Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Hanging up, Dave blended several batches of smoothies, whipped up a bowl of guacamole, and sat down with Drew to watch World Cup soccer. The United States was playing Ghana. Dave shouted at the television. He drank two full blenders and ate several pieces of whole fruit plus a dinner party’s worth of mixed nuts and corn chips with guacamole.

  Dave’s house is smaller and less sparkling than some might expect the home of a six-time world champion to be. But then, his total prize haul for those six titles was less than $50,000. Throughout Dave’s career Verne had urged him to market himself more aggressively to compensate for the sport’s dearth of race booty.

  “You should be the next Jack LaLanne!” he’d said. “You have to put yourself out there more!”

  His advice fell on deaf ears. Dave refused to take a single step to the left or the right of his independently chosen path for an extra dollar. He turned down a sponsorship offer from Timex because it would have required him to wear a watch during races, which he refused to do. He returned a hefty book advance to the publisher because he couldn’t make the manuscript meet his standards.

  Dave’s finances, never as robust as they might have been, were not helped by his divorce from Anna. But he makes little effort to increase his income beyond hanging out a shingle as a triathlon coach. And he doesn’t even make as much money in coaching as he could because, although Dave remains very much in demand as a coach, he weeds out athletes.

  An athlete has to be a little like Dave Scott in order to be coached by Dave Scott.

  “I don’t allow any of my athletes, regardless of their age or background, to be mediocre,” Dave said in his 2011 USA Triathlon Hall of Fame induction speech. “It drives me crazy.”

  A few days before he participated in his sister’s open-water swim competition, Dave was swimming with his group when he noticed that another swimmer in his lane was taking the easy way through the set by using a pull buoy. When he left it on the deck for a recovery lap, Dave snatched it, swam to the other end of the pool with it, and hurled it ten feet out of reach.

  Dave feels a small sting of disappointment when he scares away such athletes—a sting that is not dulled by any amount of repetition. He suffers a fresh disillusionment each time he rediscovers just how few are willing or able to reach deep down inside that barrel of discomfort in every swim, every ride, and every run. But the stakes are much higher with his own children, all now high-performing athletes themselves. His love for them demands that, in certain ways, he cut them a little more slack than he allows others. Yet he owes it to them and to everything sacred to hold them, when it really matters, as unyieldingly as he holds anyone to what he once called his “high, high, high expectations.”

  While Dave and Drew watched professional soccer together, Kara, then 14 years old, was playing soccer at an out-of-town tournament. She was an outstanding defender for the Boulder County Force, and Dave proudly attended many of her team’s games and practices. It was always a bit awkward for him, though, because Dave did not exactly bond with the parents of Kara’s teammates. He vexed them. They, in turn, annoyed him. The focus of Dave’s annoyance was their pointed discouragement of competitiveness in their daughters, their almost sanctimonious way of telling the girls to “have fun” as they took the field for games. Dave, by contrast, told Kara to give everything she had to win.

  “You can still have fun when you push yourself as hard as you can possibly go,” he told her. “And if you don’t win, you should be satisfied that you did your best. Figure out how you can do better next time, and maybe you can win next time.”

  If there is a next time.

  CHAPTER 13

  SHAMAN SURFER

  We count them happy who endure.

  —JAMES 5:11

  I have to find that man.

  Mark Allen’s mind was a thousand miles away from the barrage of congratulations that was fired at him by an ambush of family, race officials, media people, and others behind the finish line on Ali’i Drive. His thoughts were fixed on that old shaman with the toothless smile who had appeared to him in the lava fields, giving him the strength—or the serenity—to win the race. Mark hungered for more of the peace and acceptance that seemed to emanate from the old man. Intuition urged Mark to seize all that was offered by the venerable native Mexican, whose visitation during his moment of crisis halfway through the marathon was not only a gift, he knew, but also a beckoning. Mark’s need to beat Dave Scott and win Ironman had been satisfied. But the manner of that satisfaction had perhaps revealed what he really needed.

