stopped. Before the race Dave had thought he could live with this disadvantage, but in confronting the reality of the risk, he changed his mind.

  “Let’s just do the one foot,” Dave said.

  Pat shrugged. A physicist, he was tempted to point out that if Dave wasn’t going to ride with both feet taped, he might as well ride with neither foot taped, but he held his tongue.

  Dave rode off, one foot duct-taped to a pedal, with almost violent intensity, as though he had been given bad information about the distance of the race. He was expecting this John Howard guy to blow by him any minute. Little did Dave know he would be twenty miles down the road by the time John finally left the water, having no hope of catching the man with a limited athletic background—although he certainly tried, blazing through the 112-mile bike course in four hours, twenty-eight minutes, a time that few professional triathletes could match today despite the benefit of such innovations as clip-in pedals, aerobars, and carbon-fiber frames.

  The day turned muggy, but Dave embraced the wet heat as a relief from the cold and rain of the Davis winter in which he had completed his training. His body seemed to come alive in the humidity, which had the opposite effect on almost everyone else. Dave liked anything that made a race harder, believing that every enhancement of the basic challenge increased his mental advantage over other competitors. The elements were just one more factor that made Iron Man seem like a thing he had been allowed to design himself, to ensure his own dominance.

  There were no road closures, course markers, aid stations, or support staff. Dave had a single police motorcycle as an escort, and his parents followed him in a rented woodie wagon with a spare bike on top and food and drinks in the backseat. He ran red lights and stop signs and had a few close encounters with cross-traffic that had the right of way.

  Two hours into the ride, Dave’s taped left foot was killing him. Pat had wrapped it too tightly, cutting off circulation. Dave realized they probably should have practiced the technique before the race. He also decided he probably shouldn’t adopt any more racing techniques from movies.

  By the ti
me Pat Feeney freed Dave’s throbbing foot from the right pedal, Dave held a twenty-five-minute lead on John Howard. He had not seen a single competitor since the race had started six hours earlier. In the changing room (men’s this time) he exchanged his cycling clothes, such as they were, for a skimpy pair of running shorts, no shirt. A race official then directed him to a scale, where he had to pass a weigh-in before being allowed to finish the race. Too much weight loss meant too much dehydration.

  “Wow, you’ve only lost one pound!” the woman said.

  In all the excitement she somehow failed to notice the liter bottle of water, full and weighing two pounds, that Dave held, having just received it from a fast-thinking Pat Feeney.

  Dave started running, and again his pace seemed to betray a dangerous ignorance of how far he had to go, not to mention obliviousness to how far he had already come. But Dave was feeling totally at home as an athlete for the first time in his life. He had vowed to transform Iron Man from a test of survival into a race, and he was doing it. Every previous Iron Man finisher had walked significant stretches of the marathon and done little more than shuffle during the running parts. Dave clicked off steady sub-eight-minute miles and did not walk a single step except when he stopped to relieve himself in some bushes.

  The finish line of the 1980 Iron Man was an almost invisible piece of string held up by race director Valerie Silk and a volunteer on a quiet street in Kapiolani Park. Expecting a little more fanfare, Dave fittingly ran right through it, stopping only when Valerie shouted after him, “You’re done. You won.”

  A LEGEND WAS BORN. Dave’s time of 9:24:33 bettered the existing course record by an hour and fifty-one minutes. Runner-up Chuck Neumann, who passed John Howard during the marathon, did not finish for another hour, by which time Dave had dressed; stretched; eaten massively; talked over the whole experience with Verne, Dot, and Pat; and done interviews.

  “Are you going to retire?” asked Carol Hogan, a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser.