Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Among the athlete-adventurers participating in the second Mission Bay Triathlon, held in May 1975, was a 38-year-old navy lieutenant named John Collins, who three years later would organize the first Iron Man. The early Mission Bay Triathlons were filled with military men, who dominated the ranks (so to speak) of the sport’s pioneering generation. Mike Atkinson would say that’s no accident because the U.S. armed forces, like all military organizations, necessarily promote an ethos that glorifies suffering. No community values the willingness and capacity to endure combined physical and mental stress more highly than a volunteer army, and therefore no community is more attractive to young people who have learned to value suffering elsewhere. The military is the ultimate pain community. Back then military training and conditioning were the best available way to satisfy the needs of young men who loved to play outdoors, sweat, compete, strengthen their bodies, and test their endurance limits. Triathlon was, in a sense, a product of the efforts of some of these men to create an even better way to meet those needs.

  In 1976 John Collins was promoted to commander and transferred from Coronado Island, off the San Diego coast, to Oahu, where he found and immersed himself in a community of athlete-adventurers much like the one he had just left behind. There was something in the air, for sure. All across the island navy men and others were avidly filling their free time with ass-kicking exercise, as past generations never had. Barriers were falling. Marathoners ran farther; swimmers rode bikes.

  Yet something was still missing as late as 1977, after the first several triathlons had been contested. The preservation of the finish-line feeling—the special high chased by these endurance pioneers—required a new dimension of extremism. The first swim-bike-run races were a step in the right direction, but they literally didn’t go far enough. In a word, the Mission Bay Triathlons were just too damn short.

  It was John Collins who provided the missing element, spontaneously, offhandedly, utterly without expectations, at an awards ceremony following a relay running event in which teams had circled the entire perimeter of Oahu. Some beer had been consumed, and, right on schedule, the old argument about who were the tougher athletes—runners or swimmers—broke out. The runners naturally took the side of runners, and the few swimmers present defended their breed. John, who liked to ride a bike, submitted that cyclists deserved consideration also. The debate eventually evolved into a brainstorming session for ways to prove which type of athlete was truly the toughest. John suggested that a race combining Oahu’s 2.4-mile Waikiki Roughwater Swim, 112-mile Round the Island Bike Race, and Honolulu Marathon should do the trick.

  “Whoever won that ought to be called Iron Man,” he said.

  Iron Man. Interesting choice. Not a name to describe the most gifted or fittest athlete but a title befitting the toughest competitor. He who can bear the most pain. The best sufferer. Everyone who took part in that beer-enlivened dispute shared the same understanding of the matter’s essence. All had passed through a generational looking glass into a world where suffering had become the main thing in the sports they loved. So together they blindly fumbled their way into creating a race that, unlike any other, would test the capacity to suffer, and fitness, and talent—in that specific order.

  Many a big idea conceived over beers is never carried to full term. Nine times in ten these great notions seem less great or more daunting in the light of solitary sobriety than they did through the lens of inebriate groupthink. Ironman nearly met this fate. But one of John’s old navy buddies, Dan Hendrickson, a fellow endurance frontiersman who had already enjoyed many a past adventure with John—often in company with the two men’s wives, who were both badass athletes themselves—kept pestering Collins to follow through. So he did. The race was announced at the annual Waikiki Swim Club Banquet in October 1977. The first Iron Man Triathlon would take place on February 18, 1978, four months after the banquet. Plenty of time to train for a novel three-sport, 140.6-mile survival test. Fifteen men signed up.

  Twelve started. The race was about as casual as two kids racing each other to the next mailbox. No roads were closed. The distances were approximately measured. Two men, both minimally employed fitness junkies, separated themselves from the rest to engage in an epic war of attrition in an undiscovered realm of competitive muscle-powered travel. John Dunbar, a 24-year-old navy guy, traded the lead with Gordon Haller, a taxi driver, throughout the day. They fought harder than seemed sane with so little at stake. Gordon finally broke John halfway through the marathon and won in eleven hours, forty-six minutes, fifty-eight seconds. John was seen running into parked cars and heard deliriously accusing his support crew of poisoning him as he reeled toward the finish line to claim his second-place prize of—nothing.

