Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Mark braced himself and broke the news in the next monthly phone call from his sire. He still did not know what he was going to do with his life, besides maybe lifeguarding for another year or so. He only knew he was not going to be a doctor.

  IN 1981 IT WAS next to impossible for a former college swimmer to work as a lifeguard in Southern California without getting involved in lifeguard competitions, which combine open-water swimming and barefoot beach running. In trying his hand at these races, Mark rediscovered his talent for running and excelled in the few low-key competitions he participated in, earning a new nickname along the way: Animallen. Mark had the ideal crossbred body for these hybrid races. A late growth spurt had brought him to a swimmer’s height of six feet, but he was built like a greyhound, with long tubes of springy muscle stretched across bird bones. His rib cage was massive, housing huge lungs that served him well on land and in the water. Mark had run a sub-five-minute mile in tennis shoes after swim practice one day in college when a teammate who said he couldn’t run challenged him to a race.

  Some of the other participants in these lifeguard competitions also dabbled in the fledgling sport of triathlon. Among them was Mark’s friend Reed Gregerson, who informed him one day that he had signed up for the fifth Ironman triathlon in Hawaii, which Mark had heard about but had never given much thought to before.

  The race took place on February 6, 1982. Reed acquitted himself well, finishing fifth. Two weeks later, on Sunday, February 21, taped coverage of the race was broadcast on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. San Diego’s own Scott Tinley had won, and there were viewing parties all over the county. Mark and his live-in girlfriend, Bernice “Bunny” Stein, hosted one at their apartment in Del Mar. Mark did not know Tinley but was keen to catch a glimpse or two of Reed.

  Those ninety minutes of television changed Mark’s life.

  Reed got little love from ABC’s cameras, but another familiar face did: Reed’s on-and-off girlfriend Julie Moss, a cute 23-year-old college student with ginger-colored hair from nearby Carlsbad, whom Reed had met in lifeguarding school. Julie had signed up for Ironman not because she had any personal interest in the ordeal but because she hoped that training with Reed might extend their relationship. He dumped her before the race, but she followed through with her Ironman commitment in the hope that she could win him back with a show of grit.

  The plan worked—and then some. Julie made her television debut when she passed the women’s race leader, Pat Hines, eight miles into the marathon. Julie built up a big lead over the next ten miles, but with eight miles remaining in the race, she began to weaken. At first her decline wasn’t so bad. She merely had to interrupt her running with walking breaks. But the downward slide continued and indeed went further than imaginable. As day gave way to dusk and dusk to night, Julie’s race also descended into darkness. Her stride became a shuffle, her shuffle a spastic, two-legged limp. The freckled waif, her small head lost underneath a baby-blue baseball cap, looked like a half-starved prisoner of war being prodded with a bayonet to walk barefoot over broken glass as she made the turn onto Ali’i Drive, the homestretch, still leading but losing ground quickly to another 23-year-old college student, Kathleen McCartney. A scant quarter mile from the finish line, Julie suddenly collapsed in a heap, falling like a condemned building imploding into its own foundation. She dropped in the way that already-unconscious people do—a way that betokens no quick rise. Yet within two minutes Julie was back on her feet. After peeling her body off the pavement, she steadied herself briefly with the fingers of both hands on the road, doubled over, before pulling herself upright. The television camera held a rear angle on Julie as she paused in that bottom-up position, presenting an excellent view of a murky stain on the seat of her light-blue running shorts and dark, semisolid matter dribbling down her inner thighs.

  Mark watched transfixed as Julie continued to wobble toward the finish line. Incredibly, she seemed to regain mastery of her limbs as she went, first swinging her upper appendages in an almost jaunty straight-armed fashion and then breaking into a herky-jerky quasi run. She survived to within about 100 yards of the finish line before dropping to the asphalt again. Two male race volunteers detached themselves from the spellbound and appalled crowd that tightly surrounded her by this time and helped lift her to her feet. At first it appeared clear that she would fall the moment they let go of her arms, which were held outspread from her body. But seconds later she pulled free from her concerned rescuers, waving them away like a dangerously plastered sorority girl refusing an escort home.

