Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Mark is assisted in these tasks by his brother Gary, who has leveraged his status as a bike mechanic for several of Ironman’s top racers to score a pink Ironman volunteer T-shirt that gives him access to the bike racks before and during the race. Soon the brothers are joined by Space and Toot, who are similarly attired. Although they lack technical skills, they volunteer for the race each year as a way to feel and be more involved in the Ironman experience. Knowing Mark’s preferences, they say little. But Toot’s heart is full, and there is a message that she feels compelled to share with Mark.

  “You’re going to be all right this time,” she says, gently placing a hand on her son-in-law’s forearm. “I have a feeling.”

  Yesterday Toot made her own secret visit to the Little Blue Church, arriving there a scant few hours before Mark and Julie poked their heads in on their way to the neighboring heiau. She told Space she was going for a run and set out from the Royal Sea Cliff Resort, heading south on Ali’i Drive. She carried a plastic bag containing an unopened jug of Tanqueray gin (Pele’s brand of choice, she was told) and a piece of lava rock shaped like a wave and sparkling with golden flecks. As she jogged along the shore side of the road, she passed a small field of flowers and pulled up a bunch with her free hand.

  Toot had a healthy sweat going by the time she entered the church, two and a half miles from her starting point. She placed a few of her flowers on the altar and prayed.

  “Blessed Virgin Mary,” she said, “please watch over Mark and give him a helping hand tomorrow.”

  Still carrying the heavy plastic bag, Toot left the church and walked over to Kuemanu Heiau. There she dug a hole in the earth and buried the gin and the lava rock, placed the remaining flowers on top of them, and hid the offerings under a layer of soil. Then she spoke to the kahunas.

  “If you have any relationship with my God,” she said, “please get together with him and help Mark get this monkey off his back.”

  Finally she addressed Madam Pele, with two words: “Bug off.”

  While hurrying back to the Royal Sea Cliff, knowing Space would be worried about her long absence, Toot said her rosary. Instantly she was filled with a warm feeling of assurance, not unlike the sensation Mark carried away from the same place a few hours later.

  It is this good feeling that she has just shared with Mark.

  Chores completed, Mark sneaks off toward the far end of the pier, the most isolated place available to him, while Dave starts to make his way over to the spectator area, where Jane, Pat, John, and Mike are waiting for him. He doesn’t get far before an ABC camera crew buttonholes him. Donna de Varona, a former Olympic swimmer, sidles up next to him with a stick mike. Her cameraman centers the pair in the frame, and another guy shines a blinding light in Dave’s and Donna’s eyes. Dave’s been through this many times and submits without protest. Actually, he loves it.

  “Dave, it seems all the talk has been about a showdown between you and Mark Allen,” Donna says. “Do you think he has the best chance of anyone to dethrone you?”

  “Well, Donna, I don’t have a crystal ball,” Dave says, expressing some irritation at Donna’s choice of question. “But I know this: If Mark beats me, I’ll make sure it’s the most painful thing he’s ever done.”

  The crew releases the six-time Ironman champion to complete his search for his circle, whom he finds on the pier at the water’s edge. In the final minutes before battle, Dave likes to talk and to have people around him as much as Mark wants to be silent and alone. The conversation among the five is serious yet natural. This is not anyone’s first rodeo.

  “Boy, I’m going to be anaerobic in those first 400 meters,” Dave says as he stares into the water, punctuating his remark with a low chuckle.

  He’s referring to his plan to start the race hard and perhaps, with any luck, shake Mark early.

  “I’m glad it’s you and not me!” John says, trying to imagine the depths of suffering his friend will endure before the next time he sees him.

  The group is joined by Dave’s father and wife, who have arrived by way of a twenty-second elevator ride and a two-minute walk from Verne and Dot’s room in the King Kam. They’ve left Ryan behind with Dot. The conversation expands to include Verne and Anna as light stretches across the sky overhead.

