Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Again Dave drew closer to the BMW from behind, and once more it began moving before he could overtake it. He saw the truck reach a stop sign ahead and turn left onto Wonderland Hill Avenue, the same direction he was going. The vehicle disappeared from Dave’s sight until he completed the turn, and then it reappeared above him on a long hill that he now began to climb. The truck stopped at the top of the hill and remained stationary almost long enough for Dave to catch up to it. He was just deciding whether to pass it on the right or the left when it took off yet again, accelerating down the back side of the hill. A quarter mile later, at the bottom, the driver veered onto the right shoulder, no signal, and stopped just behind two parked cars. This was a popular area for dog walking. Dave supposed the motorist had at last found her destination.

  Nevertheless, he remained alert. As he came down the hill behind the SUV, Dave was prepared to swerve wide to the left if the driver suddenly swung back onto the road and began moving forward. What he was not prepared for was an abrupt U-turn, and that was exactly what happened. At the worst possible moment during Dave’s approach from the driver’s rear, Ramona pulled onto the road without signaling or looking behind her. Dave knew instantly that he was going to hit the truck broadside, and hard.

  “Hey! Hey! Hey!” he shouted as he clenched his brakes.

  Ramona heard the shouts, but it was too late. Dave plowed into the side of the vehicle at full speed and dropped to the ground like a sandbag. The double impact of Dave’s body striking first the car and then the ground shattered his left wrist into several pieces; fractured and dislocated his left ring finger, leaving a bone projecting through the skin; fractured his left wrist; crushed his left shoulder blade; and caused a bone-deep bruise to his right thigh and multiple cuts and abrasions.

  Ramona scrambled out of her vehicle and stood over Dave, who had not lost consciousness.

  “Call 911,” he croaked.

  The pain in his shoulder was searing. He knew his leg was in bad shape too. He lay faceup, biting his lip as Ramona made the emergency call. Moments later he heard a familiar voice. It was Lars Finanger, a local triathlete who was out for a ride when he happened upon the scene.

  “Dave, what can I do?” Lars asked, looming above him. “Can I call someone?”

  Dave asked Lars to call his sister Jane and his daughter, Kara, and have them meet him at the hospital. A police car pulled up while Lars was on the phone with Jane. An ambulance arrived a moment later.

  As he lay in the street under his bike, knowing he’d been badly hurt, a number of worries traveled through Dave’s mind.

  Will I ever be whole again?

  How long will I be unable to travel for my business?

  And at least one other worry.

  “I knew there was a finality to my exercise regimen and any thoughts of racing,” Dave told a reporter afterward. “I was very aware of that even when I was lying on the ground.”

  Nothing had changed. A week without a workout remained for Dave like a week without water or sunlight for a vegetable garden. Endorphin junkies are a dime a dozen. Dave Scott had become a self-described endorphin lunatic.

  “If I don’t get it,” he said, referring to exercise, “it just makes me go haywire. It rules my life. It’s a powerful drug for me. It’s huge. It’s gigantic.”

  Too big, Anna had finally decided. Dave and Anna separated in 2000 and divorced five years later. During their separation Dave just had to get a workout one day when Kara, born in 1996, was in his care. He put her on a little bike and instructed her to ride along behind him while he ran, which turned out to be not nearly as much fun for the child as he had imagined. Later Kara tearfully reported the incident to her mother. Anna knew that Dave would never have exposed his child to any real risk, but the situation was symbolic of the couple’s irreconcilable differences.

  On Father’s Day 2003 Dave’s three children had given him a handmade card that read, “Dear Dad, you can do anything you want for Father’s Day except swim, bike, or run.”

  Dave Scott is, by all accounts, as good a father to Ryan, Drew, and Kara as Verne was to him. But it wasn’t always easy to live under the same roof as the Man, given the “drop too much” that nature had given him.

  “When I’m on,” Dave confessed in one interview, “and when I feel good about my exercise and I’ve been on a good wave, I feel invincible. I can handle any kind of hurdle and I can meet any kind of challenge head-on. And when I don’t have it, when I don’t have that morphine-like endorphin feeling that resonates throughout my body, it affects everything. It affects my personality, it affects my confidence, it affects my ability to interact with other people.”

