The view gradually diminished in grandeur until it vanished altogether as they cruised down toward the water. After two miles they crossed what is now Ali’i Highway (then still part of Ali’i Drive), at the one-mile point of the Ironman run course, and continued another three-quarters of a mile steeply downward through an upscale residential neighborhood ending at a cul-de-sac. They passed through the gated entrance to the Kanaloa resort, an upscale condominium community where they had rented a two-bedroom unit for two weeks. Mark valued the Kanaloa for its lush, arboreal setting; its seclusion seven miles from the madness of downtown Kailua; its ocean-view balconies, chirping tropical birds, and flitting bright butterflies; and its guarded gate and security staff patrolling the grounds in golf carts. It wasn’t cheap, but it provided the tranquillity and solitude Mark required during “Iron Week,” and that made it worth every nickel.
Mark liked to arrive in Kona early so he could acclimate and train in peace for a few days before the masses flocked in on the Monday and Tuesday before Saturday’s race. By the time of this, his seventh Ironman, Mark’s Iron Week routine was a perfected ritual. Every detail was planned and (with the exception of a few carefully selected experiments) familiar. This regimented approach not only served a practical purpose but also gave him comfort through its very familiarity. Mark knew exactly where, when, and how he would train and what he would eat over the next nine days. His inner circle would handle all the details that he couldn’t or wouldn’t handle himself. His agent, Charlie Graves, with help from his assistant, Brian Hughes, would come soon to buffer him from the race organizers, his sponsors, and the media. Mark’s brother Gary, now a 21-year-old professional bike mechanic also living in San Diego, would get his bike race-ready with assistance from some of the best wrenches in the sport. His training and nutrition adviser, Phil Maffetone, and his massage therapist, Mike Rubano, would do more or less the same to Mark’s body. Julie would run interference between him and his divided family, with his dad and stepmother, Space and Toot, on one side and his mom, Sharon, on the other, and prevent them from siphoning too much of his energy, as they had been known to do in the past.
Mark and Julie picked up their keys from the management office and moved in.
DAVE SCOTT ARRIVED in Kona the next day. Like Mark, he traveled with his wife. Unlike Mark, he had a second traveling companion: his 2-month-old son, Ryan, who had been born four days after Dave’s crucial triumph at Ironman Japan. The eight weeks between that race and his departure for Hawaii had been among the best of his entire career. His record-smashing performance in the land of the rising sun had been a great balm to his frustrated spirit and had given him the confidence he needed for his showdown with Mark Allen. Then came fatherhood, which brought a delirium of a completely different kind. The stork’s timing was perhaps not ideal, for suddenly Dave had a big new responsibility to manage just when he was taking on his heaviest training workload in preparation for Hawaii. But the sense of purpose he got from his new son more than made up for the lost sleep.
The sore knee that had bothered Dave before Japan remained tender through August and September, but he was able to train effectively despite the discomfort. He recorded career-best times on the bike and run routes he used to set his Ironman expectations. Even Dave’s swim performance reached new heights. His recent times in certain benchmark sets were even better than his old college marks.
Dave and Anna collected their luggage, Dave’s bike case, and Ryan’s stroller and car seat from baggage claim (Dave’s body drinking in the moist heat of his favorite place to exercise), rented a truck, and headed for town. They cruised up the same hill on which, twenty-four hours earlier, Mark had imagined himself making a decisive move. As they came down the hill’s back side toward Palani Road, Dave thought, It could happen here.
Dave was well aware of Mark’s plan to shadow him through the race and break him in the late going. While he would do everything in his power to shake Mark before the closing miles of the marathon, he had to be prepared for Grip hanging tough. And if Mark did hang tough, Dave knew, the negative grade approaching Palani Road represented his last best chance to get away; he was a better downhill runner than Mark but an inferior sprinter. He could not afford to let Mark hang around any farther than there.
