Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  The runners’ shirtfronts are discolored with spilled Exceed and Coke. It looks like blood. It might as well be blood.

  Dave’s number bib is missing. He tore it off a few miles back. It was irritating him. It’s of little consequence; this contest of wills has transcended the formal event, like a boxing match that continues as a brawl outside the ring.

  The nonpartisans among those watching squirm with anticipation. They know that before long one of these men is going to strike a death blow. But who? And when? And exactly how? Those with some skin in the game—namely John Reganold and Mike Norton on their mopeds and Mark’s group of Charlie Graves, Brian Hughes, Mike Rubano, and John Martin, now riding in their Jeep right behind the action—can barely watch.

  As Dave and Mark reach the bottom of the false flat, Ken Glah, having passed a fading Mike Pigg for third place, strides by in the opposite direction. The next-best Ironman triathlete in the world is two full miles behind the leaders and falling ever farther back at a steady rate of fifty yards per minute. For ten seconds Ken is no longer in the race but just another awestruck spectator. More than twenty years later this moment will be his only clear memory of the day.

  The road turns upward now, and in ascending it Mark notices that it’s not as hard to keep up with Dave as it was on the recently completed descent. Instinctively Grip eases up just slightly to hide his strength as he thinks ahead to the last climb of the race: Palani Hill, the place he pointed out to Julie upon their arrival in Kona.

  I have to make my move there if I possibly can.

  They crest the present hill and begin another gentle downgrade. Dave turns the screws even tighter. Instantly Mark is back on the ropes. Blood has visibly soaked through the upper of Mark’s shoe. The foes are now running faster than they have since their initial burst out of transition, and Mark seems to be barely hanging on—Dave is that much stronger when the road bends down. Sensing his advantage, Dave thinks ahead to the last descent of the race, the back side of Palani Hill, the place he discussed with Pat Feeney earlier in the week.

  I have to make my move there if I possibly can.

  They draw closer and closer to town, and the closer they get, the faster they run.

  JULIE MOSS CONTINUES to have a pretty good race. She got off the bike behind only two other women and has lost just three spots in the first ten miles of the run. But her mind is not focused on her own performance. Since turning onto the Queen K at eight miles, she has been watching for Mark—and wondering whether she will see him before or after Dave. At last, yet much sooner than expected (for she has never seen the returning men’s leader this early on the outbound portion of the run), she spots a massive procession of vehicles drifting toward her in the distance, a helicopter hanging above. The press truck and other official vehicles at the front end of the convoy obstruct whoever the leader is until the parade has come very near. Then she sees—not him but them! They’re still together. Oh, God.

  In the blink of an eye they are gone, and Julie is alone again on the simmering highway. The encounter has left her shaken, a single echoing question dominating her thoughts: What will happen?

  The suffering of racing an Ironman is tolerable only if you are totally focused on your race, and even then it is not always tolerable. Right now Julie cares a lot more about the outcome of Mark’s fight with Dave than about her own struggle.

  Well, I guess I’ll know soon enough, she thinks. But will I? No. I have to see this. It’s too important.

  A man on a motorcycle is coming her way in the southbound lane, another spectator drawn toward Dave and Mark by the spreading news. Julie darts in front of him and waves her arms above her head like a marooned sailor. The astonished biker comes to a stop face to face with her. He notes her race number, 53, indicating an elite female. He notes that her position is well toward the front of the women’s race and that she appears neither ill nor injured.

  “Julie Moss,” she says, knowing she need say no more. “I have to see what happens.”

  “Hop on.”

  Julie passed her fiancé at the twenty-one-mile point of his race. As she climbs onto the back of a Kawasaki, Dave and Mark approach mile twenty-two. Anna stands in the dead center of the highway there.

  “Come on, Dave!” she screams, pouring her entire soul into her plea. “You can do it!”

  Anna raises her right hand. Dave presses his hand against hers. He’s so damn tired it feels like he’s yanked an emergency break. But he relishes the contact and even lets his arm stretch behind him so his hand can linger in his wife’s as he forces his body onward.

