Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Here we go!

  Again Dave does not see the immediate effect of his surge, but he senses that one and only one rider has been able to respond, and he knows it’s Mark. He can’t fool himself any longer. He wishes to hell he could see the guy and assess his status. If only he could observe Mark’s body language. Is he starting to rock from side to side? Are there any soft spots in his pedal stroke? Is he coasting at any point because he’s tired or his low back hurts? If any of these things is happening, it would be helpful to Dave to know it. If not, it’s just as well that he doesn’t know.

  Dave can’t help himself. He looks back. Mark lowers his head.

  No chance, Dave.

  Ahead, Wolfgang has also started to struggle. His ascent of the same hill minutes ago brought his supply of matches critically low. He has made the dreadful discovery that, through a combination of being alone, off the front, inexperienced, under the spotlight, and naturally aggressive, he rode just a little—maybe 1 percent—too hard. And now he’s carrying an anvil on his back, pedaling in squares, pumping his torso in rhythm with his legs to compensate for their loss of power. Adding insult to injury, the winds have finally picked up and are coming stiffly from the south—straight into Wolfgang’s face. His lead is coming down again, and this time there’s no chance of a rebound. The last twelve miles to the Kona Surf Hotel will be an eternity for him.

  At the top of the hill, Dave dials back the intensity just a bit. He’s done what he can do. It’s going to come down to the run. But he still feels strong, and there’s no reason to make it easy for anyone else. Mike Pigg continues to execute his strategy of staying with the leaders as long as possible, which, given his present state of depletion, amounts to clinging to a ten-second deficit like driftwood behind Dave and Mark. Rob is another ten seconds back and grateful that the last big hill is behind him. Ken vomits one more time for good measure after topping the hill last of the five.

  Dave and Mark pass a sign marking the ninety-nine-mile point of the bike leg. It sits at the base of Palani Hill, at the very spot Mark has chosen to break Dave in the marathon should they reach that place together three hours from now. As he whizzes past it, Mark cannot help but cast his mind ahead to that possible moment, as he has done dozens of times already in the preceding days.

  The hill tops out some 300 yards from Palani Road and then descends gently toward the intersection. This is where Dave plans to pull away from Mark in the marathon, if it comes to that—if he can’t somehow finish Mark off sooner.

  But the bike course does not go there. Instead, just beyond the ninety-nine-mile sign, Dave and his followers turn right onto Kaiwi Street, which takes them into the heart of the warehouse district on the outskirts of town and past B & L, the shop where Mark got his bike fixed on Tuesday. Three blocks down they turn left onto Kuakini Highway. Moments later they zip through the intersection at Palani Road, just one block above the pier, where it all started. A sizable crowd of spectators—the first since Hawi—is gathered there and makes a joyful noise as they pass. Three blocks farther on, Dave and Mark lean hard to the right and turn onto Hualalai Road, in the heart of town. More alley than avenue, it drops them quickly down to Ali’i Drive and the Hot Corner. The crowd is massive and raucous, having been expertly fomented by rookie secondary race announcer Mike Reilly, and by libations in the case of many. The mob, which for a long time had little to entertain it besides thumping music and Mike’s infrequent race updates from the field, was primed to fever pitch by Wolfgang’s passage through a little more than two minutes ago. Now, as the two titans of Ironman come into sight, everyone goes berserk. The noise is so great that it pains the ears of its chief objects as they accelerate savagely from the top of the block, brake just enough, and then lean hard left to make the turn onto Ali’i Drive.

  Dave and Mark now head south through the most urban portion of the bike course, blazing between two-story wooden buildings containing restaurants, jewelry shops, clothing boutiques, and knickknack stores. Spectators line the street thickly for a few blocks, but their presence dwindles as Dave and Mark move swiftly away from the village center. They pass through an area of resort hotels and condominiums, including Sea Village, where Dave woke up seven hours ago, and then into more residential and vegetated surroundings.

  As they approach one house on the water side, Dave’s eyes alight on a man lying faceup on a fully reclined lounge chair. He is shirtless, and his exposed, freshly sunburned belly is distended like a bullfrog’s throat pouch. A pile of empty beer cans surrounds him.