  Julie had stumblingly halved the distance to the finish line when she made the mistake of trying to run again and instantly planted her face on the street. As volunteers struggled to restore her to a standing posture a second time, Kathleen McCartney slipped by, unnoticed in the darkness and crowdedness and confusion, to win the race. Julie now crawled toward the finish line. The six-deep crowd of spectators, many in tears, who lined the barricades on either side of her applauded, less with sympathy than with awestruck respect, as Julie inched through the last bit of her personal Via Dolorosa and collapsed one last time, right on top of the finish line.

  Mark’s own cheeks were wet with tears when he stood up to turn off the television. He could not imagine ever subjecting himself to such a pointlessly extreme torment. Yet he could not stop thinking about the race, and about Julie Moss especially. The courage Julie had shown in finishing Ironman was the very quality Mark had lacked as an athlete ever since his father had turned away. Seeing such courage in girl-next-door Julie Moss made Mark believe he could find it in himself and made him want it more than ever. Over the ensuing days, Mark came to recognize that overcoming the choker within him was his greatest present need in life. And the way to do it had already been revealed to him.

  Two weeks after he saw Julie Moss crawl across the finish line in soiled shorts, Mark decided he would do the next Ironman. It was only seven months away, because the race organizers had elected to move the event from February to October so participants could train for it in the summer instead of having to prepare over the fall and winter months.

  When Mark got his next monthly call from his dad, Space asked what he’d been up to and Mark gushed about this cool race he had seen on television, where you had to swim 2.4 miles in the ocean, then ride 112 miles, then run a marathon—and it was in Hawaii, where it was really hot and windy. Mark’s dad showed little interest in the contest.

  “And my friend Reed did it, and he said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done,” Mark added.

  Silence.

  “And they’re doing it again in October.”

  Silence.

  “And I just signed up for it.”

  More silence. Then, “So, have you decided what you’re going to do for a living?”

  Mark was undaunted by his father’s indifference. He knew what he needed. Mark emptied his small savings and bought a used racing bike, certain he would never regret the risk he was taking. Indeed, the thrill of the risk itself was worth the risk.

  In April, three weeks into his training, Mark rose early on a Saturday morning and drove his old Volkswagen Squareback to the inaugural La Jolla Half Marathon. But he did not compete. Mark was not quite ready to run that far. Instead he watched some friends run. While he was there he bumped into Julie Moss for the first time since she’d returned from Ironman as a sudden folk hero. To Mark she seemed nine feet tall.

  “I saw you on TV,” he told her. “You were amazing.”

  “Well, I don’t know about amazing,” Julie said, blushing. “I crawled. I lost. But thanks!”

  “No, really,” Mark insisted. “It inspired me.”

  Julie studied his face and saw the truth of his words.

  “Anyway, if anybody should be doing triathlons, it’s you,” she said. “You’d kick ass. It’s not that different from a lifeguard competition.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m going to,” Mark said. “I’m doing the next Ironman in October.�
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  “Are you serious? That’s awesome! You’ll probably win it.” Julie paused. “Don’t tell Reed I said that!”

  Julie had just passed the California lifeguard certification test. A couple of weeks later she started her job training. On her first morning her new supervisor pulled up in a bright yellow lifeguard Jeep. It was Mark Allen.

  Reed also worked as a lifeguard. Three peas in a pod. Reed and Julie both planned to return to Ironman in October, so the couple formed a little training clique with Mark, swimming together at every opportunity, running on the beach, and going for long bike rides on days off. Reed found it harder and harder to keep up with Mark on those rides, while Julie quickly learned not to even try. She had said he would kick ass; he started with hers.