  Approaching the next aid station, Mark pulls a small plastic film canister out of his shorts, opens it, and drops the last salt tablet into his palm. After casting the empty canister to the side of the road, he reaches out for a bottle of decarbonated Coke, drops the tablet into that, and drinks. The captain of this particular aid station happens to see the blur of the flying canister and, suspicious, fetches it. Recalling this year’s crackdown on outside assistance to racers, he decides to report Dave’s canister to Marshals Director Dennis Haserot, almost hoping a rule has been broken.

  Dave again falls behind Mark and merges right for refreshments. But something happens. Maybe he slows down a little more. Maybe Mark doesn’t slow down as much. Whatever the case, Dave emerges from the feed zone fifteen feet behind Grip. Reflexively he moves to close the gap and with a flash of panic he discovers that he can’t. Or rather, he could, but it would be the last thing he did. His body knows it. Lifting his tempo to catch Mark feels three times harder than it would have felt just a mile back and would now require a dangerous, likely terminal dedication of resources. The dozen or more gap-closing surges Dave has executed already—on top of everything else—seem to have zapped his legs. To his great relief, however, it becomes apparent that Mark is either unable or unwilling to press the advantage. Even so, Dave knows he must catch Mark before he reaches the base of Palani Hill or his last best chance to win will be lost. Dave heeds a guiding intuition that tells him to be patient and shrink the deficit literally inch by inch, to burn as little energy as possible in making the catch.

  Mike Norton and John Reganold, having leapfrogged the action and dismounted from their mopeds, stand just beyond the aid station and are alarmed by the gap, small and static though it is.

  “Come on, Dave!” Mike shouts. “Crush him!”

  I’m trying, Dave answers in his mind.

  This is how things stand when the motorcycle bearing Julie Moss catches up with the white Ford flatbed truck carrying photographers and writers. She negotiates with the driver, who pulls wide and slows to allow her to leap off the Kawasaki and execute a train-hopper’s boarding of the truck. Among those lending a helping hand is Sports Illustrated writer Kenny Moore, who cannot believe his good fortune. He pulls out his notebook and prepares to write down everything Julie says.

  With its new passenger safely aboard, the press truck pulls back in front of the racers. Soon thereafter a barely perceptible lifting of Mark’s chin indicates that he has noticed Julie’s presence. She shoots him a thumbs-up.

  “This next hill,” she tells Kenny. “He plans to do it on this hill.”

  Dave catches Mark 100 yards from the base of that next—and last—hill. Palani.

  Another journalist in the convoy notes the time on the race clock at this moment: 7:58:02. The start cannon fired at one minute after seven this morning. It is one minute before three o’clock on the afternoon of October 14, 1989.

  AS DAVE PULLS EVEN with Mark, he shakes out his arms to relax. He is prepared to whip out his saber, as it were, and chop off Mark’s head at the summit. Their final opportunity to refuel is coming up—an aid station at the very base of the hill. Both men move toward the reaching arms of the volunteers stationed there. Mark is just about to grab a cup when a voice in his mind shouts, Go now! Startled, Mark instantly withdraws his arm, veers back to the middle of the lane, and surges. Caught off guard, Dave hurriedly tosse
s away the cup he’s claimed and counters the move. This time he puts everything he has into the chase, knowing he must. Mark’s saber has come out first, and it’s at his throat.

  Try as he might, Dave cannot haul Mark back. Sensing this, Mark turns his head just enough to ascertain from Dave’s absence in the margin of his vision that his rival is struggling. Then he really punches the gas, rocketing ahead of Dave as though a towline between them has snapped. Dave runs after Mark with the same degree of purpose with which a burning man rolls around on the ground, but his desperate effort to respond seems to serve only to precipitate a sudden and spectacular disintegration of his stride. His head begins to bob and his knees lock, leaving him to run on disjointed stilts. The abrupt loss of coordination suggests that he has held it together by will and will alone for some time.

  Showing not a shred of mercy for Dave or himself, Mark throws his body into the hill. He knows that the last mile of the race is basically all downhill—all to Dave’s advantage—and he is therefore determined to put himself out of reach by the top of the incline, no matter the cost. His lead stretches ever wider.

