Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  “The funny thing is,” Dave said eventually, “now that I’ve decided to stop racing, my knee feels better than it has in three years.”

  Again silence filled the vehicle.

  “You start working out,” Dave said, unprompted, “you start getting ideas.”

  By the time John Brant’s article about Dave’s retirement was published, its subject was already out of retirement, at least privately. His training became increasingly consistent and intensive over the next several months. Although he was healthy, Dave held himself out of the 1993 Ironman, feeling that he was not yet fit enough to achieve a performance worthy of his name. Instead he watched Mark claim his fifth consecutive Ironman title.

  Dave Scott was 40 years old and had been almost completely absent from competition for nearly five years when he committed to race the 1994 Ironman, which, as fate would have it, Mark Allen skipped, citing burnout. Dave knew that no athlete in any endurance sport had ever returned from pasture at his age to win a major championship. In light of this lack of precedent, he wondered, what should his goal be for his return to Ironman? What could he expect?

  Screw precedent.

  “The only level that I could do Ironman, contrary to what I might have said at the time, was to do well again,” Dave said afterward. “And well is not sixth place.”

  He had to win.

  But first he needed confidence that he could. He sought that confidence at the Gulf Coast Triathlon, a half-Ironman held in Panama City, Florida, in May. Having lost his bike sponsor during his long layoff and needing the support of a new one, Dave unwisely competed on a bike he had never ridden before, which was shipped to the race site by a prospective new sponsor. Its geometry was just different enough from what Dave was used to, and perhaps his aging body had lost just enough of its former adaptability, to leave him standing next to the bike some 40 miles into the 56-mile cycling leg, trying desperately to stretch out vicious cramps in his hamstrings.

  By the time he rolled into the transition area, the pro bike rack was already filled with his opponents’ machines—a sight Dave had never seen before. And it was about to get a whole lot worse. The moment he dismounted from his ill-fitting bike, the entire back side of his body seized up, and he flopped to the ground as though he had been Tasered. This happened just as the race announcer, already embarrassed for Dave on account of his tardy return from the bike course, was drawing the crowd’s attention to the great legend’s presence. Medics rushed to his aid. Humiliated, he waved them off, scrambled for and painfully laced up his running shoes, and hobbled onto the run course, as much to escape the pitying attention of the crowd as to continue the race.

  Dave heard the chatter afterward.

  He’s washed up.

  Why is he doing this to himself?

  He’s tarnishing his legacy.

  Just what a man who trained and raced best with a chip on his shoulder needed. As Dave trained through the summer in Boulder, where he now lived full time with his family, he savored fantasies of the shock and regret his doubters would express when he won Ironman despite his disastrous rust-buster in Panama City. He came to Kona even leaner than he’d been in 1989. Having shaved his trademark mustache, he looked about 28, or the age at which he’d told Linda Buchanan that he intended to be fitter at 40 than he was then. And so he was.

  Nevertheless, the doubters seemed halfway vindicated when Dave exited the swim eighteenth, nearly a minute and a half behind pre-race favorite Greg Welch, the very man who’d finished a galactically distant third behind Dave and Mark in ’89. But on the bike Dave performed like his old—or young—self. Anger plainly written on his grimacing, clean-shaven face, the Man mowed down all seventeen athletes ahead of him and snatched the lead from Greg at forty miles.

  Mark Allen, working for NBC Sports (ABC had given up rights to broadcast the race in 1990), witnessed the moment from inside a VIP vehicle. The producer of that year’s Ironman special, Lisa Lax, sat next to him in the backseat of the convertible, trying to guess what he was thinking. Was he nostalgically rooting for the old-timer? Sickened by the very idea of Dave winning yet another Ironman? Desperately wishing he was in the race to squash Dave’s return to glory? She would never know, as Mark said nothing.

  The 1994 Ironman scarcely resembled Dave’s first Ironman. In 1980 the swimmer from Davis who’d believed he could “pound it out with anyone at the end” had competed against 107 mostly ill-prepared Californian endurance misfits on inadequate bikes. Now he faced more than 1,500 superbly trained qualifiers from all over the world riding multithousand-dollar machines whose materials and components had not even existed at the time of Dave’s first Ironman. But one thing had not changed in fourteen years: the man leading the race halfway through the bike leg.

