Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  “Are you okay?” the medic asked.

  “I’m fine,” Mark hissed, keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him, having learned the hard way that putting them anywhere else threatened his equilibrium.

  “I’m just going to ask you a few questions,” said the medic.

  “Knock yourself out,” Mark answered testily.

  “What’s your name?” the medic began.

  “Mark Allen!” Mark barked. Good grief, he thought. This was humiliating enough as it was.

  “What day is it?”

  Mark briefly considered making a smart retort but decided that answering the question straight would rid him of the nuisance quicker. Of course it was Sunday. Wait, no, it was Saturday. Or was it? Mark realized with a burst of mortification that he had no clue. Meanwhile, the second hand was ticking.

  “I’m fine. Leave me alone,” Mark said at last.

  Several cups of Gatorade and water put a little life back into Grip’s legs, and he resumed running—not all the way to the finish line but enough to get him there in fifth place, forty-one minutes behind Dave. Bunny Stein met her wobbly fiancé in the finish area and dragged him away from the throng and back onto the relatively isolated pier, where his day had started with such promise. Together they stared silently into the water.

  “Are you sure this race is good for you?” Mark’s mother, Sharon, asked him later.

  1985

  Mark did not come back to Hawaii in 1985. But then, neither did Dave Scott, nor defending women’s champion Sylviane Puntous, nor most of the other big stars. The pros banded together and boycotted the event for failing to offer prize money, vowing never to return if Valerie Silk did not share the loot Ironman took from ABC Sports, Bud Light, and other sponsors with the men and women who made the race good television and attractive to corporate backers. Meanwhile, the organizers of the Nice Triathlon, Ironman’s main competitor for status among triathlons, saw an opportunity and moved their 1985 race date closer to Ironman’s, making it almost impossible for any pro to compete in both—and they increased their prize purse to $75,000.

  All of the sport’s biggest stars flocked to the French Riviera for the race that still billed itself as the World Triathlon Championship. Mark Allen won for the fourth time. Dave Scott dropped out with a flat tire. The following weekend Dave was married to Anna Pettis. The weekend after that, in Kona, Dave, working as a TV commentator for ABC, watched Scott Tinley—the lone notable boycott-buster—win Ironman and break Dave’s course record. It was hard to watch. Dave needed this race. It was his race—his only race.

  1986

  Loath to see a French event usurp Ironman as the world’s preeminent triathlon, La Jolla real estate developer Steve Drogan donated $100,000 of his own money to fund a prize purse for the 1986 race. Dave decided to skip Nice and reclaim his race. Mark chose his race, Nice, and won yet again, easily.

  “It feels good to win this one five times before Dave could win Ironman five times,” Mark told reporters with a forced laugh at the finish line.

  He wasn’t fooling anyone. Dave could live with Mark’s having Nice. But Mark, in his heart, wanted very much to take Dave’s race from him. Grip later confessed his dissatisfaction.

  “For some reason I didn’t feel as fulfilled as I thought I would,” he said. “I didn’t feel I had stretched my capabilities to push beyond what I already knew I could do. I only had to put out maybe an 80 to 85 percent effort to do it, and there’s a huge difference between going 85 percent and putting out 100 percent.”

  Mark had discovered what all great athletes discover sooner or later: Winning easily gives little satisfaction. Much more satisfying is a hard-fought victory—or loss—that stretches you beyond preexisting limits. When Mark got started in triathlon, every win felt good because he was not accustomed to winning at such a level, and because winning brought him the attention and respect—especially from his father—that he had always craved. But winning had become old hat. Mark had now won twenty-two races. He had not yet, however, become all he believed he could be.

  After Nice Mark flew to Hawaii to represent sponsors at Ironman and to watch the race. Just watch. But Kona cast its spell on him. He had to admit, there was no race like it. Ironman was the first; the hardest; and, with prize money available and all of the top racers back, the most competitive. Nice could never match it. Ironman was also Dave Scott’s race, and Dave Scott had become, along with the race he virtually personified, the embodiment of the challenge Mark now recognized as his next great goal in life. To discover his ultimate powers, Mark had to beat Dave Scott at Ironman.