When they reached the stop sign at Palani Road, the Scotts did not continue straight on the Queen K, as Mark and Julie had, but turned right and drove three long blocks downhill toward the water. After Palani Road crossed Kuakini Highway, it changed its name to Ali’i Drive and skirted the King Kamehameha Hotel on the right before bending left to run along the coast. All was quiet at the King Kam now, but in a few days its rooms would be stuffed with triathletes and their traveling companions and its ground floor crammed with Ironman expo booths, and the tiny beach and the large pier outside would be swarming with activity.
Iron Week is like nothing else in sports. It’s an intensely charged festival of hype—like Super Bowl week in whichever city happens to be host in a given year—but its atmosphere of anticipation is even more potently concentrated. The Super Bowl may be the biggest thing happening in its host city, but Ironman is the only thing happening in Kailua-Kona during the week surrounding October’s full moon. Kailua is a small city tucked in a corner of a tiny island in the remote South Pacific. As such, it supports a seamless illusion that Ironman is the focus of the whole world, the culmination by consensus of the yearly calendar, during those magical six days when it is overrun by people who, for that week, care about one thing only. Every hotel is booked full of athletes competing in the race, friends and relations of those athletes, people connected with the operation of the event, and professionals in the triathlon industry. Every conversation on the sidewalks and in the restaurants and shops of Kailua village is about the race. Every face radiates an inner sense of being precisely Where It’s At.
Ground zero of Iron Week is Dig Me Beach, a minuscule patch of sand wedged close to Kailua Pier where athletes wade into the ocean to approach the Ironman start line on race morning. Before the race it is the place where the athletes and their retinues engage in a little practice swimming and a lot of seeing and being seen (or “digging” and being “dug”). Dig Me Beach is not an official name; it is the name the spot acquired after Ironman arrived in 1981. Every spectator is also a star and every star a spectator in the show that is staged there for six days each year. Those who qualify to compete in Ironman represent the best in the world in the various age and gender categories. So intoxicated are they by their part in this scene that they imagine themselves, as they descend the five stone steps from the pier to the sand, being recognized and whispered about like movie actors at Spago in Beverly Hills. The top elite athletes try to avoid the peak morning hours at Dig Me Beach, when hundreds of gawkers take up perches on the sea wall to enjoy the scene. There are enough pro sightings, however, to sustain the fantasy of celebrity that the rest entertain, and in truth, in 1989, everyone there at least knew someone who knew Scott Tinley.
After passing by Dig Me Beach Dave and his passengers rode through Kailua-Kona’s charming central village and continued a mile and a half beyond it until they saw a sign on the ocean side of the road with the words “Sea Village Resort” painted on it. They turned into the parking lot and stopped. Before them stood a trio of three-story buildings around a pleasant grass courtyard. The vacation rental rooms inside were nothing special—two and a half stars, officially—but Dave liked Sea Village because it lay close to the action without being smack in the middle of the action, and because he could climb over a lava beach behind it and swim the Ironman swim course backward without making a stir by appearing at the pier (which he did once each year anyway because it was important to rehearse the real thing). A few years before, Dave had bumped into none other than Mark Allen on that lava beach. The two men had unwittingly checked into the same resort. Mark had moved to new lodgings the following year. Now the only people Dave worried about bumping into at Sea Village were the femal
e groupies who sometimes stalked him in the hope of winning a wink and a smile from the Elvis of triathlon.
Dave would have the weekend to settle into island life with his wife and son and to train in relative solitude. Then the entourage would come. Verne and Dot would check into the King Kam downtown. Dave’s old friend and Ironman factotum, Pat Feeney, would take up residence in an extra bedroom in Dave’s own condo unit because the Man wanted him close. Pals Mike Norton and John Reganold and sister Jane would stay in an adjacent unit.
This was essentially the same team that had surrounded Dave since his first Ironman victory in 1980. They were Dave’s family and his closest friends, but in this context they were something more. They were his circle of confidence.