  The commotion of Dave and Mark’s advance seems to wake the man from a drunken slumber. His head snaps up. His eyes bulge as they work to focus. Dave makes a mental note that he will see this character again a couple of miles into the run.

  The last hill climb on the Ironman bike course falls between 110 and 111 miles, as Ali’i Drive veers away from the water. It is short but very steep. Wolfgang’s legs burn terribly as he climbs it with atrocious form, flopping all over his bike in an effort to find unused muscles to take him the rest of the way. At the top he follows Ali’i as it bends right to run along a ridge above the water. He passes the Kona Country Club, half of its green holes to his left, half to his right, and then turns right onto Ehukai Street. He plunges down a hill that is the mirror image of the climb that burned the last match he had left for this segment of the race and sweeps into the vast parking lot of the Kona Surf Hotel. A race official hastens to meet him at the bike dismount line and holds his handlebar steady as he shakily climbs off. A race clock positioned there displays the cumulative race time: 5:27:17.

  Two legs down, one to go. Wolfgang Dittrich still leads the 1989 Ironman World Championship.

  A large, party-minded crowd has gathered at the bike-run transition area, creating a scene and an energy not unlike those of a Tour de France stage finish. Wolfgang receives a nice welcome, but the crowd explodes when Dave Scott and Mark Allen race in together one minute fifty-one seconds later.

  Mark’s bike split is 4:37:52, third fastest in the history of the race.

  Dave’s bike split is 4:37:53.

  Mike Pigg comes in ten seconds behind them, Rob Mackle eleven seconds after Mike, and a somewhat recovered and refueled Ken Glah forty-nine seconds after Rob.

  Mike Plant has come down from the finish-line tower to lead the celebration. His steady microphone chatter trails off as he watches Dave and Mark tear into the transition area almost on top of each other. He can feel what’s coming.

  CHAPTER 10

  VISION QUEST

  Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Dave Scott and Mark Allen are stark naked, in close proximity, for the second time today.

  Upon dismounting from their bikes a moment ago, Dave just ahead of Mark, the two men dashed inside the Keauhou IV Conference Room of the Kona Surf Hotel’s detached convention center building, which has been requisitioned to serve as the men’s bike-run transition changing room. It is everything that the racecourse they’ve just left and will soon return to is not: gloomily lit, softly carpeted, air conditioned. As race volunteers wheeled their bikes over to racks set up to accommodate more than a thousand bikes in the multiacre hotel parking lot, Dave and Mark ripped off their cycling clothes (Mark also removing his heart rate monitor strap, which he does not wear for the run), their movements frantic, as though the race were certain to be decided by tenths of a second.

  They now tear open their transition bags and pull on their running shorts, shoes, singlets, and headwear. (Dave dons a visor, Mark a cap.) Mark is first to burst out of the refrigerated semidarkness of Keauhou IV and reenter the stifling heat and midday glare of the island day. He runs like a fugitive through a gauntlet of clamoring spectators besieging a roped-off path that cuts across the parking lot. Dave emerges seconds later and accelerates to a near sprint, panicked by Mark’s novel position ahead of him. As Mark reaches out to grab a cup of Exceed sports drink from a volun
teer at an aid station located within the confines of the parking lot, Dave nearly clips Mark’s opposite elbow with his own in passing him—whether accidentally or intentionally, only he knows.

  Having overtaken Mark, Dave does not relax but persists at a pace that seems certain to leave him completely out of gas within a couple of miles if he keeps it up. Mark watches Dave pull away and finds himself momentarily paralyzed in disbelief. Gathering his wits, Mark begins hauling after him. By the time they escape the hotel grounds onto Ehukai Street, the pair is shoulder to shoulder and locked in a rash game of back-and-forth speed one-upping. Grip has cast aside the gamesmanship of following Dave on the bike and now refuses to let Dave nose ahead, no matter how reckless his tempo. The most knowledgeable spectators among the roaring hundreds lining the road on both sides wonder if the rivals have lost their minds. Their pace is unsustainable by a long shot.

  Have Dave and Mark become so lost in their lust to destroy each other that they now risk destroying themselves?

