Iron War

by Matt Fitzgerald

  Mark promised himself that he would try to take a more positive mind-set into his next Ironman. He would seek victory not to prove his worth but to realize himself.

  Mark also decided to confront his father at long last about the hurt Space had caused him. The meeting, which Mark probably dreaded as much as he craved it, took place after that year’s Ironman, during which Mark met with an unexpected challenge from the Chilean newcomer and 2:16 marathoner Christian Bustos. Mark stomped Bustos in the second half of the run to win by seven minutes and set a new course record of 8:09:08.

  Two months later Mark and Julie hosted a family gathering for the holidays. Julie’s heart was in her throat, as Mark’s must have been also, when Mark shut the door to finally have it out with his father. Space showed no surprise when Mark revealed the reason for the conversation. In fact, he said, he’d been expecting it for a long time. Mark told Space about the memories of ill treatment that had lately come back to him with terrible force. Knowing the power of silence, Mark stopped there. The truth was on the table for Space to affirm or deny, own or disown. Space affirmed and owned his harsh behavior. It had happened, and he had done it. He confessed with a steady eye and in plain words. And he stopped there.

  Afterward Julie could see that a great burden had been lifted from her husband. He seemed free, in a new way. Not free to start over with his father. Free of his father.

  In ’93, Mark lowered the Ironman record once more, to 8:07:45, beating Finland’s Pauli Kiuri for his fifth Ironman title.

  Mark decided to skip Ironman the following year. He needed a break. His body was beginning to wear down. But his desire was also flagging. Mark had succeeded in taking more positive motivations into the world’s biggest race. Ironically, this success had left him needing Ironman less. He still loved it, but he did not need it as he once did.

  “I don’t know how many more times I will keep doing this race,” Mark said wearily from the stage of the Ironman awards banquet—the stage he had once wanted to stand on more than he wanted anything else in life.

  Mark was on the mountaintop. He was outrageously successful, respected, affluent, and more famous than he could sometimes fathom. But he was beginning to covet other summits, and to attain them, he would first have to descend.

  AT A PARTY HELD the night after his fifth Ironman victory, Mark found himself talking to Gatorade president Bill Schmidt, who offered him two tickets to the 1994 Super Bowl, which would take place in Atlanta in late January, a couple of weeks after Mark’s thirty-seventh birthday. Mark didn’t know football from checkers, nor did Julie, but Mike Rubano was a big fan, so Mark invited his friend to make the trip with him. Before leaving, both men rented tuxedos. Bill had said they’d need them.

  The night before the game Gatorade hosted a swank party for the rich and famous at the Buckhead Theater. The first person Mark and Mike saw after gaining admittance was Spike Lee. A band was playing for the few hundred special guests. It was the B-52s. The triathlete and his massage therapist were shown to their table, from which they had a good view of a velvet-roped VIP area. Bill Schmidt was sitting inside at a table with Michael Jordan. Muhammad Ali was among those seated at the next table over. Mike observed two empty chairs between Bill and Michael.

  “Mark, those seats are for us,” Mike said, grabbing Mark’s sleeve and leaning into him as he pointed obviously. “That’s where we’re supposed to be sitting!”

  “We can’t sit there, Mike,” Mark said. “Those seats are probably for President Clinton and Ted Turner.”

  Mike had already caught Bill’s eye. Bill whispered into the ear of a young assistant seated near him, who immediately stood and left the VIP area. Mike gave Mark a significant look. Mark shook his head and laughed helplessly. The assistant approached their table.

  “How can I help you gentlemen?” he asked.

  “Can we sit at that table?” Mike blurted. “There’s no one sitting in those two seats.”

  “I’m very sorry,” the assistant said with studied politeness. “Those chairs are reserved for other guests.”

  The assistant returned to the VIP area and spoke in his boss’s ear. Moments later Bill was waving Mark and Mike in. Mark sat down next to Michael Jordan, who gave him a friendly greeting. They had recently filmed a Gatorade television advertisement together.

  Mark Allen’s fans would have given much to have listened in on the conversation that now took place between the greatest athletes of all time in two disparate sports. In all likelihood, Michael asked Mark the same questions other team sport jocks typically ask endurance athletes, and made the same remarks.

