“If you’re talking about a top athlete, somebody who’s trying to win Ironman, they’re already working at 97, 98 percent of their potential,” Mark said in a 2010 interview. “But getting that last 2 or 3 percent probably requires them to change the one thing that’s most difficult for them to change.”
The man who most reminded Mark of himself was Peter Reid. Like Mark, Peter had a difficult relationship with his father and channeled the resulting anger into sport. Peter’s father, Ted, scoffed at the idea of his son’s becoming a professional triathlete, telling him it wasn’t a real career. Peter’s racing was about proving him wrong.
Peter’s wife, Lori Bowden, also a triathlete, became friendly with Julie Moss during the summer of 1996, when the two women found themselves training in the same group in San Diego. One day Julie invited Lori to dinner. This was before the move north, when Mark and Julie still lived in a gorgeous Spanish Mediterranean house in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, surrounded by bougainvillea, cactus, and willow trees, which was afforded by Mark’s success. As symbols of Mark’s achievements, the lovely home and grounds intimidated the hell out of Peter as he approached them with Lori, bottle of wine in hand, on the appointed evening.
Conversation around the dining table was dominated by Lori and Julie, both of whom played the talkative yang to the quiet yin of their husbands. Mark, relaxed and comfortable in his early retirement, interjected a remark here and there. Meanwhile Peter, who had met Mark before but never really talked to him, sat frozen in his chair, utterly star-struck, his eyes frequently drifting toward an aboriginal painting titled Dream Time that hung on the wall behind Mark. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Mark developed a nascent fondness for the young dreamer that evening.
Peter finished fourth in his first Ironman that October. Two years later, with a little help from Mark, Peter won the race. The next night the new Ironman champion attended a private celebration in Kailua-Kona. He was standing alone in the middle of a room in a kind of daze when suddenly Mark Allen stood before him. Without uttering a word, Mark, who is not a hugger, reached out and embraced Peter. It was not a welcome-to-the-club gesture, motivated by Mark’s understanding of what it means to win Ironman. Mark hugged Peter because he knew what it meant for Peter to win Ironman.
Prone to depression, Peter went up and down as an athlete and as a human being over the next few years. He lost Ironman in 1999, won again in 2000, then went completely sideways, quitting the race in 2001, almost quitting the sport in 2002, and splitting from Lori. Mark stepped in and became Peter’s full-time coach. He taught Peter to approach the sport as a whole person. Mark even convinced Peter to try working with Brant Secunda. While Peter did not talk to any deer, he came away from his first of two visits to Soquel feeling more refreshed and positive than he had in some time.
In 2003 Peter Reid reached the mountaintop one more time. Months later, his dad died. But before he did, Ted sent Peter a letter in which he apologized for his many mistakes as a parent and begged forgiveness. The moment Peter read these words, the fire that had fueled his training and racing was snuffed. It became harder and harder to get out the door and train. He could no longer push himself in races as he once had, and his results told the story. In the spring of 2006 Peter quit the sport cold and disappeared into the northern Canadian wilderness to fly small planes. Since Peter’s retirement, only a handful of elite triathletes have so much as nibbled at the spiritual piece of Mark’s secret to success.
“Why isn’t every triathlete in the world coming to learn from Brant?” Mark asked himself in an interview. “One answer that’s come to me is that anything that’s going to require people to change is also going to require them to do a certain amount of work. Often that work pushes the sensitive buttons in us that are resistant to change.”
In many ways, Dave Scott and Mark Allen could not be more unalike. Their individual secrets to success are very different on most levels. Mark may have summarized those differences best when he said, “At Ironman, to do well takes either supreme confidence or calm. Dave gets there through confidence. I think I’ve gotten there through calm.” But there’s one way in which the former star-crossed rivals have become the same. As they grow older, both men have arrived at a place where they feel an increasingly pressing desire to help others achieve great things in the same way that they did. This desire is fueled by both pride and fear—pride in their tremendous accomplishments and in all that went into them, and fear that history will forget these accomplishments and all that went into them. This fear has been justified and exacerbated by a surprising dearth of serious seekers of their wisdom. Each man in his own way suffers a bit of the prophet’s loneliness, wondering at times if the convictions he stood for died at his own athletic curtain call. Neither man seems to fully understand that his secret is a secret not for everyone but for very few. This kind of secret fundamentally cannot be shared because it must be inborn, like Dave’s, or earned, like Mark’s.
ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2010, Mats Allen, then 17 years old, participated in his first triathlon, an Olympic-distance event in Santa Cruz. Mark and Julie then lived two blocks apart and within walking distance of the race site at Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf. They traveled there separately. Signing up for the race had been their son’s idea. Throughout Mats’s childhood, Mark had gone out of his way to avoid steering his son toward the sport that had made him famous—that is, to avoid doing what his own father had done to him in medicine. Left to choose his own path, Mats had gotten into water polo. When his team was recruited by the triathlon’s organizer to serve as volunteers on race day, Mats thought, What the heck—why not do the race? Having never ridden a racing bike before, Mats asked his dad to show him how to clip into and out of the pedals on the eve of the competition. Fortunately, Mark remembered.
A strong swimmer, Mats exited the water near the front end of his starting wave. A frenetically engaged Mark Allen snapped several photos of his son as he emerged through the foam, then raced across the strand to capture images of Mats mounting his bike in transition. Julie hung back, watching the two of them, experiencing one of those moments of dizzying nostalgia that convey the full preciousness of time’s losses. She had been present at Mark’s first triathlon in 1982. Now here he was, gray-haired, cheering on a first-time triathlete who looked uncannily like his father twenty-two years before.
After completing the race, capturing first place in his age group on the strength of his excellent swim, Mats went home talking about perhaps doing Ironman after he turned 18.
In June 2011 Drew Scott qualified for Ironman. Ryan and Kara Scott have dabbled in triathlon as well. It’s possible—not likely but possible—that some combination of these young people will meet one October Saturday on the Queen K Highway and perhaps share a moment of competitive, cooperative suffering that leaves them changed forever.
Another Iron War? Never. History may repeat itself as a new generation takes the reins, but some things happen outside the normal run of history. A few magical moments appear only once in time—and live forever.
EPILOGUE
We can’t all be heroes, because somebody
has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
—WILL ROGERS
Seven and a half hours after the start of the 2000 Ironman, I left the makeshift media center that had been set up in a meeting room on the ground floor of the King Kamehameha Hotel and began walking toward the Queen Kaahumanu Highway to catch sight of the men’s race leader returning to town. Although I had the required credential, I hadn’t bothered to take a spot on one of the press vehicles that spent the whole day on the course, choosing instead to hang out in the air-conditioned media center and follow the online coverage provided on ironman.com—the same online coverage that any schmuck lacking a press pass could watch anywhere in the world without undergoing the hassle and expense of traveling to the race.
I had ridden on the women’s press truck when I’d covered my first Ironman in 1998 and had learned my lesson. It was the
most exhausting thing I had ever done besides race an Ironman myself. Nine hours of standing and holding on for dear life as we leapfrogged from athlete to athlete along the highway, shouting my throat sore in the roaring wind, climbing down from and back onto a flatbed under the hot sun at our many stops, feverishly scribbling bib numbers and time gaps onto a sweat-sodden notepad, forgetting to eat and to reapply sunscreen. And for what? The total product of these efforts and privations was a pathetically meager grasp of what had actually happened in the race.
Watching an Ironman is nothing like watching a football game. The athletes are obscured and unidentifiable in the swim. On the bike they quickly spread out so widely that one has to serially ignore most of the relevant players at any given time while paying attention to a single athlete or small group. The run is like a great card shuffle as bike specialists wilt and superior runners move up. It’s impossible to see it all, or even half of it.
So I decided to take a more comfortable approach to my second Ironman reporting experience. But I couldn’t resist treating myself to an unmediated view of the climax.
My path from the King Kam to my targeted viewing spot closely traced the first mile-plus of the Ironman bike leg, except that I used the sidewalk on the left side of the road instead of claiming the middle of the outbound lanes on the right side of the roadway as the racers had done in the morning. Starting at the point where Ali’i Drive bends away from Kailua Bay, I walked three-quarters of a mile up Pay-’n’-Save Hill to the Queen K. By the time I topped the hill, my T-shirt was soaked through. It was two forty-five in the afternoon, the air temperature was 90 degrees, and the dew point stood only 10 degrees higher. Although I was less than a month away from running a marathon and in great shape, my heart thumped palpably from the effort of merely walking the hill in such terrific heat and humidity. I couldn’t imagine scaling it at a dead run of six and a half minutes per mile after six hours of prior exercise, as the world’s best could.
The finish-line area in front of the hotel had been bustling with humanity, but at the intersection of Palani Road and the Queen K, where Mark Allen, running the opposite way, had first looked back after dropping Dave in 1989, there was almost no one—just a traffic cop and a few crowd-averse triathlon fans who, like me, preferred to get a good, long look at the race leader just before he finished rather than fighting for a glimpse of him at the moment he broke the tape. But I continued even farther, walking northward along the Queen K until I reached the high point of Palani Hill—the hill that had decided Iron War. Here, I knew, I would get the most telescopic view of the soon-to-be champion’s approach.