  Three days before the race Mark formally entered the pro men’s field. Dave couldn’t have been happier. He was motivated enough already to beat the scab and cherry picker Scott Tinley (as Dave then chose to think of a person whom he otherwise liked and respected). But Dave had heard about Mark’s empty gloating after Nice, and he welcomed the opportunity to make him pay for his loose lips.

  Mark again followed Dave like a duckling from the start line to the swim exit. He continued to shadow Dave through 105 miles of the bike leg, ahead of the rest of the field, until Mark stopped pedaling briefly to pee from the saddle. Dave chose the moment to surge ahead, and he was able to start the marathon with a one-minute lead. He had never raced so angry. His fanged expression startled spectators who watched him charge up the hill leading out of the Kona Surf Hotel parking lot. Some stepped back reflexively from the curb as though fearing they might be bitten.

  Now came Dave’s turn to piss. He stopped at the side of the road and whipped out his junk. The camera-bearing motorcycle traveling with him stopped too.

  “Turn off the camera!” Dave shouted.

  He resumed running. But his fury was not spent.

  “I want a split, and I want it now!” Dave shouted at a race marshal on a scooter also riding alongside him.

  That year, for the first time, Ironman had assigned spotters to provide time gaps to professional racers. But it was easier to tell the man in second place how far behind the leader he was than to tell the leader how much time he had on the man in second place. Receiving no immediate answer from the marshal, Dave became angrier still.

  “Where’s Allen?” he barked.

  Okay, now it was out: That was what he really wanted to know. Smiling malevolently, the marshal gestured backward with a thumb. Dave swiveled his head. There was Mark, about sixty yards behind him.

  You again.

  That was it. Almost visibly steaming, Dave took off like a shot. His lead grew to 100 yards, then 200, then a quarter mile. He requested no more time gaps. He knew he didn’t need them.

  Dave crossed the finish line at 8:28:37, demolishing by twenty-two minutes the course record Tinley had set the previous year and having run a 2:49 marathon in 100-degree heat. Mark finished eight minutes back, telling himself that the fatigue in his legs from having won Nice two weeks earlier was worth at least that much time. If he had started the race fresh, he would have won for sure.

  Dave’s most attentive listener among the hundreds who heard his victory speech at the following night’s awards banquet at the Kona Surf was Mark Allen. The now two-time runner-up sat far forward in his seat, feverish with envy. What Dave had on that stage seemed worth ten times more than everything Mark had achieved in his career to that point. He felt like a starving man watching the thief of his eggs eat an omelet. Perhaps Mark even began to sense that this clawing need inside him wasn’t about sport at all.

  1987

  A massive wave of expectation carried Mark through the next year. The Kellogg company came calling and signed Grip to a deal that made him a pitchman for its new Pro-Grain breakfast cereal (which was its failed, sugary Star Wars C3PO’s cereal in a different box), promoting it as “Ironman food.” No matter that Mark had never won Ironman (although he had won an Ironman—in Japan the previous year). He would take care of that come October—a six-figure bonus from Kellogg said he would. Weeks before the race Ke
llogg purchased the back cover of the January 1988 issue of Triathlete for a Mark Allen/Pro-Grain Ironman victory advertisement. It was as good as done.

  Around the same time Mark signed a book deal with a similar understanding. He and collaborator Bob Babbitt would pen the first chunk of the largely biographical manuscript before Ironman and would write the last part, which would describe his hard-earned first Ironman victory, immediately after he won the 1987 race. It hardly needed to be said that another failure would severely compromise this plan. Mark knew he would not fail.

  Grip planned his entire season around Hawaii for the first time in his career. He skipped Nice, the lucrative race he had owned even more thoroughly than Dave had owned Ironman. He trained harder than ever, completing more than 15,000 miles of combined swimming, cycling, and running, or the equivalent of more than 100 Ironman races, between the time he started his buildup in January and his departure for Kona in early October.