  What do you think about out there all day?

  I can’t run long distance. It hurts my knees.

  Do you really pee on the bike?

  As Mark conversed with Michael he noticed that Muhammad Ali was messing with Mike’s hair from behind him. The horseplay provoked a conversation between the two men, and before long Muhammad was autographing Muslim brochures for Mike to take home and give to friends, or sell, or whatever.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be leaving,” Michael said to Mark, becoming impossibly tall as he rose from the table. “I don’t want to steal the spotlight from Mark Allen.”

  The line came out sounding less funny and more condescending than intended, but only Mark caught it. Mike was oblivious to all negativity. He was, in fact, in heaven, feasting on every detail of the once-in-a-lifetime experience. Mark, meanwhile, was completely indifferent to the household names surrounding him. Ten years before, he might have been starry-eyed, but not now. He would take one Brant Secunda over fifty Michael Jordans today. Mark was just happy he had made his friend happy.

  AFTER THAT NIGHT Mike Rubano began to notice that Mark seemed often to wish he were somewhere else—somewhere other than the top of Triathlon Mountain. His contracts with Nike and Ironman required him to race Ironman one more time. Mark decided to fulfill that obligation in 1995 and then quit, but he remained steadfast in his choice to skip the 1994 race. As fate would have it, that was the year of Dave Scott’s first comeback. In an interview published in the September 1994 issue of Triathlete, Roy Wallack asked Mark if news of his old rival’s return tempted him to change his mind.

  “Not really,” Mark said, laughing. “The race in ’89 was one of those moments in sports that you couldn’t orchestrate. He and I each maybe had the best races we’d ever had there. The way we raced each other—I couldn’t have picked a better scenario. But to go back when he’s going back? I don’t think we’d be in the same place in the race. With all respect to him, I think our strategies would be very different. Maybe he’ll win the race this year. I don’t know. But my decision to not go back is firm, and whatever he does is good for him.”

  Trash talk has rarely been more artfully bleached. One could almost read Mark’s answer as something other than a total dismissal of Dave as a competitive rival. The Mark Allen of 1988 and before would not have dared, or even thought, to say such a thing.

  Mark continued to train and compete throughout 1994, but he tried some different stuff. He raced a sprint triathlon series in Australia. He trained for the Berlin Marathon, aiming to qualify for the Olympic Trials by clocking 2:22 or better, but pulled up lame during the race and dropped out. At the same time, he took advantage of the absence of pressure to be Ironman-fit in October to raise his shamanistic explorations a level—or two, or three. Mark subjected himself to sweat-lodge ceremonies that made his first, which he’d barely survived, seem like a sip of chamomile tea. He went off into the wilderness and sat inside a perimeter of stones for four days with only a jug of water to sustain him. Well, that and perhaps a little bit of a certain kind of cactus.

  Upon returning to Boulder from one of these vision quests, Mark told Kenny Souza that while he’d sat inside his circle of stones, a deer had approached him and started a conversation.

  Wrong guy to confide in. Kenny was, after all, the same impious jokester who liked to rearrange Mark’s crystals to a
nnoy him. Kenny broke out laughing.

  “Dude!” he said. “No food for four days? What do you expect? A deer will talk to you!”

  Mark looked at Kenny mournfully and said nothing more. At that moment, Kenny decided to stop teasing Mark about his shamanism thing. At the same time, Mark decided to stop sharing so much of his spiritual journey with his athlete friends.

  As ready as Mark was in mind and body to move on from triathlon by this time, he had two strong motivations to race the 1995 Ironman as a career encore. The first of these was a single item that remained in his bag of tricks—one last unused tool that might enable him to reach a little higher yet. Mark had optimized his bicycling aerodynamics. He had mastered his race nutrition. He had gotten stronger with weight lifting. He had done everything he could physically do. Mark’s final innovation was to approach Ironman as a spiritual endeavor, a kind of whole-body prayer. His last and, he hoped, greatest performance would be a gesture of gratitude to the universe of which he was a small part for the gifts and opportunities it had given him. After that, he would walk away.

  Mark’s second motivation to race his twelfth and final Ironman was Dave Scott. Going into 1995, Dave had six Ironman titles. Mark had five. Mark could not walk away in Dave’s shadow. Not when he was this close.