  “You’re doing it!” Julie shouts. But she still isn’t sure. She has seen him doing it before, only to come undone.

  “Stay within yourself!” she calls. Then adds, “You never have to do this again!”

  “It’s over,” says a photographer.

  “It’s never over,” Julie says. “If he cramps, Dave will be on him.”

  Dave is thinking the same thing. Although he is absolutely dying of fatigue, he concedes nothing more than the present hill. If he can just keep Mark within range, within ten or fifteen seconds, he can reel him in on the shallow descent to Palani Road, and if not there, then on the steeper drop down Pay-’n’-Save Hill.

  Mark’s lead is thirty seconds at the top of the hill. He does not relent but now hurls himself headlong down the back side, spurring himself onward by picturing Dave coming after him. As he makes the right turn onto Palani, Mark hazards a glance back along the Queen K. Dave is 200 yards behind him. Mark continues to press. The density of spectators and the volume of their noise increase exponentially as Mark flies down Pay-’n’-Save Hill. He reaches Kuakini Highway and uses the opportunity of the left turn he makes there to steal another glance back. Dave has not even come off the Queen K.

  Suddenly Mark stops dead in his tracks. Julie’s heart leaps into her throat. What? No! But her fright is short-lived. Mark balls both fists, extends his arms skyward, and drives his elbows into his sides, shouting, “Yes!” Then he’s running again.

  No sooner has Mark completed the left turn onto Kuakini Highway than a young man bolts from the curb and begins to run alongside him, at a respectful distance. It is Brian Hughes.

  “Mark!” he shouts. “John Martin is at the next corner. He has the flag. He’ll give it to you.”

  This is the solution Brian has come up with to the conflict between his desire to see Mark cross the finish line with a star-spangled banner in his hand and Ironman’s crackdown on outside assistance to racers. Brian is Mark’s official representative, but his friend is just an innocent bystander. Brian hopes this makes a difference in the judgment of any Ironman official who might witness the transfer. Mark couldn’t care less.

  “Where’s Dave?” he shouts back. “How close is he?”

  Nonplussed, Brian looks back toward Palani Road.

  “I can’t even see him,” Brian says, now struggling for breath. “Mark, you won.”

  Brian stops, and Mark continues. The cheering crescendos as he runs down Kuakini toward the next-to-last turn of the race, at Hualalai Road. At the corner, as promised, stands John Martin. As Mark reaches him, John thrusts the flag into Grip’s right hand.

  The roar of the fans rises as Mark approaches the Hot Corner once more and turns—to the right this time—onto Ali’i Drive. Cathy Plant’s last report to her husband from the field was garbled by the rising din on his side, allowing him to announce only that someone had broken away, leaving the crowd in a state of almost unbearable anticipation for four minutes. Mark’s arrival hits the crowd like news of enemy surrender from the front line of a long and costly war. A bedlam of celebration erupts as Mark embarks on the final stretch. He has finally done it, and good God, what it took! The people know the story—enough of it anyway—and they rejoice in full appreciation of his overcoming.

  THE VICTOR’S RUN down Ali’i Drive: This is the dream of every triathlete gifted enough to dare. Not breaking the tape at the finish line but running that iconic final stretch. Mark has dreamed this dream a thousand times and more, and the reality is exactly like his dream in every detail, just a little more vivid and a whole lot louder. The central village of KailuaKona has a quaint dreamscape quality that makes the ultimate triathlon experience even more surreal, or unreal, than it would otherwise be. The way the street snakes left and right to hide the finish banner until you’re almost underneath it; the way the shops and restaurants, all with second-story balconies, press in on the street from both sides; something vaguely Candyland, with a South Pacific twist, about the zoning and architecture—Mark floats through it all, six inches above the ground, now in a soundless vacuum, in slow motion, seeing every shouting mouth and every pumping fist, dreaming with his eyes wide open.