  Dave, who does not wear a watch, has instructed Pat to tell him when it’s time to start his warm-up swim, and Pat now gives the signal. Anna gets the last moment with Dave.

  “Get out there and do it!” she says. “I love you.”

  Dave could slip into the water from the very spot on the pier where he now stands, but he does not. He knows Mark is probably spying on him, as he has done in past years, waiting to see where Dave lines up at the start so he can draw close beside him and easily fall into his slipstream after the cannon fires. This parasitical tactic has become a serious bone of contention, and Mark intends to make the most of it. But Dave has his own two-part plan to thwart it. Part one entails sneaking over to the lightly trafficked north side of the pier and wading into the bay there. He will warm up by swimming around the pier and then melt into the huddle of heads masked in identical yellow swim caps floating behind the start line. Having escaped detection, Dave will execute the second part of the plan, turning Mark’s own tactics against him and using his better-than-ever swim form to latch on to the feet of a faster swimmer, maybe Chris Hinshaw or Wolfgang Dittrich, and shake Mark straight out of the gate.

  Dave slinks off, feeling clever. Meanwhile, Mark sits on a small bleacher positioned at the very end of the pier, alone, head down. Inside him a quiet battle is taking place between his fears and his chosen self.

  Dave looks fitter than ever. Those veins!

  So what? He’s no god.

  It’s going to be a hot one. I can tell already.

  And? It’s always hot.

  As this internal dialogue continues, secondary race announcer Mike Reilly approaches the bleacher from the left on his way toward the spot on the pier where the start cannon, a surprisingly small toy cannon, rests, to help oversee its firing. He sees a shadowy figure sitting at the right edge of the second bench from the bottom, head down. Not another soul is nearby. Reilly comes nearer and recognizes Mark Allen. He slows to give Mark time to notice him before he passes by. Although he fears it may be a breach of protocol, Reilly can’t resist the temptation to wish Mark good luck before the race. But Mark seems oblivious to his approach, if not insensible to the whole frenetic scene behind him, if not on another plane of existence entirely. So Reilly forces it.

  “Good luck, Mark,” he says.

  Mark hears a voice, but his concentration is so deep that there’s a delay before he recognizes the voice and a further delay before he understands what has been said. Seeing no sign that he’s been heard, Reilly continues walking, feeling like an idiot. He is three paces beyond the bleacher when he hears a single word spoken softly behind him.

  “Thanks.”

  Moments later Dave Scott swims around the end of the pier, right underneath Mark. So much for that plan.

  Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer,” or some other crowd-stirring rock anthem, is now blasting over the loudspeakers. It seems to come from heaven and to fill the entire earth with sound. The atmosphere is electric. Dawn has passed; day has arrived. Some of the younger spectators, now standing on the seawall, pump their fists to the thundering beat of the music. Others sip coffee and let their enchanted eyes play about the large and variegated spectacle. Everyone, athletes and spectators alike, has been caught up in a quivering field of social energy. Mike Plant orders the athletes into the water, and the voltage is cranked up another notch.

  The last quarter hour before the start of Ironman is charged with a jittery anticipation that no other sporting event can match. The stakes—the sheer magnitude of the challenges facing the athletes—seem to transcend sport. The awesome setting—the limitless sea and sky, the looming Hawaiian volcanoes, so recently revealed by the transition from night to day—lend a
sense of almost cosmic importance to what is about to begin. But the kicker is the fact that nobody knows exactly when the race will start. Officially it starts at seven o’clock; however, it never actually starts at seven on the dot, and there is no countdown. This system is needed because it would be easy for one or more deliriously amped athletes to jump a predictable start, like a defensive lineman timing a quarterback’s snap count. It would take only a few such miscreants to launch the entire field prematurely, and there would be no way to cram that genie back inside the bottle. The surprise start format makes the athletes’ eagerness even more difficult to contain. Race staff in kayaks and on surfboards beat the racers back behind the start line, which stretches across the water some fifty feet from shore, and Mike Plant shouts threats and admonitions over the loudspeakers.