  Not quite. They know what they’re doing—or at least what they’re feeling. As they tear through the first quarter mile of the marathon, both men are gauging the status of their legs. It is a moment of truth. After four and a half hours of hard cycling, a triathlete’s legs will inevitably be sore, stiff, and heavy, causing the transition to running to lack coordination; nonetheless, he can feel right away whether he’s going to have a bad run or a good one. With a surge of confidence, Mark discovers that his legs feel better than they ever have after the Ironman bike leg. This realization gives him the courage to match Dave’s crazy tempo. Beside him, Dave detects the same sensations in his own legs, and so, with a kind of sadistic delight, he forges ahead with his pre-race plan to terrify Mark into mentally imploding with a vicious early run pace. Mark is, in fact, astonished and alarmed by what Dave is doing, but he would sooner die than let him go.

  Just like the bike leg, the run leg begins with a demoralizing climb—an eighth of a mile at a 9 percent grade up Ehukai Street, from the Kona Surf parking lot to Ali’i Drive. Yet Dave and Mark seem to flatten the hill as they stampede heavenward with huge, ballistic strides, thwarting the course designers’ malicious aims. The spectators clap and holler with special fervor, a glint of rapture in their faces. The stunning velocity of the running, the naked ferocity of the struggle, the mythical status of the men—all of this against the backdrop of their singular rivalry: It is almost too perfect. More than a few watchers find themselves laughing with delight.

  “Dad, it’s like a movie!” says one 12-year-old boy as the runners pass.

  At the top of the hill the warriors turn left onto Ali’i, retracing the route by which they arrived at the Kona Surf on their bikes a short time ago. An escort forms around them as they cut due north along a ridge some 200 feet above the water. Leading it is the station wagon carrying Mike Adamle and his ABC crew, which is followed by a white Ford flatbed truck bearing photographers and writers. Immediately in front of Dave and Mark are a scooter carrying a course marshal and a convertible bearing four race officials, including Mike Plant’s wife, Cathy, who continues her work as a spotter. Behind the runners is a white Jeep with Mark’s support crew—Charlie Graves, Brian Hughes, Mike Rubano, and John Martin. And, hanging at the very back of the escort, as inconspicuously as possible, are two men on mopeds: Dave’s pals John Reganold and Mike Norton.

  Cathy Plant checked her stopwatch at the start of the marathon, and she checks it again now to get a split for the first mile: 5:55. She communicates the split to her husband, who remains back at the Kona Surf parking lot, by two-way radio.

  “You mean 6:55,” he corrects.

  After all, this was Scott Molina’s average pace for the marathon in his winning effort last year.

  “No, 5:55.”

  “Holy smokes! And they’re running side by side?”

  “Side by side.”

  “Wow. Fantastic.”

  “Mike . . .” She pauses, groping for the right words. “I wish you could see this.”

  The tone of Cathy’s voice sends a shiver down Mike’s spine. Mike shares the information with the crowd, which is briefly hushed by the report. They sense it too.

  By now Dave and Mark have shaken off their cycling legs and found their normal running strides, which are as unalike as almost everything else about them. Mark’s, as always, looks fluid and efficient. He scuttles lightly forward with minimal vertical displacement, like a Jesus lizard on water. Dave runs with fists clenched, chest protruding, low back arched, butt sticking out, knees splayed wide, and feet flared. His form is as gangly and unorthodox as Mark’s is graceful and textbook. But he goes just as fast.

  There’s a lovely view of the Pacific Ocean over the two men’s left shoulders. But their eyes are focused on the aid station they’re approaching on the west side of the road. Running at Mark’s left shoulder, Dave has easier access to the cups. Mark, on the other hand, must slow down and merge left to get his. Having slaked his thirst, he must then surge to catch Dave. It’s a sequence that wastes only a small amount of energy in a single instance but could become a decisive drain if repeated every mile or so throughout the marathon.