  And so, even in 2009, as the paramedics gingerly loaded him onto a stretcher, Dave foresaw in his coming period of postaccident immobility his own personal hell, an experience far more terrible than the same situation would be for most people. Upon learning of his accident, Dave’s family and friends feared for his mind as much as they did for his body, and rightly so. They knew he was likely to do desperate things for a fix while he recovered, and his doctors and therapists were duly warned.

  Dave was taken by ambulance from the site of the accident to Boulder Community Hospital, where he was stabilized and spent one night before being transferred to the famous Steadman Clinic in Vail for surgery on his shoulder. On her first visit there Jane pulled aside his orthopedic surgeon, Randy Viola, and delivered a warning in the form of a story. Many years ago, she told him, Dave had been hospitalized after another bike wreck. Early one morning his doctor had entered Dave’s room during his rounds and found him lying on the floor, bench-pressing his own bed.

  Randy soon discovered that time had not mellowed his patient. Dave tested the limits any way he could, to the point where the staff had to assign nurses to keep a close watch on him, to protect him—from himself.

  The doctors at the Steadman Clinic had found a blood clot in Dave’s lung. He was told he must avoid any kind of exercise until the clot was broken up with anticoagulants. Knowing the chance he was taking, Dave took it anyway. A fate worse than death awaited him, he felt, if he obeyed doctors’ orders and went stir-crazy like never before.

  Walking was the first form of exercise Dave was actually allowed to do after the blood clot had dispersed. Running was forbidden, but Dave tried it anyway, convincing himself that he was not disobeying doctors’ orders if he renamed the activity “quick steps.”

  One afternoon Dave was joined on a walk by Peyman Razifard, a member of Dave’s Wednesday-morning running group. Before they started Peyman joked, “This is the first time I’ll be able to beat you.”

  Big mistake. Dave said nothing, but when the pair reached the base of a long hill, Dave began to quick-step, and soon his challenger was left in his dust.

  Dave was able to swim with one arm before he could swim with both, so, naturally, he did. One morning Mirinda Carfrae, who would win Ironman the following year, arrived at the Flatiron Athletic Club pool in Boulder to find Dave swimming with fins on his feet and his left arm pinned against his side.

  “What are you doing today?” Dave asked her.

  “Oh, just some 200s,” she said, already knowing where this was going.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Sure enough, Dave did not merely join Mirinda but tried to egg her into competition. Possessed of her own competitive nature and an impish sense of humor, Mirinda swam just hard enough to nip Dave at the wall on each interval. But the wounded old man put everything he had into the final 200 and outreached her by a hair’s breadth.

  “Only the last one counts,” he deadpanned.

  ON A SATURDAY MORNING in June 2010, a little more than a year after his accident, Dave Scott drove to Boulder Reservoir with his 19-year-old-son, Drew, who was home for the summer from Montana State University, where he competed on the Nordic ski team. They were drawn there by an open-water swim competition organized by Jane. Dave was out of town most weekends leading triathlon clinics, at which
he typically found little time to train. He planned to take advantage of being home this particular weekend to work out to his heart’s content.

  As they were preparing to leave the house, Drew had emerged from his bedroom with a triathlon wetsuit slung over a shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” Dave said, scowling.

  “I’m bringing my wetsuit,” Drew said, defensive.

  “No, you’re not. The water’s 70 degrees. You’ll get a better workout without it. You’ll see the truth—the truth of how your swimming is now.”

  With an adolescent groan, Drew turned around and put the wetsuit back in his room. As they drove toward the reservoir, Dave completed his sermon.

  “You can’t always take the easy way, Drew,” he said. “Sometimes it’s okay. If your ego needs a boost, go ahead, wear a wetsuit. But other times, take the windy road. See what you can do.”

  Drew absorbed the speech without comment.

  At the reservoir, Dave and Drew wove through the gathering crowd of swimmers and found Jane, who was checking off names on a clipboard and handing out swim caps to competitors.

  “How are you?” Dave asked her quietly, looking deeply into her eyes as though that was where he expected to find the true answer, regardless of what her mouth said.

