Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  “When I began training, my practical knowledge base was very limited,” Dave wrote for Active.com. “I had a limited understanding of all of the nuances, including technology. Looking back, this was probably an asset for me.”

  The less athletes think, the better they perform. Stephen McGregor’s research with accelerometers in running is not the only proof of this law. Studies involving the use of EEG to measure brain activity in golfers, for example, have shown that those who exhibit the least brain activity when hitting putts are the most accurate putters. Mindless performance may be especially helpful in endurance sports because of the supreme importance of the capacity to suffer. The more science and technical detail an athlete incorporates into the training process, the more distracted he becomes from the only thing that really matters: getting out the door and going hard.

  Mark Allen routinely practiced the skill of clearing his consciousness during hard workouts and races. When he succeeded, he said, he felt his mind emptying into his bike or his legs. Once that happened, his body became relaxed and efficient.

  A stranger once asked Dave what he thought about while training for hours and hours. “My rhythms,” he said. “And lunch.”

  Around the time Dave Scott and Mark Allen completed their last Ironmans in the mid-1990s, the geeks invaded. A new wave of coaches came along and published influential books detailing training formulas that required a master’s degree to understand and apply. These systems, with their cycles and phases and zones, were later complemented by computer programs that made the correct way to train even more dazzlingly complicated. There are now well-paid experts who specialize in adjusting the positioning of triathletes on their bikes. That’s it. And, of course, there are other experts who do nothing but videotape athletes running and teach them how to run more correctly.

  Despite all of this, or perhaps in some measure because of it, nobody today is racing Ironmans any faster than Dave Scott and Mark Allen did in 1989. And those who race best at Ironman and elsewhere today are those who, like Curtis Vollmer, approach their sport intuitively, with a hunger to win and a capacity to suffer that enable them to seemingly transcend their physical capacities in ways the geeks and coaches can’t explain.

  MARK’S SURGE CATCHES DAVE by surprise. It is sudden, explosive, and decisive, creating an instant gap that cannot be closed. It is now clear which of the two men is physically stronger on this day. Mark has always had more physical Ironman potential than his nemesis, but not until today has he been able to actualize his inborn advantage. What made the difference? Those seven-hour training days in New Zealand? Mark’s patient new race strategy? His willingness to finally, fully face the fears that defeated him in past Ironmans? The extra fat he consumed before the race and the extra sodium during? His offering to the island spirits? His stepmother’s appeasement of Madam Pele? The anger provoked by the writer who predicted that Mark would never win Ironman? His vision in the lava fields? Some combination of these things? Informed persons will forever disagree.

  Dave recognizes Mark’s advantage, but he still believes in his bones that his will can trump another’s talent—at least here, in his race. So Dave does the only thing he knows—he tries harder, wills his legs to accelerate, understanding that he must answer Mark’s move immediately or the race is lost. But something strange happens. He seems to lose control of his body. He cannot attain the speed he needs in the normal way, by simply getting up on his toes a little more, lifting his knees, and driving his arms. His body seems incapable of doing these familiar things. He’s like an orator who is forced to deliver a speech after several Novocain shots and must come up with a whole new way of making words come out of his mouth, on the fly, before an audience of thousands. More literally, the preferred muscle fibers in Dave’s legs that he has been using all day are now so damaged and depleted and otherwise compromised that they cannot respond to his brain’s command to work harder. This physical mutiny is communicated back to Dave’s brain, which scrambles to stimulate the muscles in alternative ways.

  The result is a terrible transfiguration of Dave’s stride. His knees lock. He begins hurling his rigid legs forward like a rusted Tin Man. His torso twists from side to side. His shoulders cinch up toward his ears. The effort is total, but Dave makes up no ground. At one point he looks down at his legs, as though asking them what the hell is going on. This is, in fact, exactly what he’s doing, as he will later report. Dave is stunned by his body’s insubordination. Nothing like it has ever happened before. Upon finishing, Dave will be heard to utter repeatedly, to no one in particular, in a tone of dazed disbelief, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.” Meaning I can’t believe I couldn’t do it.