  At eighty-five miles, Dave found himself in a lead pack with Greg Welch, Ken Glah, Jürgen Zäck, and Peter Kropko. A flag marking the Timex Bike Prime—a $1,500 prize awarded to the race leader at that point of the race—appeared ahead. Jürgen and Peter took off after it. Greg made to follow, not so much for the sake of the prime as to mark the others. But Dave called out to him.

  “Let it go, Welchy,” he said. “That’s not the race. The race is here.”

  Greg took Dave’s advice and let the others get away. Later he wondered why Dave had given the free counsel. Since his last Ironman in 1989, Dave had drifted back into his coaching roots. He had even coached Greg himself, informally, over the summer. Perhaps Dave just couldn’t help himself at this stage of his life—couldn’t help being a good coach even at his own expense as an athlete.

  Dave and Greg quickly dispatched Jürgen and company at the start of the marathon. Peter Kropko was last seen stumbling into a dolphin-shaped mailbox and tearing it out of the ground by the post as he fell over, clinging to it like a life preserver. Greg pulled twenty seconds ahead of Dave over the first half of the run. Dave surged, classically, on a long downhill stretch with ten miles to go and drew within eleven seconds of regaining the lead. Reports of the dramatic chase, radioed from the lava fields back to the finish area, sent the crowd into a frenzy. Although Dave liked to focus on his doubters, he had fifty believers for every hater.

  The Man had played his last card, however. The miracle was not to be. As Dave folded, Greg went all in and stretched his lead to four minutes over the last miles. Dave held on for second place and put the exclamation point on the statement he’d sought to make. His finish time of 8:24:32 was better than any of his winning times at Ironman, and obliterated the men’s 40-plus age-group record by thirty-five minutes.

  “That race proved to me that it wasn’t about age,” Dave said later. “Age was the biggest hurdle, deterrent, and handicap that everyone else put on me, and I recognized it, but at 40 I didn’t really think I was old.”

  A confident, hungry Dave Scott left the island already thinking ahead to his next opportunity.

  Fit and ready for a final showdown with Mark Allen at the 1995 Ironman, which Grip, now 37, had decided would be his last, Dave dropped a dumbbell on his foot before the race, breaking a toe. With Dave watching, Mark won his sixth title, matching Dave’s career haul.

  Well, that was disappointing. But another year of consistent training in Boulder’s moderate altitude, which seemed to agree with Dave, more than made up for any physical decline wrought by another year of aging, and when he arrived back in Kona in October 1996, now 42, he believed in his heart that he could win number seven and thus surpass Mark in his absence, although he kept this belief to himself for fear of being socially straitjacketed.

  No matter. He was whispered about anyway, ridiculed in some quarters for daring to compete in a professional division dominated by men whom he might have babysat a quarter century earlier. Cameron Widoff, a brash and rising young pro who had placed twelfth at Ironman the previous year, had caught sight of Dave in Kona a few days before the race and elbowed Triathlete editor T. J. Murphy in the ribs.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” he’d sneered.


  Dave certainly looked out of place. He still wore no sports watch or heart rate monitor, even though he was now sponsored by heart rate monitor manufacturer Polar. His bike was an anachronism. No power meter, no mileage counter, nothing.

  Just give me a water bottle and get out of my way.

  Dave felt as out of place as he looked for the first five hours of the race. He had an unaccountably terrible swim. Worse, although he had ridden better than ever in his summer training, his legs betrayed him on the bike. It seemed as if the mighty red fibers of his thighs and shanks had been scooped out and replaced with vanilla pudding. Dave had been greedy in the last month before the race, pushing himself more and more in training as the fumes of his simmering fitness had gone to his head, and now he was paying the price. As a parade of young pros and even age groupers whizzed by him like Manhattan pedestrians overtaking an octogenarian with a walker, he was, for the first time in ten tries, seriously tempted to quit Ironman.

  Tempted.

  At eighty-five miles, Dave decided to stop feeling sorry for himself. Knowing from experience that an atrocious ride can sometimes inexplicably be followed by a great run, he mentally flushed his horrendous bike leg and decided to let it all hang out in the marathon.