  WHILE MARK WAS TRAINING for the October 1982 Ironman, a bored young Sacramento lawyer named Jim Curl and an executive from Speedo swimwear, Carl Thomas, were working together to develop a national series of triathlons of a shorter and more welcoming format than the famous Ironman. The inaugural event of the United States Triathlon Series (USTS), which would be the world’s premier triathlon race series for the next decade, took place at Torrey Pines State Beach in Del Mar, just north of San Diego, on June 12. Mark was among more than 600 athletes who gathered at the race site just after dawn on that Saturday morning. Most of them, like Mark, were first-timers.

  A tremendous “I was there when” excitement charged the atmosphere. There was a shared, unspoken awareness that USTS San Diego would be remembered as a milestone in the young sport’s development, a quantum leap toward mainstream legitimacy. The event wore the trappings of a bona fide, professionally organized sporting event, including police support and sponsor signage—simple things that had been missing from the rinky-dink triathlons that had taken place here and there over the previous few years. Participants racked their bikes in long, mass bike racks, a new innovation that spared racers from having to return to their cars to execute transitions. A $2,000 prize purse was on the line. No doubt about it: This was the big time.

  A celebrity element contributed to the excitement. All of the sport’s few emerging stars were there. As Mark milled about in the parking lot where the transition area had been set up, nervously wondering what the heck he should be doing, he saw Dave Scott, whom he recognized from the Ironman broadcast he’d watched four months earlier. Mark also spotted the man who had beaten Dave in that race, local boy Scott Tinley. Striking and charismatic, Tinley always burned the candle at three ends, partying as hard as he trained and working the business side of sport as aggressively as he partied. Tinley would soon parlay his rising popularity into his own signature line of performance apparel and a back-page column in Triathlete magazine, which would be founded a few months later. Present as well was Scott Molina, who had cannonballed 600 miles from northern California in a VW Squareback just like the one Mark drove. Known as a blue-collar triathlete, Molina had been born and raised in the industrial San Francisco exurb of Pittsburg, one of seven children. He’d skipped college and had become a husband and father before his twenty-third birthday. When he raced his first triathlon he was living in a trailer and working as a clerk in a liquor store and as a short-order cook at the local K-Mart.

  The morning was cool and cloudy, typical of San Diego in June. As the competitors crowded against the water’s edge, which served as a start line, scores of spectators watched from the beach and from a concrete terrace behind them. A horn blasted, and all 600-plus racers dived into the surf together for a chilly 2-kilometer swim. Mark happily discovered that he was a stronger swimmer than all but a handful of his competitors, nestled comfortably into the lead pack, and left the water on the heels of none other than Dave Scott.

  On the bike, Dave, wearing a collared shirt, dropped Mark like it was child’s play, and another strong cyclist also got away from him. But he held off everyone else and completed the 35-kilometer bike leg in third place. Mark lost valuable time when, rookie that he was, he racked his bike at the wrong transition spot and struggled to put on a woman’s running shoes before realizing his mistake and locating his own Nikes. A spirited crowd of onlookers thronging around the bike racks sent Mark onto the run course feeling like a superstar. He quickly passed the guy who had passed him on the bike and moved into second place, four minutes behind Dave. Then he heard footsteps.

  Mark swiveled his head and saw a pack of three runners quickly reeling him in: Tinley, Molina, and a dark-haired stranger wearing bib number 6. The trio soon caught Mark and moved in front of him. As Tinley slid past him, he turned to Mark and spoke.

  “Who are you?” he said somewhat irritably.

  “My name is Mark Allen,” Mark struggled to say between breaths.

  “Oh, I heard about you,” Tinley said, seemingly relieved that it was not a completely unknown party who was challenging him. “Someone told me to watch out for you.”

  These words filled Mark with as much pleasure as any words that had ever been spoken to him.

  Spirits buoyed, Mark tried to hang on to the others, but they were running too damn fast. If he didn’t let them go, he wouldn’t finish. It was that simple. Mark fell back into his own rhythm as the others drifted ahead of him.