  Endurance athletes call it “tying up” because that’s what it looks like. It’s as if the runner has been roped with multiple lassos and is gamely trying to run through his bondage. Stephen McGregor’s research has shown that the effect of fatigue on the stride is very much like running in bonds. Control entropy plummets, meaning the stride becomes rigid, robotic, constrained.

  Usually, however, the changes are not plainly visible. Accelerometers capture them, but the naked eye does not. The grotesque distortion of Dave’s stride therefore suggests an extraordinary drop in control entropy, an almost superhuman effort to resist unimaginable fatigue. Further evidence in support of this conjecture comes from Dave’s pace over the final 1.7 miles of the race. He covers this agonizing final stretch of the contest, already knowing he has lost, in 10:13, which works out to precisely six minutes per mile—slightly faster than his average pace for the entire marathon.

  One of the reasons Steve never sees a runner’s form fall apart in his lab as spectacularly as Dave’s does now is that there is no possibility of slowing down in his treadmill test. If the subject feels he cannot sustain his current pace, he must stop. There is no middle option. Even in races, over-the-top episodes of tying up are fairly uncommon. When they do happen, they are almost always associated with a dramatic loss of speed. A sort of three-quarter quitting occurs, and as the runner’s speed comes down, his control entropy increases because he is no longer forcing it so much, although his form may remain goofy because his muscles remain damaged, depleted, and compromised. The sustained increase in speed Dave manages despite his horrific tying up is the rarest of rarities—truly a one-in-a-billion exhibition of will in sports. If Dave Scott were wearing accelerometers, he might set a never-to-be-broken record for low control entropy. That is, for mental toughness.

  Dave Scott’s mission in life has been to see what his body can do. Fulfilling this purpose has required that he first cultivate his body’s capabilities to the highest possible level and then, on the right day, try harder than it has ever been known possible to try. As Mark Allen drifts away in front of him on Palani Hill, Dave has finally found what his body can do. And what it can’t.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

  What is to give light must endure burning.

  —VIKTOR FRANKL

  Three weeks after finishing second in the 1989 Ironman, Dave Scott traveled to New Braunfels, Texas, to host a weekend triathlon camp. Assisting him were fellow professional triathletes Paula Newby-Fraser and Ray Browning as well as 1981 Ironman winner John Howard, now retired, and celebrity bike mechanic Dan Rock. That Sunday happened to be the day on which ABC’s coverage of the recent Ironman was broadcast. Dan and Ray watched the show together in the room they shared on the second floor of a major-chain business hotel. Dave watched it alone in his ground-floor room. Forty-five minutes into the program, Ray stood up.

  “I’m going to check on Dave,” he announced.

  “Okay,” Dan said with a knowing smile. “I’m going to stay here and see what happens.”

  Both men not only knew what had happened but were among the first to have known, having competed in the race themselves.

  Ray entered Dave’s room at the precise moment when, on the nineteen-inch screen Dave was watching, Mark was br
eaking away from him on Palani Hill.

  “Hey, Dave, what’s going on?” Ray said.

  Dave’s eyes continued to bore holes into the television screen as he delivered his full-throated reply: “I’m losing!”

  NEVER HAS AN ATHLETE lost so well. The sheer valiance of Dave’s Iron War defeat was as magnificent as any victory. Refusing to accept his van-quishment until it was an irreversible fait accompli, if even then, the Man ran as hard as he could all the way to the finish line, though there was no real cause to do so and though the cost in agony was immense. The race was over the moment Dave lost contact with Mark at the base of Palani Hill, with 1.7 miles left to go. From there Mark flew ever farther ahead of his nemesis on the giddy wings of assured victory. Meanwhile, the next guy behind Dave, Ken Glah (who would be passed by Greg Welch less than a mile from the finish), was so far back that Dave could literally have walked the rest of the way and still beaten him.