  Gordon was not exactly awed by his feat. On days off from his job as a communications specialist he routinely ran 20 miles, cycled 100 miles, and swam 1.5 miles between sunup and sundown.

  Despite its laughably humble trappings, Iron Man seemed a thing of destiny to the adventurous few who experienced it. Strange and small as it was, the race radiated that magical energy that marks a true happening. The first Iron Man participants and witnesses knew deep in their bones, despite surface reasons to believe otherwise, that they were at the beginning of something special and lasting.

  When the force of destiny is behind such a happening, strange coincidences help it grow. Sports Illustrated is not a magazine that regularly publishes lengthy features about two-year-old sporting events involving twelve participants, but it published a sprawling feature about the second Iron Man, which took place in February 1979.

  SI writer Barry McDermott just happened to be in Hawaii covering a golf tournament that wrapped up a few days before the race and sort of stumbled upon it. He couldn’t believe his ears when his editor requested 4,000 words on the competition. Barry selected the obvious theme for his account—perhaps the only theme he could have chosen. By way of describing the twelve racers he met on Oahu, he wrote, “They all shared a common reason for being there, a very compelling reason (some call it a curse): an addiction to inordinate amounts of exercise.” The race itself he described as “a legal way to prove their toughness.” Precisely.

  None of the protagonists in Barry’s story, which is to say none of the race’s top competitors, was a world-class athlete in any of the three disciplines. The most talented cyclists, swimmers, and runners had other places to be: in the Tour de France, in the pool at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, on the start line of the Boston Marathon. What was exceptional about returning champion Gordon Haller, revenge-seeking John Dunbar, and first-timer Tom Warren (who had prepared for Oahu’s sultriness by riding a stationary bike in a sauna) was not their talent but their tremendous appetite for training and their insatiable lust to challenge the outer limits of human endurance and tolerance for pain.

  To come away with a fabulous story Barry McDermott needed to do little else than stick a tape recorder in front of these three eccentrics. Among the best lines he captured was one spoken by Tom Warren, which beautifully encapsulates the spirit that animated the first triathlons.

  “I’m only in mediocre shape right now,” said the man who worked out three times a day year-round. “But sometimes it’s better that way.”

  A pool swimmer or track runner would have never said such a thing. If he had, he would have been branded a heretic. For the conventional endurance athlete, the race was all about performance—get as fit as you can to go as fast as you can. But for Tom Warren and his fellow iron men, who sought to separate themselves from the ranks of conventional endurance athletes so recently swelled by erstwhile couch potatoes, it was now all about suffering. The point of racing Iron Man was to attain a new height of toughness. Whatever added to the suffering the racers endured between the start and finish lines was good, even if the thing that did so was inadequate physical preparedness. Sure, a little extra fitness might have enabled Tom to complete Iron Man faster than eleven hours, fifteen minutes, and fifty-six seconds, and
win by a wider margin than forty-eight minutes, but it would also have attenuated the suffering. And where was the satisfaction in that?

  Barry’s piece greatly excited the public imagination, SI having accurately read the American zeitgeist in devoting ten full pages to the Iron Man spectacle. The following year the ABC television network sent a camera crew to Oahu to cover the third Ironman (no longer Iron Man), Dave Scott’s first, for Wide World of Sports. John Collins’s brainchild, and the sport of triathlon, had passed a tipping point.