  Mark’s confidence of winning Ironman was supported in no small measure by Dave Scott’s announcement after the 1986 Ironman that he would skip the race in 1987. The star-crossed rivals did square off at other races, however, including the Bermuda International Triathlon in August, which Mark won and from which Dave, along with half of the men’s pro field, was disqualified for drafting on the bike. After the race a fuming Dave Scott announced that he would defend his Ironman title after all.

  “I want to race Mark at his best,” he said flatly.

  The news shook Mark, who came face to face with Dave, just hours after the announcement had been made, in the lobby of the hotel where both were staying. They had no choice but to speak, and there was only one thing to talk about.

  “I hear you’re doing Ironman,” Mark said, his voice so tight it almost cracked.

  “Yeah, I’m going back,” Dave said good-humoredly, enjoying Mark’s discomfiture.

  As they parted Mark cursed himself under his breath. I gave him my power! he lamented. Why did I let him have my power? I’ve got to get it back!

  Mark’s arrival in Kailua two months later was treated like a crown prince’s attendance at his father’s deathbed. The whole hype-filled week before the race had the feel of a coronation. Mark was in the spotlight, and Dave had been pushed to the wings. The heir apparent was far more visible in Kona than in past years, and more celebrated. He did some promotional work for Kellogg on the island, signed scores of specially made posters at the race expo, and was seen breakfasting with Julie Moss at the Aloha Café and lunching with her at Amy’s Café the day before the race.

  The tension between Dave and Mark was palpable. They had been able to engage in brief but comfortable small talk together in Kona the previous October. Mark’s low-key approach to that year’s race had made a semblance of friendship possible. That possibility had ended.

  At a meeting for professional racers held two days before the race, Dave sat on a chair facing a rotating cast of race officials, who reviewed the race rules and answered questions. Mark sat on the floor facing Dave, staring at him, daring Dave to look his way. He did not. Mark quietly gloated, feeling he’d reclaimed the power he’d given to Dave in Bermuda. That feeling did not last long.

  Toward the end of the meeting Dave spoke up, voicing a concern about getting accurate time-gap information during the marathon.

  “When I’m out there in first place on the run,” he began. Then he caught his “slip” and corrected it before continuing, “Or whoever . . .”

  A few days before the race Dave and Mark sat down separately for interviews for ABC’s television coverage of the event.

  “If there’s one thing you can count on in this race,” Mark said, “it’s that Dave Scott is not going to die. Which means, as someone who’s going to compete against him, I know that I have to go a little faster, push a little harder, and that when it gets tough for me I’m going to go beyond that, one or two or three or ten steps, until hopefully I get to the point where the guy’s behind me.”

  Mark spoke these words in reasonable and earnest tones, but the nuances of his body language—his unblinking eyes and mumbling lips—seemed vaguely grasping, uncentered, as though he knew he was forcing something he shouldn’t.

  By contrast, Dave’s mouth formed an insolent smile and his eyes twinkled as he told the camera, “Mark’s had a great year. But I think he would throw away all those victories from January to October if he could just win Ironman. And I think he feels that pressure.”

  Mark had not actually raced in January, February, or March. Dave was pressing buttons, aware that Mark was listening live to his interview in the shadows of the Kona Surf Hotel meeting room that was being used as a television studio as Mark awaited his turn before the camera.

  Having learned the hard way that dropping Dave on the bike was not the way to beat him, Mark planned to restrain himself through the cycling portion of the contest and then choose his moment to strike on the run. He did just that.

  Once more Mark shadowed Dave through the swim. But this time Mark followed so closely that he repeatedly slapped Dave’s feet with his hands. Midway through the swim Dave flipped over and swam a few backstrokes while glaring at Mark, or trying to, through his goggles. Having sent a message, Dave turned back onto his belly—and Mark resumed slapping his feet.