  Smart as ever in his approach to the sport, Mark recognized that, at age 37, he would have to reduce his training as a concession to the declining capacities of his body. But he wasn’t above fretting over this concession. While Mark knew that dialing back his training was the best thing for him, he feared it might also be the best thing for his younger competitors, the fresh-legged kids ten and twelve years his junior who were able to continue training as hard as Mark ever had and who hungered to dethrone him.

  The sport had changed since Mark had won Iron War, and had changed even during his year of sabbatical. Greg Welch, seven years behind Mark in age, had taken advantage of Grip’s absence to win the 1994 Ironman, and many pundits considered him strong enough to possibly win even with Mark back in the mix. There had also been a full-scale German invasion of Ironman-distance racing while Mark was away. Members of a new breed of marauding Saxon supercyclists were posting stupendous Ironman bike splits and threatening to do what no one had been able to do in the sport’s mature age: win Ironman on the bike.

  Breaking from his past formula of competing in shorter races over the summer and making Kona his lone Ironman-distance competition, Mark chose to contest Ironman Japan on June 25 as a rust-buster. He wanted the confidence that a win and a fast time would give him, especially considering how poorly he had performed during his Ironman sabbatical year, losing several shorter races, failing miserably in an attempt to break the eight-hour barrier at Ironman Germany, and dropping out of the Berlin Marathon. Mark needed to silence the inner doubts that echoed others’ speculation about whether, after twelve years in the sport, he still had it. Despite suffering some setbacks in the lead-up to the race (including an ankle sprain and a bout of flu), Mark won easily over a weak field in 8:23 flat.

  Two weeks later, Ironman Germany took place. Jürgen Zäck, age 30, one of those marauding Saxon supercyclists, won in 8:08:07, blitzing the bike leg in an absurd time of 4:20:28. Right behind Jürgen was 24-year-old Thomas Hellriegel, who rode 4:21:14. A thunderbolt of anxiety shot through Mark’s head when he saw these results. He had covered the same bike course more than eleven minutes slower the previous year. Worse, as the summer wore on, Mark wore down. He felt increasingly sluggish and rickety. On the verge of panic, he made an appointment to see his doctor, who ran blood tests. In a follow-up, he delivered the results.

  “Your DHEA and testosterone levels are very low,” the doctor said.

  “So what does that mean?” Mark asked.

  “Hormonally, you’re about 70 years old.”

  As soon as he returned home, Mark called Brant Secunda to apprise him of the situation and ask for help. Brant suggested Alaska. In August Mark spent eight full days with his spiritual mentor near Juneau, chanting, drumming, making offerings, and fasting while Greg Welch, Jürgen Zäck, and Thomas Hellriegel were logging six hours of training a day in preparation for Ironman.

  After returning to Boulder from Alaska, Mark did as much hard training as his 37-year-old body could handle. He did so without joy. It was evident to Paul and Kenny that their friend was dragging himself through rides and runs with them. His heart just wasn’t in it anymore—nor was it as hard to keep up with him as it used to be.

  “I hate to say it,” Kenny told Paul after one long run that was particularly disastrous for Mark, “but there’s no way he can win Ironman.”

  Mark’s situation had not improved by the time he flew to Kona. Phil Maffetone came over to the Kanaloa resort daily to practice manual muscle testing on his longtime client. Phil placed his hands on various meridian points on Mark’s body and asked him to resist the pressure he applied. The strength of Mark’s resistance told Phil how well the athlete’s neuromuscular system was functioning. Mark bombed every test. Never had Phil seen him so out of balance. It seemed as if Mark’s body had already retired.

  The day before the race Phil came over one last time. He placed his hands on Mark and nearly leaped back in surprise. Mark’s body felt completely different. The vitality had returned. His outward energy had changed too. He now gave off an aura of grim determination. Phil understood: Mark was going to will himself through this.

  On the evening before the race Mark stopped by the Little Blue Church with Julie and made an offering at Kuemanu Heiau, as he had done each year since Iron War. It was no mere superstitious luck ritual—or not mainly. Mark believed in the island spirits and he feared the consequences of failing to show them proper respect.