  As soon as he got back to the Kanaloa with Julie, Mark tore the condo apart in search of the journal in which he’d seen the shaman, but it was nowhere to be found. He later obtained another copy only to discover that the advertised ten-day retreat, beginning November 17, fell too close to his and Julie’s wedding date of December 10 to permit his attendance. More reluctantly than Julie would have liked, Mark skipped the retreat in favor of keeping his nuptial commitment and made plans to attend the following year’s retreat instead.

  Mark was initially quiet about his vision and its effect on him, at least publicly. In his speech at the Ironman awards banquet, he referred to a “vision of strength” that had helped him win, but he said nothing about the shaman. With Julie and his closest friends, however, Mark was more open, and not merely open but evangelistic. He gave brochures about the retreat he’d signed up for to Paul Huddle and Kenny Souza. They saw the same photograph of the shaman that Mark had seen before his battle with Dave Scott. He was identified as Don José Matsuwa, a 109-year-old Huichol Indian spiritual leader and healer, renowned and respected throughout central Mexico. Also pictured was a white man, Brant Secunda, who was identified as Don José’s adopted grandson and creator of the Dance of the Deer Foundation, the sponsor of the retreat, which the brochure described as a “ten-day intensive seminar at the Pacific Ocean in Mexico.”

  “What do you think?” Mark asked his friends. “Do you want to go with me?”

  Paul and Kenny both tossed their hats into the ring in a why-the-hell-not way. Mark had hoped for something more. Sure enough, when the time came to go, Mark’s closest triathlon buddies sheepishly asked to have their hats back.

  One night, as the retreat was approaching, Mark woke up with a terrible feeling of foreboding. He scrambled out of bed and began pacing the room while Julie remained sleeping. Something’s wrong, he thought. Something’s wrong. As he tried to walk off the mysterious anxiety, Mark was again visited by a vision of the radiant face of Don José. The same feelings of peace and acceptance he had absorbed from that image in his moment of crisis on the Queen K Highway flowed into him a second time. The sense of foreboding that had awakened him dissipated, and he was able to return to sleep.

  A few days later Mark was contacted by Brant Secunda. He informed Mark that Don José had recently passed away, but that the retreat would go on. Mark asked Brant when Don José had died. It was the very night of his vision.

  At last Mark’s opportunity came. On November 30, 1990, fresh off his second Ironman victory, Mark flew from San Diego to Puerto Vallarta. Brant had instructed his guests to meet in a particular location within the airport. Arriving early, Mark hovered off to one side and observed the others as they gathered.

  Oh, my God, Mark thought, taking in their clothes, speech, and manners. I am the only normal person who’s going to this workshop.

  Of course, Mark had spent the last eight years in a world where male leg-shaving and five-hour workouts were normal.

  Brant showed up, and Mark felt some relief. He had vaguely worried that the first real shaman he would meet would walk around with sparks shooting out of his head and eagles circling over him. But Brant just seemed like a regular guy with an unusually powerful presence. Mark’s relief deepened as the group was ferried toward a villa set on a pinch-me-beautiful bluff overlooking the sea. In talking to his fellow initiates Mark discovered that they were, in fact, some of the most interesting and grounded f
olks he had met in a long time.

  At the first evening’s welcome dinner, Brant Secunda introduced himself and told his story.

  “I grew up in New York City and northern New Jersey in the ’50s and ’60s,” he began, as he always did.

  As a teenager, like many other young seekers of the day, Brant had become interested in the books of Carlos Castaneda, the very same anthropologist of Mexican Indian shamanism whose books would captivate Mark Allen at about the same age a few years later. So strong was the spell that Castaneda’s stories cast on Brant that, four days after he graduated from high school in June 1970, he hopped aboard a bus and made a cross-continental pilgrimage to central Mexico in search of the great teacher described in Castaneda’s books, Don Juan Matus, who, unfortunately for Brant, did not actually exist. Castaneda had fabricated almost everything he’d passed off as real in his work. Starting in the remote village of Ixtlan del Rio, Brant embarked upon what was supposed to be a five-day hike in the Sierra Madre Mountains that would lead him to the home of the invented Don Juan.