  The athletes’ faces wear alarmed expressions as they descend the five stone steps to the sand of Dig Me Beach and enter the water. Some who have not yet strapped on their goggles have red-rimmed eyes, like Rob Mackle’s. Others are bug-eyed, lips pursed with undisguised terror. The Catholics cross themselves. A few of the women seem to struggle for breath. A few of the men smile and squint menacingly, as though ready to bite someone. They are the most terrified of all.

  The music stops. An ABC television helicopter swoops over the bay. A local kahuna recites an invocation, and the national anthem is sung. It can’t be long now. But several dozen athletes continue to warm up in front of the start line, confident the rocket won’t launch until they’re on board.

  Mark Allen completes his warm-up swim and finds Dave Scott on the start line. It isn’t hard. The pros always start at the front, and the fastest swimmers among the pros always congregate about twenty feet from the pier. Dave has to be there, and Mark knows it, and the Man’s trademark mustache makes him hard to miss. Dave’s goggles are currently on his forehead, not over his eyes, rendering him especially easy to find.

  Mark has rehearsed this moment in his mind again and again for months. He has mentally practiced feeling no fear or intimidation and bowling Dave over with his own confidence and strength. He has imagined himself saying, “I hope you have your best race today, Dave, because I’m going to beat you!” The time is here.

  “Good luck, Dave,” Mark says.

  Oh, well. It wouldn’t have come out as he’d imagined it anyway. Dave merely nods in acknowledgment of Mark’s offering.

  On the pier, race owner Valerie Silk and race director Debbie Baker stand behind the cannon. With them is John Waihee, governor of Hawaii, today’s honorary race starter. Mike Reilly is also there. Valerie has shown Governor Waihee what he needs to do and instructed him to wait for her signal. The race might not start at any particular time, but it does start when Valerie decides. Mike Reilly can’t help but notice that the governor seems distracted, almost irritable, as though he would rather be somewhere else.

  In front of this group, almost directly in the cannon’s line of innocuous fire, Triathlete photographer Gary Newkirk is poised on the edge of the pier with his legs dangling over the start line below. He likes to capture an image of the start as it happens, which requires that he hold the camera in front of his face beginning about two minutes before the cannon fires and use his instinctive flinch at the weapon’s report to activate the shutter. Once Mike Plant finally succeeds in getting almost everyone back behind the start line, Gary knows to assume his position. But a good fifty athletes are currently swimming toward the start line from the far side, so Gary’s camera rests idly on his lap.

  Boom!

  Governor Waihee has decided he can do whatever the hell he wants. Valerie Silk’s jaw drops. The woman widely regarded as the gentlest soul in Hawaii might brain the son of a bitch if she had a frying pan handy.

  Meanwhile, chaos—more than the usual chaos.

  Taken unawares, Dave Scott frantically pulls his goggles over his eyes and starts swimming before a thousand of his greatest admirers swim over him. His plan to lose Mark straight out of the gate has possibly been ruined before he can take a single stroke.

  Mark’s plan to follow Dave is no less compromised. Although he was somewhat readier for the cannon and is able to respond to its firing more quickly, he feels strangely flummoxed to find himself swimming ahead of Dave when he had no intention or expectation of doing so. His confusion saps a bit of the power from his typical all-out start—or perhaps instinct tells him to wait for Dave so he can salvage Plan A.

  The unhappiest swimmers are the fifty who were swimming in the wrong direction, toward the other 1,200, when the cannon fired. They have become victims of a watery stampede. Try as they might to swiftly about-face and race ahead of the coming swarm, the very fastest swimmers are at the front of that swarm, so the fifty victims are doomed to be slapped, elbowed, and pushed under.

  Even some of the safety volunteers, paddling prone on surfboards, are brutally engulfed, having also been surprised by the premature firing of the field piece and having failed to respect the barracuda speed of the swimmers off the front.

  It’s not much better for the fastest swimmers themselves, who want nothing more than to get out ahead of the aquatic mosh pit and into clean water so they can enjoy a swift and unmolested swim.