  His pace does not slacken. Mark continues to run swiftly as he approaches the banner stretched across the finish line at belly level by two race officials. He does not so much wave the flag gripped tightly in his right hand as beat the air with it in convulsive stabs, the sort of unconscious “take that” gesture that is often seen in moments of hard-won victory, but a little different here. Through a clench-toothed grin he tries and fails to restrain his sobs. The moment he breaks the tape—his total time an unimaginable 8:09:15, his marathon split (minus the bike-run transition) an unbelievable 2:38:49—he gives up all restraint and breaks into unashamed weeping.

  Mark Allen does not weep like a ferociously competitive athlete who has won the most important event in his sport after years of maddening frustration. He weeps like a man who has overcome something much deeper, older, and more personal. His whole life Mark has dreamed of doing something that makes people look and say, “That’s incredible.” Since discovering triathlon Mark has done many things that are incredible in the eyes of others. But until now, no victory has exactly represented what he meant when he first articulated his dream as a young boy. Nothing has filled the emptiness that inflated that dream. Now Mark has finally done something incredible in his own eyes. He has filled the emptiness, and it is indescribably good.

  Will the feeling last? Will the fullness remain? Hush. These are questions for tomorrow.

  Julie dashes forward and throws her arms around Mark, who crumples into her embrace in a mixed expression of exhaustion and emotional release. Gary, of whose earlier heroics Mark will soon learn, pats his big brother on the back and fixes him with a huge grin and sparkling eyes that communicate both worshipful pride and concern over Mark’s unaccustomed tearful outpouring. Sharon squeezes herself between her sons.

  “Oh, Mark, you did it,” she moans in tones that could only ever be heard in mother-to-child speech. “You finally did it. Oh, Mark.”

  Space is caught on the back side of the family scrum and must wait to stake his claim to the new champion of Ironman.

  The massive crowd erupts anew as Dave comes to the finish line, fifty-eight seconds behind Mark. So great is the roar of appreciation that the man who carried this race on his back toward this pivotal moment for ten years is compelled to acknowledge the people with a small gesture of his left hand. Not even a decibel quieter than Mark’s ovation, Dave’s reception communicates a clear message: You did not lose this race. Not really. And the crowd is right. The enduring image of the greatest race ever run will not be Mark breaking the tape alone at the finish line but Dave and Mark together, still together, less than two miles from the finish line, at one minute before three o’clock on the afternoon of October 14, 19
89.

  CHAPTER 11

  BREAKING POINT

  How can you think and hit at the same time?

  —YOGI BERRA

  It is three o’clock on the afternoon of October 14, 1989, and Mark Allen is running away from Dave Scott on Palani Hill in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. Meanwhile, 22-year-old Stephen McGregor is hanging out with fellow students at Tri-State University (since renamed Trine University) in Angola, Indiana. A triathlete himself, Steve is aware that the race is happening on this day, but since there is no live coverage of any kind, he will not learn the result until some time afterward. Partial to Dave Scott, he will be disappointed to find out that Dave has been unable to respond to Mark’s last surge.

  Two decades later Steve will develop innovative tools in his work as an exercise physiologist that will yield surprising discoveries about the human running stride. Among these tools will be an esoteric statistic called control entropy, which can be used to precisely measure a runner’s fatigue level as well as to quantify how hard a runner is trying to resist the fatigue he’s feeling. The concept of control entropy will also provide a compelling explanation of what happens in the critical moment of the greatest race ever run, when Dave’s legs fail him, and will expose the remarkable achievement hidden in his failure. Specifically, Steve’s analysis will lead him to conclude that in the last ten minutes of the race, Dave Scott fights as hard against total physical exhaustion as any athlete ever has for as long as human beings have raced.

  AN ONLY CHILD, Stephen McGregor spent the first ten years of his life in the small town of St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada. His father, Jim, worked as a factory manager and made a better living than most men who lack a college education. On weekends Jim pursued the uncommon hobby of racing dragsters and achieved no small measure of success, winning a Canadian Top Fuel Championship and holding his nation’s speed record for a time. Steve looked up to him, as any son of a race-car driver would, and inherited his love of the adrenaline rush. His mother, Patricia, who had completed one year of college, taught first grade.