  On the third day, Brant became hopelessly disoriented, lost under towering oak and Brazil trees and amid thick underbrush. A city kid, 18 years old and utterly lacking in survival skills, he soon lost his grip, surrendering to a state of panic. I should have gone to college like my friends, he thought. Brant walked and walked without seeing a single human being, sign of civilization, or orienting clue. Hours passed. A hot sun beat down on the young man, who had long since consumed the two pineapples and the small canteen of water he had packed to sustain him and was now desperately thirsty, hungry, sunburned, and fatigued. He became convinced that he was going to die and even sat down to write a farewell letter to his mother and father. He cursed himself for having attempted such a foolish adventure alone.

  Eventually Brant fell unconscious, suffering from severe dehydration and heat exhaustion. Some time later he awoke on his back in the dirt to discover several exotic-looking Indian men standing over him, sprinkling water on his face and gently kicking him to break his slumber. They explained, in Spanish, that the old shaman of their village had dreamed about Brant the previous night and had sent the rescue party that was now saving his life.

  The natives led Brant along a narrow path that eventually opened onto a clearing, where a small village of mud huts greeted Brant with the aroma of corn tortillas being cooked over open fires and the laughter of children playing. Brant’s rescuers introduced him to their shaman, the venerable Don José Matsuwa, then a sprightly 90-year-old with twenty good years left in him.

  Don Juan, Don José, whatever.

  Brant stayed. Don José adopted him as his grandson, and over the next twelve years apprenticed him in the traditions, lore, and rituals of Huichol Indian shamanism, which is big on animism (the notion that spirits inhabit physical things), spiritual healing, and peyote.

  Typical of one who finds spiritual answers in a tradition outside that of his own people, Brant developed a yearning to take Huichol Indian shamanism back to America. In 1981 he established a foundation for that purpose in Soquel, California, near the surf city of Santa Cruz. Brant divided his time between Soquel and Mexico until Don José’s death in 1990.

  Brant’s story was appealing to Mark, who, over the next several days, learned about Huichol beliefs and healing practices from Brant and from Don José’s widow, Doña Josefa Medrano, an ancient woman who smiled as radiantly as her late husband and who costumed herself in bead necklaces, flowing skirts, and head scarves. The simple, practical nature of the wisdom and the penetrating influence of nature on every aspect of the faith were likewise to Mark’s taste. He performed sunrise and sunset prayers with the group and hiked with them to “places of power”—mainly hilltops. He did the sacred dance of the deer, after which Brant’s foundation was named. He sat in a sweat lodge, which sorely tested his legendary tolerance for suffering. Merely sitting in that heat was as mentally challenging as running with Dave through the lava fields of Kona during the 1989 Ironman had been.

  It was all very enjoyable but not quite transformative until sunset on the seventh day. Mark was sitting in a circle with his fellow initiates, listening to the trance-inducing chanting of Brant Secunda, when suddenly he experienced what can only be described as a classic spiritual awakening, like Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree and Augustine’s conversion in his back garden. Mark suddenly felt, with absolute certainty, that he had just found—in the person of Brant and in the tradition he represented—the answer he had been searching for since he was a young boy. Mark had always been drawn to images in movies of wise elders from ancient traditions who utter simple nuggets of wisdom that put everything in perspective. All his life he had searched for someone or something in the real world that would connect him to that type of knowledge and clarity. But try as Mark might to experience his hazy ideal of how life should be lived and to feel something that deeply touched his soul, he always fell just a little short. The many traditions and practices Mark sampled had brought him closer, but never the whole way, to peace and inner happiness.