  Dave reached the bike-run transition in twenty-sixth place, farther back by a long shot than he had ever been in Hawaii. He burst onto the run course as if he’d stepped on a hornet’s nest and almost immediately began to pass other runners. It became a classic Dave Scott game, a kind of kinetic outdoor cousin of Pac-Man. Five thousand morale points per pass, as it were. Having accepted the race as an unsalvageable disaster, Dave still wanted to see what he could do.

  A few miles into the marathon, Dave began to receive accurate information on his position from tuned-in spectators, and the game became even more exciting.

  “You’re in sixteenth place!” he heard.

  Dave had never been in sixteenth place before. He should have been ashamed. Instead he was exhilarated. Here I go! he told himself. I’m in sixteenth place! This is terrific! Let me get to tenth! Dave caught the tenth man at about mile thirteen, a scenario he would have considered nightmarish before the race but which now felt more like waking from a nightmare. He had never had so much fun.

  Among those Dave passed as he approached the top ten was Cameron Widoff. Cam What-the-Heck-Is-He-Doing-Here Widoff.

  Dave did not stop there. With four miles left in the race, 42-year-old Dave Scott moved into fifth place. As he sprinted the final stretch on Ali’i Drive, Ironman race announcer Mike Reilly, who had taken over Mike Plant’s job in 1991, recognized the Man’s distinctive duck-like stride from his perch above the finish line. He nearly swallowed his tongue.

  “Here comes Dave Scott in fifth place!” he hollered into his microphone. It wasn’t quite his “The band is on the field!” moment, but it was pretty darn close.

  As he crossed the finish line, Dave pumped his fist in grim satisfaction.

  “No one would introduce me as Dave Scott, six-time Ironman champion, and oh, by the way, he got fifth in 1996,” Dave said in a 2010 interview. “That’s a real blight on my résumé. But for mental fortitude and tenacity, it was one of my best races ever, if not the best.”

  Dave knew winning as well as any athlete, yet he would ultimately rank two losses—1996 and Iron War—as his favorite racing memories.

  Dave walked away from the finish line of the 1996 Ironman with an obvious limp, leaning on Anna, who with her free arm held the couple’s third child, Kara, as Ryan and Drew gallivanted proudly ahead of their parents. Dave had hurt his knee during the run. That same knee was still bothering him when he started his next Ironman in 2001, racing in the pro division once more at age 47 (and deservedly, having run a 1:15 half-marathon in the Vineman Triathlon earlier in the season). Dave dropped out forty-five miles into the bike leg, his knee on fire. For the first time in ten tries, he quit Ironman. Afterward Dave announced—as he had five years before—that he’d raced his last race in Kona. But he soon discovered that he couldn’t live with failing to reach the finish line of his final Ironman. On top of that, he couldn’t live without Ironman.

  In 2002, the year after his uprecedented DNF, Dave got permission from Ironman to access the racecourse in a car, which he shared with Competitor publisher Bob Babbitt. Dave insisted on driving and followed the men’s professional race so closely that he practically seemed to be in the race. Dave and Bob were cruising next to first-timer Chris McCormack when Chris took the lead on the bike.

  “What should I do?” he shouted at Dave. Chris had been an adoring Dave Scott fan long before he met him.

  “Go for it!” Dave bellowed.

  When Dave and Bob reached the barricade barring access to the narrow section of the bike course between Kawaihae and Hawi, Dave argued his way past it, very nearly pulling the “Do you know who I am?” card.

  Dave spoke almost without pause through the entire day, more to himself than to Bob, analyzing every move, volunteering what he would be doing if he were in the race.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Dave said as the lead cyclists made what he considered a rather timid descent from Hawi. “There’s practically no wind! These guys should be flying!”

  Dave’s eyes met Bob’s; that mad gleam was still there. For an instant Bob was convinced that Dave was going to pull over, haul a bike out of the trunk, and show the young punks how it was done. He did not—perhaps only because there was no bike in the trunk.