  The rivals exited Kailua Bay together mere seconds behind the leader, German swim specialist Wolfgang Dittrich. They ran side by side to the changing room, and from there they hustled in lockstep to their bikes, which awaited them in adjacent slots in the bike racks. They straddled their machines, and each struggled to get his first shoe clipped into a pedal so he could jump onto the saddle and clip in the other shoe while already moving. Dave lost his balance, veering to the right toward Mark, who simultaneously lost his balance and veered left toward Dave. They collided, and Mark sprawled into the nearby snow fencing, whose presence was fortuitous because without it Grip would have gone all the way to the ground. Scrambling to right himself, Mark shot Dave a look that said, Dude, what the hell? Dave ignored him and rode off. Mark chased.

  Dave chose not to capture the lead early on the bike, as Mark expected, but instead fell into a comparatively leisurely tempo that allowed some of the slower swimmers, including the dangerous Scott Tinley, to catch up. Mark began to feel antsy, and fought back the temptation to take a flier. Suddenly a gusher erupted from his nose. He had to ease up to beg a roaming medic for some gauze to staunch the blood, now figuring it was just as well that Dave wasn’t pushing the pace.

  Mark’s appetite had almost disappeared in the three days before the race. Half a sandwich filled him up. He tried to dismiss the sudden disappearance of his hunger, which he had never experienced before, as a benign effect of nerves. In fact, he had been poisoned by some bad sushi eaten a couple of days earlier and was now bleeding internally. Mark would not find out until after the race that his bloody nose was connected to the undiagnosed situation in his gut.

  The lead pack of riders was well on its way back from Hawi when Dave finally put the hammer down, and by then Mark, dried blood smeared across his face, was ready. He quickly bridged the gap Dave had opened and with him pulled steadily away from the pretenders. As they neared Kailua Mark suddenly vomited. A minute later he chundered a second time. That was worrisome. He had suffered nosebleeds occasionally in training, and they had not seemed to affect his performance. But he had never barfed before. The vomiting brought relief, however, and Mark discovered that he was able to drink again soon afterward.

  Dave and Mark started the run side by side, knocking elbows several times in the first mile. They had now made violent bodily contact in all three legs of the race—surely a first in Ironman history. Climbing the steep hill outside the Kona Surf parking lot, Mark felt great. Dave felt awful—as if his blood had turned to water. Mark sensed Dave’s weakness and, executing his plan, turned his stride up a notch at the three-mile point of the marathon. Dave had no choice but to let him go. Over the next thirteen miles, Mark built a lead
of five minutes. He began to mentally rehearse his victory speech.

  The turnaround point on the out-and-back run course stood about sixteen miles from the bike-run transition, ten miles from the finish line, and just over one mile beyond Keahole Airport on the Queen K. A twenty-foot inflated Bud Light can marked the spot, taunting athletes with an optical illusion that made it seem closer than it was. This part of the race was always critical for the leaders because they met each other head-on as runners who had already made the turn passed runners still approaching it. These moments gave them a chance to measure time gaps with precision and assess each other’s appearance. Dave and Mark would later discuss this crucial moment of the 1987 Ironman at a rare event in 2002, a meeting of the Los Angeles Triathlon Club in which the paired legends reviewed the full history of their singular rivalry.

  “When you pass your toughest competitor, you want to look as good as you possibly can,” Mark said, waggishly taking the tone of a grade school teacher.

  “Very true,” Dave confirmed with a knowing smile.

  “So, out of the corner of my eye,” Mark continued, then remarked parenthetically, “(because you also don’t want to let them know you’re looking, even though they know you are).”

  Dave interrupted Mark. “I saw you looking,” he teased. “You were nervous. You took two looks, actually. Two long, long looks, and your jaw was dropping.”

  Playing along, Mark pantomimed pointing a finger and dropping his jaw in awe and wonder. Then he said, “And the thought hit me: He does not look good at all.”

  “Nor did he,” Dave interjected, no longer smiling.

  “I knew he was looking as good as he possibly could,” Mark continued, as though he had not heard his former rival, “and I thought, I have this thing sewn up.”