  All of that frustration was forgotten as Mark absorbed Brant’s chant. This man was the real deal. He had done what it takes to possess the wisdom that brings peace and inner happiness, and Mark knew he could do the same through him. It was happening already. Through the remainder of the retreat, Mark tasted the reality of the possibility that had been teasingly alluded to in his past spiritual wanderings. He felt as though he had been swallowed up into nature and eternity and was now fundamentally connected to every person and to all other living things. He felt a new joy—not the familiar kind that came from achieving results, but a joy that was already inside him, and that became his jumping-off point for going out into the world.

  When he left Mexico Mark was committed to going all the way with Huichol Indian shamanism. Whatever it took, he would learn from Brant Secunda until he was as complete as Brant himself.

  Mark came home a different man. Life changed at the summer house in Boulder. The old gang still trained and hung out together, but the dynamics of the relationships shifted subtly toward a new equilibrium. Paul and Kenny and the others got used to Mark interrupting bike rides to put dead birds in his pockets. They got used to him waving burning sage around them and praying for traveling mercies before they boarded airplanes. Mark grew his hair long, and they got used to that.

  AFTER BEATING DAVE in 1989, Mark briefly considered putting Ironman behind him forever. I’ve done everything that I possibly could have dreamed to do in this sport, he thought. I’ve filled my bucket. But although the feeling of winning Ironman was wonderful, it was not lasting. No sooner had it worn off than Mark began to crave it anew.

  Dave Scott had publicly retired from Ironman after each of his last four victories, only to come back. Mark now understood why. Winning Ironman was so hard and so fulfilling that it was natural to fly home from the island feeling it was enough. But as memories of the pain faded and the afterglow dissipated, returning came to seem just as natural.

  Having decided to race Ironman again, Mark set a goal to top himself. He created a five-year plan. The plan centered on a small bag of tricks, or potential performance-boosting measures, that Mark wanted to try, to see if they would enable him to perform even better in Kona. One year he teamed up with bike wizard Steve Hed for extensive testing that yielded a more aerodynamic riding position on his bike. Another year he worked with strength and conditioning coach Diane Buchta to develop a weight lifting program that added several pounds of muscle to his bony frame. And each year he took his spiritual practices a step further.

  Mark Allen and Brant Secunda became triathlon’s equivalent of Luke Skywalker and Yoda. While Mark’s interest in shamanism was completely independent of his pursuit of triathlon, his everyday life was so dominated by the sport that it naturally became the primary field of application for his new spiritual practice. Mark regularly visited Brant in Soquel for healing rituals to fix his frequent overuse injuries. He fe
ll into a routine of traveling with Brant to a place of power such as Mt. Shasta or Alaska each summer, right before he started his big Ironman training ramp-up. During such trips Mark would spend several days neglecting his workouts and getting his mind right, the Huichol way. Brant gave Mark a full indoctrination into the wisdom of his religion and aided him in discovering how to apply it in training and competition.

  The result was essentially the perfection of Ironman racing. Grip became unbeatable in Kona as the Man never had. After learning just two weeks before the 1990 Ironman that Dave had withdrawn from the race with an injury, Mark won it by nine minutes over Scott Tinley. The following year, Mark took the race by six minutes over Greg Welch.

  During a training ride while preparing for the 1992 Ironman, Mark was struck by a car. As he flipped over his handlebars and sailed toward impact with the road, he felt something dense and heavy dislodge from his chest, like a cinder block flying out of his heart. He landed wrong and broke his collarbone.

  Mark lived in a kind of trance for the next week. His mind replayed moments from his past, his childhood. Something had indeed been dislodged in that accident, and it wasn’t physical. A shadowy need had been stirring inside him lately, since he and Julie had begun to try to conceive a child together. His brush with death brought that need to the surface and exposed it to daylight. Suddenly Mark understood why winning his first Ironman had not made him feel better about himself, and why the second hadn’t either, nor the third. His motivation to keep winning Ironman was partly positive: a hunger to test and improve himself as a whole person. But it was also partly negative: a yearning to make up for what he lacked with his father. Mark now saw an opportunity to move beyond that negative motivation—to let go, and to grow.