  IN 2003 DAVE SCOTT was recruited to participate in a charity event called Ironman Revisited, in which athletes were invited to swim, bike, and run the original Ironman course on Oahu. More or less healthy, although only “80 percent fit,” as he told anyone who would listen, Dave agreed to ride the bike course as part of a relay with challenged athletes Rudy Garcia-Tolson, who would swim, and “One-Arm” Willie Stewart, who would run. Shortly before the race, Dave was talked into doing the swim, too, as a guide to 15-year-old Rudy, a two-leg amputee. Having completed the bike leg in first place, Dave jumped into a car—again with Bob Babbitt—and followed Willie as he ran. A steady stream of tensely voiced encouragement issued from Dave’s wide-open window toward Willie, who clung to a two-minute lead over David Lourens, the top individual racer. With thirteen miles to go, Willie weakened, and his lead shrank. Dave stopped the car, scrambled out, and ran with Willie through the final thirteen miles of the race, to victory.

  Dave returned to Ironman Revisited each year thereafter. In 2007 he raced it as part of a relay team with sons Ryan and Drew, now 17 and 15 years old and showing a strong interest in the family business. The trio took second place. Dave felt stronger and more sound of body than he had in years. Perhaps this perception was not strictly physical in origin but was an effect of doing the thing he loved most with two of the most important people in his life. In any case, Dave flew home with his boys fixated on the idea of returning to Ironman—the real Ironman—now that his children, including 11-year-old daughter Kara, were old enough to really appreciate it, and while he still had the ability to do it well, by his standard.

  Dave’s form did not come around in time for the 2008 Ironman, but by February 2009 the Man was divulging to those in his circle of confidence that he was thinking about returning to the Kona start line in October. His plan was to throw himself into his training for six weeks in May and June, see where that left him, and then make a formal decision. Dave made an informal decision midway through that training block, during a fifty-six-mile solo ride on Sunday, May 17. He rode hard and felt great, and when he returned to the Boulder outskirts he calculated that his total time for the ride, including the ten minutes it would take him to cruise through town to his front door, would be about 2:23. Solid.

  As he rolled westward along Broadway toward his home in North Boulder, Dave began to run some numbers in his head. His swim pace in recent workouts was only two seconds per 100 yards slower than it had been in his prime. He figured he could go 0:52, m
aybe 0:51 in the Ironman swim. With five months to build on his current cycling fitness, an Ironman bike split of 4:45 seemed realistic. On a great day, perhaps 4:41 would be possible; on a lousy day, he would surely ride no worse than 4:51. The run was more of a mystery. He had not done enough running lately to know exactly where he stood, but 6:30 miles still felt pretty easy. A sub-three-hour marathon in Kona was thus a conservative hope. Tallying his estimates, Dave came up with a projected finish time of roughly 8:40. That time would have placed him twelfth in the previous year’s Ironman and represented a sixty-seven-minute improvement on the existing course record for the men’s 55 to 59 age group.

  Dave knew better than to go public with such an estimate. It would be much doubted. But he had no reason to second-guess his projection. Dave had correctly predicted that he would lop more than an hour off the Ironman course record on his first try in 1980. He had rightly predicted that it would take about an 8:10 to win the race in 1989, when the existing course record was 8:28. Nobody was better able to estimate his Ironman performance capacity at any given moment than Dave Scott. He’d been doing it every day for thirty years. Not a single rotation of planet Earth was completed, not one, without Dave’s being able to accurately guess how fast he could finish Ironman at his present fitness level. It was as routine as checking his appearance in the bathroom mirror.

  In high spirits, Dave turned right off Broadway onto Poplar Avenue. Immediately he noticed a beige BMW X5 sport utility truck stopped in the middle of the right lane ahead of him. Dave assumed the driver must be looking for someone or something. The driver, 61-year-old Ramona Sands, was in fact looking for an open house. As Dave approached the vehicle from behind, wondering if he’d been seen in the rearview mirror, the BMW began moving. Dave continued to ride at a steady 24 mph as the accelerating truck pulled away.

  A few hundred yards later the driver stopped again, in the middle of the road, without signaling. Dave’s antenna went up. Thirty years of cycling experience had taught him the warning signs of a bike-blind motorist.