  On race morning Mark was driven to the pier from the Kanaloa in silence, as always. He went through the same pre-race routine he had gone through eleven times before, getting his body marked, applying waterproof sunscreen, putting air in his tires. He was acutely conscious that he was doing each of these things for the last time.

  Mark was no less conscious of his attire. Nike had supplied him with a high-tech, low-drag racing suit that would perhaps cut his swim time fractionally. Its one drawback was that it looked like something he’d pulled out of Julie’s side of the closet, and Mark was vain enough to dread showing himself in its girlie splendor. He waited until all of the other competitors were already in the water and NBC’s cameras were off filming someone else, then sneaked to the far end of the pier and hastily took off the heavy sweat clothes he’d been hiding under. He was just about to jump into the water when he saw Jürgen Zäck’s head bobbing in front of him.

  “Mark, Mark, Mark,” Jürgen said in mock disappointment.

  At least the suit worked. Mark completed the swim near the front of the first pack of top contenders, right on Greg Welch’s heels and well ahead of Jürgen Zäck and Thomas Hellriegel, who were not known for their swimming chops. On the bike Mark quickly passed the dozen or so better swimmers who had left transition ahead of him and found himself in the lead earlier than expected. He settled into a groove at a heart rate of 135 beats per minute, comfortably below the 150 bpm limit that represented his maximum sustainable heart rate for 112 miles.

  Suddenly Jürgen Zäck zipped by Mark so swiftly and easily that Mark at first mistook him for a race marshal on a motorized scooter. Less than two minutes later Thomas Hellriegel followed, moving even faster. Mark increased his tempo to keep the Germans within range and watched his heart rate climb to 140, then 145, then 150. He was now riding as hard as he dared, and still he was losing ground to the virile young meat machines chugging away ahead of him. Not helping matters were the vicious mumuku crosswinds, which blew harder than Mark had ever experienced, ripping across the Queen K in gusts of 45 mph. They slowed Mark’s advance to a frustrating grind, yet his German rivals seemed to slice right through them. Even with his heart rate pinned at 150, Mark could only watch helplessly as they receded out of sight ahead of him
. He did some arithmetic. He figured he could spot either man seven or eight minutes at the start of the marathon—maybe 10, but that was really pushing it—and still win. So it became his goal to keep his deficit within that margin.

  Mark started the run in seventh place, thirteen minutes and thirty-one seconds behind Thomas Hellriegel, who had completed a ride for the ages, besting the next-fastest bike split (Jürgen’s) by eleven minutes. No one had ever made up a gap of that size at Ironman.

  As he left the Kona Surf Hotel parking lot, Mark tried to tell himself that anything could happen. A roaring, partisan crowd of hundreds cheered him on as he hoofed his way up the steep hill of Ehukai Street leading to Ali’i Drive (now called Ali’i Highway along this stretch) from the hotel. He was nearing the top when his peripheral vision strayed to a group of three older women in the throng.

  “Go, Mark!” they screamed.

  As he passed, one of the women addressed her friends in a stage whisper that Mark was not meant to overhear: “Oh, my, he doesn’t look so good.”

  The marathon course had been changed since Iron War. Instead of turning left onto Ali’i Drive at the top of Ehukai Street to head toward Kailua-Kona, runners now turned right onto Ali’i Highway and ran down a steep and winding hill dead-ending six-tenths of a mile away in a basin set close against the ocean, with a golf course on one side and a lava field on the other. Only to turn around and come right back.

  That lava field was also a burial ground known as Lekeleke. In 1819 a battle had been fought there between a faction of Hawaiians led by the future King Kamehameha II that wished to abandon the island’s traditional religion in favor of Christianity and a faction that opposed this sellout to the native people’s European conquerors. Three hundred men and women died in the Battle of Kuamo’o, and their bodies were interred in rock cairns on the lava field. Ironman participants nicknamed this morbid basin the Pit, and its inclusion in the marathon course was seen as a gratuitously sadistic move, adding 200 feet of painful downhill and spirit-crushing uphill running to the first mile of the marathon and forcing racers to come to a near dead stop, turn 180 degrees, and struggle to get their momentum going again in a stifling, airless topographical concavity where heat pooled thickly. More than a few corpses of a kind were added to the Lekeleke burial ground during the several years when the Ironman racecourse brushed against it.