  And then it passed another tipping point. Julie Moss’s crawl in the February 1982 Ironman changed everything. Hers were the hands and knees that launched a thousand new triathletes. If the first two Ironman television specials created a healthy stream of interest in triathlon participation generally, and in Ironman participation specifically, the horrifyingly uplifting image of Julie willing her completely destroyed body through the final yards of the fifth Ironman opened the floodgates. Hundreds upon hundreds among the millions who watched Julie totter like a giraffe on ice and collapse onto the street in a seemingly lifeless heap, only to raise herself by some impossible means and stagger some more, leaped up from their recliners (at the same time as Mark Allen) and shouted, “Wow! I want to do that!”

  Julie’s crawl, her shocking display of voluntary suffering, was the image that caused the popularity of Ironman and triathlon to explode. A graph of triathlon’s historical growth curve would show a dramatic upturn beginning precisely at the date of the television broadcast that got Julie an invitation from David Letterman (which she turned down because she feared he’d make fun of her). The lesson could not be clearer: This new sport and its grandest event appealed to a widespread and intense desire to suffer. Yes, people wanted to play in the water and on bikes. Yes, they wanted to have beautiful bodies like those of the triathletes on their television screens. Yes, they wanted to get back outdoors. But what they really wanted was to hurt like hell in pursuit of an outlandish goal.

  JULIE’S CRAWL brought so many people to Ironman that Ironman soon could take no more. In 1983 race owner Valerie Silk established a qualifying system for Ironman entry. Each year since then, getting to Ironman has become more difficult as the number of qualifying events around the world and the number of athletes competing for a fixed number of Ironman slots have increased. This raising of the bar has been all to the good, because when the recent couch potatoes began racing Ironman, the original iron men no longer felt so special. To regain their distinction once again, they either had to do something even crazier or find a way to achieve distinction within the sport of triathlon in the form it took. Fortunately, those who followed that first wave have been able to do the latter.

  “Ironman used to be a small group of dedicated people who were looked at as crazy,” Mike Atkinson says. “But it grew, and every group, once it gets big enough, starts to define standards. You have to have some way of creating status hierarchies within groups—to measure who you are by comparison to other people. So now, if you want to be considered a serious triathlete, you’ve got to do Hawaii at some point.”

  Today there are double, triple, and even deca-Ironman races, but they haven’t really caught on, and they probably never will because even those endurance fanatics who are most addicted to the pursuit of the ultimate finish-line feeling are able to pursue it without end at the original Ironman distance. Because the distance hasn’t changed. Ironman remains long enough to test the capacity to suffer, and fitness, and talent—in that specific order. The ever-rising level of competition at Ironman gives even the most committed seekers (or abject addicts) all they need to continue their quest to suffer more than they ever have before.

  The effect of competition on the human capacity to endure has been measured, and it is large. A seminal 1968 study at UC-Berkeley found that young men lasted 20 percent longer in a stationary bike ride to exhaustion when each subject was matched against a peer of roughly equal fitness than when the test was tackled alone.

  This effect is not equal in all situations, however. The more important a test of endurance is perceived to be, the stronger the competition effect becomes. Thus, athletes are generally more motivated and more willing to suffer in major championship races such as Ironman than in smaller events. Likewise, because winning is the formal objective, athletes fortunate enough to have a legitimate chance of winning such races are generally readier to sacrifice and suffer than less gifted athletes. And because the particular composition of an important race can make it even more important, the best athletes are likely to reach farthest beyond existing limits when they must defeat their most accomplished and renowned rivals to claim victory—and they may reach higher still when they face their archnemesis on his best day.

  The magnitude of the satisfaction that a triathlete experiences upon crossing a finish line is directly proportional to the amount of suffering he has overcome to get there. This reward knows no ability. Even the slowest of the slow can push themselves beyond existing limits and finish with tremendous satisfaction. But winning often demands and inspires the greatest suffering and thus confers the greatest sense of pride. Often, because of the nature of competition, it is precisely he who has the most guts who is the fastest and experiences the most intense fulfillment at the finish line.