  This encounter was more than an ordinary meeting of the siblings, who saw each other a few times a week. Jane had learned four days earlier that she had uterine cancer. Dave had been coaching a regular Tuesday swim workout at Flatiron Athletic Club, where Jane also coached, when his cell phone rang. He checked the number. It was Jane. His entire body clenched. Jane had already told him that some abnormal cells had been found in a recent Pap smear and that she was having further tests. Dave answered.

  “I’m out in the parking lot,” Jane whispered. “Please come.”

  Dave abandoned his swimmers, raced outside, found her car, and climbed in. She told him what he already knew. They broke down together and sobbed in each other’s arms. Dave and Jane had been as close as a brother and sister could be for their whole lives. Their entire journey had been shared—every high and every low. They had started swimming together, then built a coaching business together. Jane had cheered Dave through almost all of his Ironmans. They had moved to Boulder together. Now this.

  “We’ve got to have faith,” Dave said, gathering himself. “We’ve got to have faith.”

  Dave was likely speaking to Jane from precisely the same place from which he spoke to himself when things were looking bad at Ironman.

  Now, having received a swim cap from Jane, Dave stripped down to his swimsuit and made small talk on the beach with friends and acquaintances in the minutes before the race started. He still looked damn good in a Speedo. Six firm rectus abdominus muscles were outlined like small loaves of wheat bread under his bronzed skin. His swimmer’s chest looked as though it would meet a fist with a satisfyingly deep thudding sound. His thighs retained that bulgingly lean form that makes the legs appear skinny from some angles, massive from others, and is witnessed only in endurance athletes of the highest caliber—an undeceiving outward manifestation of inward ability.

  Dave no longer looked younger than his age. Any stranger could see his 56 years in his crow’s feet and in the flecks of gray in his close-cropped hair. He just looked like the fittest 56-year-old man in the history of the world. And he probably was, despite everything.

  A hub of the Boulder athletic community, Dave knew almost all of the four or five dozen other athletes present and greeted many with his trademark gentle sarcasm.

  “Looking kind of pasty, Matt,” he told one swimmer, eyeing his luminously white belly, which he correctly judged to be a source of self- consciousness.

  Moments before the start, a sinewy woman with hair hanging in shoulder-length coils sidled up to Dave. She was three-time Ironman winner and Ironman world record holder Chrissie Wellington, whom Dave had recently begun to coach. Dave demonstratively eyeballed the wetsuit she wore but said nothing.

  “Aw, come on, Dave!” she pleaded with a laugh.

  “Okay, this time,” he said.

  There were 1-mile and 2-mile swim options. Dave, of course, chose the longer alternative. He covered the course in 47:15, finishing three minutes behind Chrissie. Had Dave swum the full 2.4-mile Ironman distance at the same pace, he would have finished in 56:38. Not bad for a 56-year-old man who lacked full range of motion in his left shoulder, could not straighten his left ring finger, and suffered from constricted breathing associated with lingering damage from his bike wreck. But not good enough.

  “I used to be an athlete; now I just exist,” Dave told a friend with an unconvincing smile as he air-dried on the beach.

  Age was his new archnemesis. In 2000, when Dave was 46, a reporter had asked what motivated him to continue working out several hours a day even though he scarcely raced anymore.

  “I think it’s age—awareness of age,” Dave said. “I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to start slipping.”

  While Dave talked with others about their respective swim experiences, he eagerly scanned the water for Drew’s familiar stroke. He waited and waited. At last he spied his son’s flailing arms. Drew got out of the water at fifty-five minutes and change.

  “Your stroke looks terrible,” Dave teased.

  Father and son walked together to the parking lot to pull bikes out of their truck. Their friend Marek, who falls between them in age, met them there, already dressed to ride. Disdaining the concept of the warm-up as much as his father, Drew hunkered into his aerobars and dropped the hammer before they had even left the reservoir’s mile-long access road. Marek held fast at Drew’s shoulder, and Dave tucked in behind them.