  But he did not walk. Instead he fought for every second over the remaining distance, because anything could happen—and even if the race was lost, a great finish time was not. The competitor in him had been mortally wounded, but Dave still had a chance to break 8:10, and he still cared.

  Dave ran like a man with a bullet in his chest. It was ugly. Yet his determined death sprint was also beautiful as an expression of his incredible, pointless unwillingness to relent. Among the witnesses was Jim Curl, who had last seen Dave at his condo, relaxed and ready, on the eve of the race. Jim was having a tough day, walking up Pay-’n’-Save Hill as Dave came down it like an avalanche in futile yet unyielding pursuit of Mark.

  Thank you, triathlon gods, Jim said to himself as he carried this humbling image of perseverance—of carrying on despite everything—through the remaining nineteen miles of his own race—and, after that, through the rest of his life.

  In triathlon today, it is customary for race winners to purposely dog the homestretch, high-fiving fans along the barricades, mugging for cameras, hoisting their children, and all but turning cartwheels in a show of savoring their triumph. Such behavior drives Dave nuts, not because he sees it as showing up those finishing behind the winner but because it demonstrates a lack of respect for the clock. How can these kids, today’s so-called professional racers, allow their precious finish times to bloat by ten, twenty, even thirty seconds while gamboling like simpletons for the mere sake of extending their winning moments?

  “It’s a race!” he raves. “You’re supposed to finish it as fast as you can!”

  So deeply time-obsessed was Dave, and so terrific was the second-place time he achieved in the 1989 Ironman (8:10:13), that, as much as he hated to lose, he was not as immediately disappointed by his defeat as one might have expected. But his satisfaction did not last long.

  Dave had not even caught his breath when he saw Carol Hogan standing before him. The local reporter who in 1980 had asked Dave if he was going to retire after he won his first Ironman still worshipped the ground he walked on. A diminutive woman, she looked up at her vanquished hero with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Dave,” she cried, “you lost!”

  “I know,” Dave said with a sigh. “I had a great race. Mark had a fabulous race.”

  Carol’s disappointment made Dave feel suddenly defensive about his feeling that he had in fact had a great race. But it was another post-race incident that really took the wind out of his sails.

  Anna pushed her way to her husband scant seconds after he crossed the finish line—teetering with exhaustion, his face cadaverous—and threw her arms around him. Insofar as his brain was working well enough to expect anything, he expected her to say, “You did great, Dave,” or “Better luck next time, honey.” But instead she whispered something about a suspicious canister that Dave was believed to have discarded during the marathon. Anna warned her disoriented and uncomprehending husband that the race officials were buzzing about it and that he should expect to be interrogated.

  “What?” Dave mumbled, barely above a whisper. “A canister? What kind of canister?”

  “I don’t know. A film canister, I think.”

  Then he remembered that he had seen an item like that tucked into Mark’s running shorts. Apparently Mark had tossed it away at some point, and a race official had picked it up, wrongly assuming that it was Dave who had dropped it and that the canister—whatever it had contained; probably something innocuous like salt tablets—must have been given to him illegally by a friend or supporter earlier in the race.

  Sure enough, a race official soon found Dave and pulled him aside to ask about the canister. Dave told the man what little he knew. The official then left him, whether to question Mark or to deliver his findings he would never know, as the matter never again came to Dave’s attention. Most likely the officials prudently decided against ruining the greatest race ever run by disqualifying either of its heroes over an unproven minor infraction. Nevertheless, that arbitrary and accusatory intrusion on Dave’s immediate emotional processing of the race’s outcome spoiled whatever satisfaction in his performance he might otherwise have enjoyed.

  At the awards ceremony the next night Valerie Silk broke from tradition and allowed Dave to say a few words before the winner spoke. Dave took the gesture of respect as his due and stayed resolute in his refusal to forgive the previous day’s insult.

  I’ll show them. Wait till next time.