A LOW-PRESSURE SYSTEM hit the Kona coast on the Monday of race week. The air was unusually cool. Harsh winds riled the waters of Kailua Bay into an ornery chop. Monday is the first major arrival day for Ironman competitors, and dozens among the freshly landed tried gamely to enjoy Dig Me Beach as it was meant to be enjoyed, despite the poor conditions. Monday is also the day when things turn serious for the contenders. Friends and family begin to arrive and demand attention. The usual Iron Week schedule of media interviews, sponsor obligations, and appearances at official Ironman events gets rolling. All of these time sucks must be squeezed into the daylight hours alongside the meticulously planned meals, workouts, massages, bike adjustments, and other preparations the athletes would rather focus on.
Both Dave and Mark woke early that morning to make time for it all. Dave consumed a colossal breakfast of fruit, shredded wheat, yogurt, toast, and rice cakes and then performed his standard Monday-before-Ironman workout sequence. He walked gingerly over the lava beach behind his condo complex and waded into the warm Pacific to swim two miles. His workout included a couple of long surges at sixty-eight seconds per 100 yards, slightly exceeding his planned race pace. He dried off, grabbed a snack, and threw on cycling clothes. Braving the day’s wild winds, he rode for two hours, ratcheting his speed up to roughly 24.5 miles per hour—race speed—for forty minutes in the middle. Upon returning to Sea Village, he grabbed another snack, chucked Ryan’s chin, and changed into running clothes. He then ran nine miles, moving at a rate of six minutes per mile over the last four.
The afternoon did not belong to Dave, or to Mark. ABC had scheduled interviews with all of the main contenders in a two-hour window, casting-call style. The camera, lights, and backdrop were set up at the sprawling Kona Surf Hotel in Keauhou, seven miles south of Dig Me Beach and the site of Ironman’s bike-run transition. Given the format, there was always a chance that Dave and Mark would encounter each other—something neither man particularly wanted. It had happened in 1987. When Mark showed up for his interview, Dave had just sat down for his turn in front of the camera. As Dave silently gazed toward the lens, calmly waiting for those behind it to complete some technical preparations, Mark stole a good long look at his rival—the man who had come to represent Mark’s inability to finally overcome the choker he had once been. Feeling watched, Dave shifted his glance in Mark’s direction, and their eyes dueled.
No such faceoff occurred at the Kona Surf this year. Conducting the interviews for ABC was Sam Posey, a retired open-wheel race-car driver now enjoying a second career as a sports broadcaster. He asked Dave what Ironman meant to him.
“I look at this event, really, as war with myself,” Dave said in the tone of a confession. “I feel as though, once I’m out there, there’s no other race that draws out my physical talents as this one does.”
When Mark took his turn on the hot seat, Sam asked him simply what his goal was for the race.
“My main goal is, one, to win,” Mark said. “But in doing that, I want to race the entire race—to feel like I’m in control of what’s going on inside of my body. I don’t want to have the course defeat me, and that’s what I feel has happened in the past. This year that’s what I would like to defeat.”
TUESDAY MORNING Dave did his Tuesday-before-Ironman workouts—the workouts he simply had to do four days before Ironman because they provided precisely the stimulus he believed his body needed at that time—and because they were the workouts he always did on that day and hence were a comfort to him. He wheeled out of Sea Village on his bike and climbed nearly 2,000 feet toward the High Road, or Route 190, as the maps called it. As he scaled the seemingly endless ramp-like incline toward the center of the island, he periodically got out of the saddle and pedaled for five minutes in a standing posture, as he would do during tactical surges on important hills during the race. After completing the ascent he U-turned, bombed back down to the Queen K, and noodled around on that until he had ridden for three hours. Back at the condo, he refueled and put on his running shoes. He ran six miles, covering the last four in a little more than twenty-five minutes. Finally, he negotiated the lava rocks and swam the full Ironman swim course backward.
Mark started his morning with a swim and then ran from the Kanaloa toward town on Ali’i Drive. As he came close to the Royal Sea Cliff Resort, where his father and stepmother were staying, he saw Space and Toot walking together ahead. He crept up behind them and slowed to a walk. Toot felt his presence and turned, startled. Mark put a finger to his lips, and she smiled. Disguising his voice, he said, “Hey, are you Mark Allen’s dad?”