  The view from the pier and the seawall is spectacular. Flailing arms and thrashing legs churn the bay into a frenzy of whitewater, as though eager piranhas have congregated in a bid for the most cattle carcasses devoured in ninety seconds. Inside the frenzy, goggles and sports watches are being ripped off, heads are being dunked, esophagus-searing salt water is being inhaled, and worse. It’s not uncommon for an athlete or two to not even get beyond the pier before grabbing hold of a surfboard and calling it a day.

  ABC’s Sam Posey stands on the pier with this savagery behind him, a television camera focused on his upper half. Wearing a blue polo shirt and holding a bulbous microphone, he delivers his opening lines for the one-hour Ironman show that will be broadcast several weeks later. Although it is not live, he’ll get only one take because his dramatic sea-of-humanity backdrop will soon flow out of frame.

  “And so the thirteenth Ironman Triathlon is under way!” he enunciates. “The Ironman: quite possibly the toughest, most demanding single-day sporting event anywhere in the world. Consider what’s ahead: 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of riding a bike, and 26.2 miles of running—a full marathon. Now, when the Ironman was first held back in 1978, it was a struggle just to survive and to finish. Today, despite the brutal distances involved, the Ironman is very much a race.”

  As these words are spoken, the man who made Ironman a race, Dave Scott, is sprinting in total abandonment toward the front of the melee, angry enough to kill. He loves to race angry. He always races angry. It takes little to flip the switch of fury inside his mind at the start of a race. But his bad start today is one of the most incensing setbacks he has experienced in any triathlon, and he has seized upon it as an opportunity to stoke his rage and save his original plan for the swim. He torpedoes ahead of nearly everyone who got out in front of him and soon enough catches and passes Mark, who, with relief, tucks in behind him. Dave does not relent but continues to stroke as hard as he can in an effort to dislodge the parasite.

  Grip is not the only swimmer to hitch a ride. A massive pack of nearly twenty men forms behind the Man. This is not 1982, and Dave and Mark are no longer in a class by themselves in the water. Dave senses the scope of his company, and his animus expands to encompass the whole lot. His efforts in this early part of the race are as much a message to the others as a matter of personal performance.

  This is how hard I am willing to go. This is how much I am willing to suffer. You want to stay with me? Then get ready for an extremely unpleasant experience that will not end well for you.

  The most threatening men in the group besides Mark are Mike Pigg and Ken Glah, last year’s second- and third-place finishers. Pigg has been a dominating force since turning pro three years ago and is the reigning Triathlete of the Year. A scrapper, Pigg
has been compared to Pete Rose, who usually played well but always got his uniform dirty. Glah, a Pennsylvanian, is known as the Beast of the East, so novel is the phenomenon of an East Coaster among Ironman’s top echelon. Only 25 years old, like Pigg, the mustached redhead is strong in all three disciplines.

  Behind Dave’s pack the field strings out quickly, elongating from a roundish blob to a stretched-out teardrop in a matter of minutes. While the swim is by far the shortest leg of the race in distance and duration, it is also the discipline in which the greatest disparities in speed are manifest. The leader will cover the 2.4-mile out-and-back course in forty-eight minutes. Forty-eight minutes after that, athletes will still be staggering in droves up the swim exit ramp.

  AS THE FAT BACK END of the teardrop drifts away from the pier, a strange and colorful detritus is left behind in the beach’s shallow waters: hundreds of abandoned flip-flops of various hues. Over the course of Iron Week the prickly sea urchins carpeting the ocean floor off Dig Me Beach caused a run on flip-flops at Whalers General Store across the street, and at other vendors.

  The entire swim course lies in water clear and shallow enough to sight bottom. If they care to look, swimmers can see craggy blue coral on the ocean floor and schools of small tropical fish in flaming colors darting about in tidy formations. A group of manta rays glides gently underneath the lead swimmers as they pass beyond the pier.