  It was a beautiful day, dry and sunny with temperatures in the low 80s. The trio chose a mostly flat route, heading west and then north along Highway 36. On such terrain, after more than a year of recovery and fitness rebuilding, Dave often felt as strong, or almost as strong, as he had on the day of his accident. He would lock into an effortless rhythm at 23 mph, and it would seem as though he could go forever. Could he get back to 24 in Kona? It seemed possible.

  After ninety minutes of comfortable spinning, the three men ventured into the hills, turning off the highway and ascending more than 2,000 feet in Left Hand Canyon, the same climb Dave had made with John Brant during his 1992 retirement. It was every man for himself. Marek fell back first. Dave held on to his son’s back wheel for several minutes, but then Drew stood out of the saddle and surged away easily. As Dave’s breathing deepened, that all-too-familiar feeling of constriction seized his lungs. This now happened every time he started sucking wind while exercising. He just couldn’t draw a belly breath anymore. It was enough to bring tears to his eyes at such moments—the frustration of effectively having a governor on his respiration, limiting him to 80 percent of his normal capacity.

  It’s over, he thought in these moments. He would never compete at Ironman again. People who encouraged him to do the race just to do it had no clue what it meant to him. Crawling through the race in ten hours at age 56 when he knew he could have finished in 8:40 or 8:50 at age 55, blowing people’s minds one more time, would do absolutely nothing for him. Less than nothing.

  At the top of the hill, Drew sat up triumphantly and waited for the losers to catch him. Dave rode right past his son and began the descent without even looking at him.

  THE NEXT MORNING the group reconvened at Marek’s condo for a trail run. Again Drew took off hard from the start. Dave groaned in pain with each landing of his left foot for the first ten minutes, until it went numb or he just got used to the hurt. He’d injured it after the crash in his haste to return to training, and it remained unhealed, in part because he refused to stop running.

  They ran for forty minutes and then turned around. Along the way they met several other groups of runners. Dave knew them all, including a pair of older women, members of Dave’s Wednesday running group, who came walking in his direction.

 
“You’re supposed to be running, not walking, ladies,” Dave admonished as they passed.

  “We were, I swear!” one of them said. “We just stopped.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Dave began to tire noticeably with about three miles left to run. Still a better downhill than uphill runner, he fell into a pattern of slipping behind the others on the climbs and then running them down on the back sides. On the last big hill, a long, gentle rise followed by a long, gentle descent, much like Palani Hill in Kona, Dave fell way back. He figured he had seen the last of his workout partners until they regrouped at the finish. But when he crested the hill, Dave looked ahead and saw that Drew had broken away from Marek, who appeared to be struggling.

  Blood in the water. Dave went after Marek like a torpedo. He had about a mile in which to make up 200 yards on the little punk: numbers that exactly matched what he’d needed to do to catch Mark in 1989 upon reaching the top of Palani Hill. Perhaps Dave even imagined himself back there, back then, enjoying a second chance to make the greatest race ever run come out differently. His pace dipped under six minutes per mile, just as it had twenty-one years before. The gap steadily closed. Marek felt Dave coming, turned back, and flinched at the sight of the oncoming missile. He sped up, but he didn’t stand a chance. Dave shot past Marek in the final fifty yards. He won.

  “I thought you were toast,” Marek said after he’d caught his breath. “How did you do that?”

  “I still like to play the game,” Dave said with a smile. “I can push myself as hard as I ever have. Even now, with all my limitations, I can reach down deep into that barrel of discomfort and pull out one single thing that allows me to hang on. I like doing that. I take pride in doing that.”

  He looked proud.

  BETWEEN HIS SECOND AND THIRD workouts of the day—another ride and a swim at Flatiron Athletic Club—Dave returned home with Drew to wash up and refuel. After showering, Dave called his parents, who now lived in Boulder also, to confirm plans for a family meeting at their home. Dave and Jane would drive over separately in the evening. Patti, who lived and still coached swimmers in Sonora, California, would join them by phone. The spoken purpose of the meeting was to discuss Jane’s illness and impending emergency surgery. The real purpose of the meeting was to comfort Verne and Dot, who had been hit hard by the news. Both had passed their eightieth birthdays, and they did not want to outlive their youngest child, having made it this far.