  Dave did not sleep well the night after the race, or the night after that. As he lay awake, the Man (was he still the Man?) seared his memories of the great fight he had narrowly lost into the tender tissues of his brain with the hot iron of voluntary recall. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed the race, Dave replayed it obsessively in his mind, trying to figure out how he could make it come out differently. And he succeeded in that effort.

  Dave recognized that he’d made a few small, tactical errors, such as letting Mark take the inside position at the marathon aid stations as they ran side by side through all but the last 1.7 miles. Identifying such errors afforded him some relief because it meant he could have beaten Mark—and if he could have beaten Mark, then he still might. Next time.

  After a short off-season break, Dave resumed training with great optimism and ample motivation, confident he could come up with the fifty-nine seconds he would need to turn the tables on Mark in the 1990 Ironman. Little did he know that he would never get his chance to exact vengeance on Mark Allen—not in 1990; not ever. An ankle injury kept Dave out of his first rematch opportunity, which Mark won, and also the 1991 Ironman, where Mark collected his third title. The following year, still recovering, Dave allowed the responsibilities of fatherhood (he and Anna had a second son, Drew, by then) and an expanding coaching business to distract him from his still smoldering desire to return to Kona, where Mark won yet again.

  There were several “beanbag-chair” periods in those years, precipitated by the mutiny of Dave’s body, stress from his side business, fear of aging and its effects on the physical powers that had always been the pride of his life, and the slow unraveling of his marriage—sometimes individually and sometimes in combination.

  Ray Browning witnessed a number of these downswings from his vantage point as a partner in Dave’s training-camp business. He always saw them coming, like storm clouds on the horizon. First Dave would become irritable—everything was a hassle. Then he would just disappear. Phone calls would not be returned. Ray became worried enough about Dave on some occasions to contact other friends and acquaintances and ask if they had seen him. Usually nobody had.

  In 1992, at age 38, Dave formally announced his retirement from professional racing. It was an emotionally driven gesture of frustration and largely self-directed disgust precipitated by another nagging knee injury. Dave had not exercised in ten days when Outside writer John Brant came to Boulder—where Dave and his family were staying with his sister Jane, who had recently moved there—to follow Dave around for a couple of days and gather material for a profile to mark the end of Dave’
s legendary career. Ironically, John’s visit was just the sort of thing that was guaranteed to pull Dave off the couch; he had always rallied under a spotlight.

  Sure enough, on the first morning of John’s visit, Dave proposed that John follow along in his rental car while Dave rode his bike for a few hours. They met at Jane’s house. John was led through the living room, where Legos, Babar books, an inflatable whale, and other children’s belongings were scattered about, and seated at the kitchen table, from which vantage point he quietly observed the family dynamics while Dave got ready.

  “Look at these hairy legs,” said Dave, who had stopped shaving them when he had stopped training. “I’ll be the laughingstock of every triathlete in Boulder.”

  “So go ahead and shave them,” Jane said. “Anyway, who’s going to challenge you?”

  Dave smiled boyishly at his sister’s not-so-subtle flattery before taking another dig at himself.

  “I couldn’t do that,” he said. “If I shaved my legs, everyone would see that I don’t have any muscles down there.”

  Anna now spoke to John directly. “My husband,” she said, “has more problems with body image than a 15-year-old.”

  Ready at last, Dave clomped outside in his cycling shoes and mounted a road bike. John took the wheel of his car and followed Dave out the driveway. An eighth of a mile down the road, Dave pointed out a house to John: Mark Allen’s summer house. Dave did not stop to see whether Mark, currently training toward his fourth straight Ironman victory, cared to come along.

  Dave rode first through the flats east of Boulder and then into the hills. The workout ended abruptly at the top of the famous Left Hand Canyon climb when an approaching storm forced Dave to pull over, throw his bike into the back of John’s car, and hitch a ride home.

  “That was fun,” Dave said, beaming like a child, after settling into the passenger seat.

  They rode in silence for a minute or two, watching the storm gather.