Space whipped around, saw his son, and laughed. This was a regular joke between them, but one with an edge. Mark knew Space relished basking in his son’s reflected glory. It was really what he came here for. And Mark couldn’t resist calling him on it, under the veil of teasing.
During the forty-five-mile ride that completed his day’s training, Mark encountered a minor mechanical problem with his bike, and he returned to Kanaloa in a hurry to fix it. Gary had not yet arrived from the mainland, so after showering and changing Mark looked up the number for one of the two local bike shops, B & L Marine Bike & Sport. George Goldstine, a mechanic Mark knew and trusted, answered. Mark explained his quandary.
“Come on down,” George said. “We’ll take care of it.”
Mark went next door and knocked. Mike Rubano, his massage therapist, answered.
“I’m heading into town to B & L,” Mark said. “Want to come?”
“Sure,” Mike said, happy to go but having no choice. He knew Mark wanted a buffer against energy-sapping encounters with fans now that the village was teeming with athletes.
They drove seven miles to the store, which was hidden on the far side of Kailua-Kona in a warehouse district. Mark and Mike slunk in with Mark’s bike as invisibly as they could and made a furtive search for George. Along the way they might have passed a stack of fresh copies of the new Competitor, the pre-Ironman issue featuring Dave Scott and Mark Allen on the cover with the headline “SHOWDOWN ON THE KONA COAST.” If they did, Mark likely recoiled on seeing it, as though it were an FBI “Wanted” poster bearing an image of his face.
They found George tied up with another customer, so Mark folded his arms and settled in to wait. As he had feared, the store was inundated with other athletes taking care of last-minute equipment matters, and Mark was subjected to numerous double-takes and sideways stares. One starry-eyed age-group triathlete proved bolder than the rest and approached Grip.
“Hey, Mark!” the fan said, forgetting in his excitement to use his indoor voice. “Do you think this is your year?”
Mark ignored the fellow as completely as if the slightest acknowledgment of his existence would have turned him into a pillar of salt. The fan’s face fell by degrees. Reflexively he shifted his eyes toward Mike in mute appeal, but he discerned from Mike’s hanging jaw and flushed skin that Mark’s friend was equally shocked.
Half an hour later Mike fixed Mark with a sideways stare of his own as they walked away from the bike shop. He half expected Mark to volunteer some kind of explanation for his behavior, but Mark said nothing. Perhaps, in the privacy of his own thoughts, Mark was reminding himself of the permission given to him by his favorite self-h
elp guru, David K. Reynolds: “Feeling pressured by others, by time, by circumstances is just another feeling. The feeling causes you trouble when you believe you must respond to it or fight it or remove it. Just feel the pressure and continue doing what you need to do.” Perhaps he needed no reminder.
Back at the Kanaloa, Mark ate a hearty lunch, possibly one of his favorites: tortillas stuffed with beans, tofu, salsa, avocado, onions, tomatoes, cottage cheese, and spices. It contained more fat than anything Dave Scott would have eaten. Grip supplemented the repast with a meal-replacement shake made by Exceed, Ironman’s and Mark’s sports nutrition sponsor, also high in fat. Months earlier, when mulling over the question of why he always performed well in the Nice Triathlon and poorly at Ironman, Mark had noted that, like any sensible visitor to France, he nibbled a lot of cheese in the days before the Nice race. Phil Maffetone advocated a relatively high-fat diet for endurance athletes. Influenced by Phil’s beliefs, Mark speculated that the fat content of the delicious fromage he ate before the Nice Triathlon gave him an endurance boost in that race, which he had never lost. So he had developed a plan to duplicate the nutritional advantage in Hawaii.
Desperation had delivered Mark to a place of looking for and exploiting every conceivable way to enhance his Ironman performance, no matter how small. He could not take risks, however. Most of the things he did in the week before the 1989 Ironman would necessarily be the same things he did every year: train lightly, visualize a successful race, load up on high-carbohydrate foods in the last three days before the competition, and so forth. But, since these standard practices alone had not been sufficient to lift him to Ironman victory in past years, he carefully selected a small handful of new measures to try, and eating more fat was one.
Iron War Page 14