  When Mark was half a mile from the turnaround point on the 15-kilometer out-and-back run course, Dave Scott came chugging by in the opposite direction like a gas-powered machine, radiating strength and confidence. Then came Scott Tinley and Scott Molina together, without the third guy. Mark was within sight of the turnaround when he encountered the dark-haired fellow wearing bib number 6. He had clearly slowed down and was obviously hurting. Minutes after making the turn, Mark caught him, but the moment he did, the other surged. He was not going to go down without a fight.

  Number 6 was Dale Basescu, a former standout college swimmer also competing in his first triathlon. Dale was exactly the kind of guy who had always intimidated the hell out of Mark in the pool. He had an actor’s good looks and a chiseled body. He gave off the same aura of confidence Mark had just seen on Dave Scott, and, like Dave, he was as tough as an alligator.

  Dale’s countermove shook Mark like a bully’s two-handed shove to the chest. His spirit nosedived as he considered the pain he would have to embrace to match the stranger’s increased tempo. That old tape loop began to play in his head.

  I’m no match for this guy. Look at him. He’ll never crack. Fifth place is good enough. Hell, it’s my first triathlon! Why suffer any more than I am already if I’m going to lose anyway?

  But Mark did not quit this time. Instead of shamefully caving in to the voice of doubt and negativity as he’d always done in the past, instead of allowing those tired old self-sabotaging refrains to talk him into submitting to yet another alpha male, Mark fought back. That voice had always hated him. Now Mark hated it right back. He silenced the mutinous mouth inside him.

  No! To hell with that. Not this time. I don’t care. I’ll die trying.

  Mark lifted his chin, pressed his hips forward, and began beating the ground with his feet. He clawed his way back onto Dale’s shoulder. Over the next four miles, the pair fought an escalating battle of speed and will. Certain that he could make Mark crack—for he had enforced his will on the likes of Mark Allen many times before—Dale turned up the pace another notch. Mark threw it right back at him, plunging into an abyss of pain unlike any he had felt before. Dale could hear him wheezing and knew the tall, lanky stranger had pinned the needle. Mark’s audible struggle for breath suggested an imminent collapse, but he confounded his foe’s expectations and held on. Mark had a murderous chokehold on his choker self, and no amount of suffering would make him release it. He ran utterly mindlessly, giving himself over entirely to the effort to prevail, and when Dale accelerated yet again, when everything Mark had wasn’t enough, he found a way to run harder still.

  Out of the corner of his eye Dale now noticed something disturbing about Mark’s face. It was an asymmetrical rictus grin, an unconscious and locked gaping of the right
side of his mouth. The crooked grimace lent a borderline crazed appearance to Mark’s visage and caused Dale to fear that the young man he was battling was somehow impervious to pain, or perhaps even enjoying his own suffering. It rattled him.

  The race’s homestretch was a short but tough hill leading back into Torrey Pines State Beach. Dale and Mark were still side by side when they hit the base of the hill, but Mark suddenly unleashed a savage kick. Dale prided himself on his ability to dig deeper and hurt more than other athletes. In a battle of wills, he almost always triumphed. But Mark exerted a kind of mental dominance Dale had rarely seen, and it crushed him. Mark had done to Dale what others had been doing to Mark his whole life. Suddenly, in this new sport, he was as strong as he had been weak as a swimmer. Preyed upon in sports for fourteen years until then, he was now the predator.

  But how? And why? One reason was physical. Mark had a body born for triathlon; he was that rare good swimmer who also turned out to be a great cyclist and a phenomenal runner. Ability is always the substrate of confidence. A second reason was mental. The competitor in Mark had finally had enough time and distance to process the damage he had endured and transform a source of quaking weakness into a fuel for ruthless strength, becoming like a bone that is more unbreakable for having healed from a past break. Body and mind together had found their niche.

  A need to prove his value as a human being still powered Mark’s racing. Inner doubts continued to plague him. Success was still the only proof of self-worth he recognized. But he had the coward inside him against the ropes.