  Both runners slow down as little as possible for these exchanges, each preferring to risk missing a pass or sending a cup flying to the ground than to sacrifice an inch to the other. Fortunately, the aid stations are long—about fifty yards—and well staffed, with redundant numbers of volunteers at each, allowing Dave and Mark more than one opportunity to grab a cup. Some are filled with Exceed and others with water, which they alternately gulp and pour over their heads. There are also specially designed plastic bottles of decarbonated Coca-Cola.

  It’s impossible to breathe and drink at the same time. Dave and Mark are breathing hard enough that even briefly halting their respiration to swallow some liquid causes them to gasp through several breath cycles afterward as their lungs scramble to catch up with the backlog of demand for oxygen. Despite the hassle and the discomfort, both men grab as many cups as they can in those fifty yards—four and five apiece.

  A quarter mile past the aid station the road turns sharply to the left and immediately plunges precipitously toward the shore, sending Dave and Mark hurtling down a hill very much like the one they climbed a mile earlier, leaving the Kona Surf. Running downhill is infinitely worse than running uphill in these circumstances. Each foot strike sends a sharp jolt of pain through the quadriceps muscles, which worked as prime movers for four and a half hours on the bike and now, on the run, serve as the body’s primary shock absorbers, accommodating forces equal to seven or eight times Dave’s and Mark’s individual body weights as they barrel down the decline at 14 mph.

  Something about Dave’s odd stride gives him a preternatural gift for downhill running, and he steamrolls ahead of Mark by a few paces as they drop toward shore level and then make a hard right to begin a five-mile journey into downtown Kailua-Kona along the coast. But within 100 yards of the road’s flattening out, Mark is again hip to hip with his rival.

  They pass the Kona Surf and Racquet Club, a large complex of condominiums and townhomes that is a popular choice for Iron Week accommodations because of its twenty-five-meter outdoor pool. A crowd of friends and family members of racers staying there erupts as the heroes pass at a breathtaking pace with their escort.

  They pass the Outrigger Hotel, a multistory luxury hotel for those with a little more money to spend. Another small crowd of spectators is left with hands on mouths.

  The runners pass a white sign with a big red “2” printed upon it. Mark checks his stopwatch, sees they have run another mile in less than six minutes, and thinks, Whatever. Dave wears no watch and is pacing himself completely by feel.

  Just ahead on the left, Dave spies the shirtless, beer-swilling dude he saw sprawled out on a reclining lawn chair earlier. He is now perilously awake and standing at the edge of his driveway, shouting nonsense at the cyclists (lesser male pros) trickling through in the opposite direction. The
commotion of Dave and Mark’s motorcade behind him grabs his attention. He turns, blinks twice, and a look of recognition seizes his face, then a look of inspiration. As the runners pass him, the barefoot drunk breaks from the curb and gives thundering chase. Arms pumping wildly, he draws up beside Dave and bellows, “Come on, guys! Pick it up!” There is no one to stop him—no security detail among the course officials and journalists and friends of Dave and Mark in the convoy. Their only way of escaping their tormentor is to outrun him, which, fortunately, they need all of ten seconds to do.

  “Where’s the fire?” is his parting shot.

  As it wends its way toward town, Ali’i Drive curves gently left and right along the contours of the coast, undulates up and down, and is closely bordered by lush vegetation on both sides. The view ahead is thus usually limited to a couple of hundred yards. But there comes a moment when the street straightens and flattens out enough to reveal Wolfgang Dittrich, the race leader for almost six hours, ahead.

  Blood in the water.

  Dave instinctively, needlessly presses even harder. He cannot help himself. A runner ahead is like a terrible itch that can be relieved only by a quick overtaking. Mark surges smoothly with him, thinking, If I go down, let me take him with me.

  Approaching another aid station, Mark makes a surprising and clearly calculated move. Instead of easing behind Dave and merging left to take his drinks, he bolts ahead and cuts across, stealing the inside position for this and subsequent aid stations on Ali’i Drive. Dave briefly considers trying to wrest it back at the next opportunity but decides not to waste his energy on such small tactics. He has been granting Mark the little advantages all day—allowing him to ride his wake in the swim, to hide out on the bike—trusting that the race will be decided by one big advantage in his favor: a stronger will. No reason to change his mind about that now. Go ahead, Mark. Knock yourself out.