  Theoretically, then, the most deeply satisfying experience a triathlete could have in the sport (and among the best in life) would occur at the finish line of a race in which he has overcome as much suffering as he could possibly ever endure, and knows it.

  THIS IS THE POSSIBILITY that stands before Dave Scott and Mark Allen as they match strides along the center of the Queen K Highway. Together they constitute an ephemeral and ultraexclusive pain community within a pain community. Not one element of their circumstances could be altered to make the moment more “excitingly significant” to either—to make either man more willing to embrace the pain he is now bearing and however much additional pain lies between where he is and the end.

  The winner of this race will take home $20,000; the runner-up $12,000. It’s not about the money. A much greater reward motivates Dave Scott and Mark Allen to bear the extraordinary suffering they now bear: the reward of suffering itself; maybe the greatest finish-line feeling anyone has ever felt.

  CHAPTER 5

  YOU AGAIN

  It is an unhappy lot which finds no enemies.

  —PLUBIUS CYRUS

  In September 1976 Dave Scott, then 22 years old, flew to Oahu to compete in the Waikiki Roughwater Swim. So charmed was Dave by the island that he immediately decided to return the following year, maybe every year. Hawaii’s kiln-like heat, choppy waters, and defiant topography brought out the best in an athlete designed for extreme environmental challenges. Not much of a tourist, Dave judged the places he visited by how much he enjoyed working out in them, exercise being the only recreation he had time for or interest in. Consequently, Dave did little sightseeing in Hawaii. He did not visit any volcanoes or take home any lava rocks as souvenirs.

  Ten months later Mark Allen, then 19 years old, vacationed in Hawaii with his father and stepmother, one of Toot and Space’s friends, and Mark’s current girlfriend during the summer break after his first year of college. In the middle of their week on the Big Island, the group drove a rental car to the top of the volcano Mauna Kea and got out to admire the view from 13,796 feet.

  Mauna Kea is dormant. It last erupted forty-six centuries before Mark’s party peered into its quiescent crater. In traditional Hawaiian mythology all volcanic activity is the handiwork of the goddess Pele. Jealous in nature, Madam Pele cooks up eruptions to communicate rage and to punish. More than a few ancient stories begin with slights against Pele and end with burning lava shooting into the sky. It is from Pele, in fact, that we get our expression “Don’t blow your stack.” In times past native Hawaiians soothed Pele’s temper by hiking to the rims of volcanoes to make offerings to the deity (and some still do, though less avidly).

  Pele is best known ou
tside Hawaii today for her curse. The curse of Pele sounds ancient but is actually of recent origin. It would have to be, because the curse is directed against people who remove lava rocks from the island, and Hawaiian tourism dates back only as far as airplane travel. Urban legend holds that the curse was invented by a fed-up park ranger who sought to discourage lava pilfering, which is in fact a violation of federal law if not a crime against a sovereign divinity, punishable by hard luck and misfortune.

  Some people believe in the curse. Others don’t. The people who believe in it most fervently are those who number themselves among the curse’s victims—those who have taken lava home from Hawaii and have subsequently suffered health problems, accidents, financial calamities, and the like. Each year the Thomas A. Jagger Museum at Volcanoes National Park, site of Pele’s “home” volcano, Kilauea, receives dozens of packages containing returned lava, letters of apology, and often propitiatory bottles of gin from contrite objects of Pele’s vengeance.

  The gin goes back to the late nineteenth century, when George Lycurgus, a Greek hotelier who operated an inn at the edge of Kilauea, got into the habit of entertaining tourists by performing sham prayers and tossing empty gin bottles (whose contents he had himself consumed) into the crater as gifts to Pele. A more traditional choice would have been ohelo berries.

  As Mark Allen and his traveling companions wandered along Mauna Kea’s crater rim, an extraordinary piece of lava, shaped like a wave and sparkling with little golden flecks, caught the attention of Mark and his stepmother simultaneously. They both reached for it, but Toot grabbed it first.