As I squinted toward the distant point on the horizon where police lights would herald the coming of the race leader, I suddenly sensed that I was being watched. I looked across the highway, and there stood a woman, looking at me in the tentative way one does when one wishes to be noticed without speaking or seeming weird. I had somehow not observed her as I was walking.
I thought about crossing the road to say hello, but she beat me to it. As she approached I noticed that she was very lean, obviously an athlete, fortyish with ginger-colored hair and freckles.
“How’s it going?” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Just came out to see the finish.”
“Any idea who’s leading?”
“Last I heard it was Peter Reid.”
We traded information about the race. The woman said she was working as a spotter for NBC. I told her I was reporting for Active.com. Then, belatedly, she reached out a hand.
“Julie Moss,” she said.
I blushed crimson. Why hadn’t I recognized her?
“I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you!” I blurted after sharing my own name.
“Maybe it’s because I’m not on my hands and knees,” she joked.
We talked a little longer, and then Julie returned to the far side of the highway. At that moment I saw lights on the horizon. A few minutes passed, and I could distinguish a flatbed press truck followed by a pace car flanked by two police motorcycles. No other entourage. Peter Reid remained hidden behind the press truck until he was almost close enough to touch. He looked terrible. Normally a fluid runner, he now appeared as if running in chains, stiff and tied up. His face was rigid, his eyes locked yearningly on a finish line in his mind. He was clearly exerting as much force of will to keep moving forward as he ever had in his life. Julie called some encouraging words to him, interrupting a near-total silence. Peter took no notice of her. She took no umbrage. As Mark Allen’s wife, she knew all about competitive tunnel vision; plus, as a former racer herself, she knew that only two things existed in all the universe for Peter now: unbelievable pain and an unaccountable desire to continue, to finish, to win.
As Peter passed, a lump suddenly lodged in my throat, and my eyes welled. I squelched the ambush of emotion with surprise and wonder.
What the hell just happened?
I reviewed the strange moment in my mind. It wasn’t Peter’s victory that moved me, I concluded. I’d been rooting for Tim DeBoom, the American hope. It was Peter’s lonely display of courage. I knew what he was going through, or the better part of it anyway, and like an old war buddy I felt a sentimental connection to him through a special bond of suffering.
But it was more than that. The feeling was similar to my experience in other moments of transcendent connection, like when I gave my future wife a hug she badly needed or when I listened to one of those sad songs that gets me every time. The particular type of connection I felt to Peter Reid in his isolated agony clearly had a special significance for me. I felt something like it every time I studied a certain photograph, the iconic image of Iron War (shown on the cover), captured by Lois Schwartz at about one minute before three o’clock on the afternoon of October 14, 1989—an image that says it all as words never could. There was a pattern here. Something about the sight and thought of brave men and women grimacing through the voluntary torture of endurance racing squeezed my soul differently than other sources of sentimental feeling. But what was that something, exactly?
Not until a decade later, on my journey to discover the how and the why of Iron War, did I come to fully understand what that something was. I found the answer in Michael Atkinson’s sociological study of triathlon as a pain community that answered a fundamental human need for a certain kind of suffering.
There is no single characteristic that defines human nature or the human condition, but it is tempting to formulate such definitions all the same. Whichever characteristic stands out as the true essence of our condition or nature for any given person depends on his biases. My biases are such that the voluntary suffering of triathlon, borne in pursuit of the triumph of spirit over flesh, seems the most potent metaphor for our nature and condition.
Our earthly lives are doomed. Our lives are, in the long run—the billion-year perspective—utterly meaningless. And in the meantime they are a constant struggle. It takes a lot of courage just to make it from one end to the other. Yet who among us tries merely to make it? Somehow we muster the courage and spirit not only to survive, and bear the suffering required for that, but to create meaning, to pursue greatness, to put on a show, and we willingly bear incalculable additional suffering for the sake of these nonmandatory joys. To paraphrase Dave Scott, something within us just can’t resist trying to “see what we can do” with these bodies and minds while we have them, no matter the price.
Human beings are the creatures that try harder and never stop trying. We try when it’s hopeless. We try when it doesn’t make any sense. And when we succeed in trying harder than we have ever tried before, we try harder still. We are Cinderella, and Rocky, and the Little Engine That Could. We are beautiful in this way. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
I love humanity most when I experience something that makes me feel a sense of solidarity with my human comrades as fellow doomed “tri-ers” (or is it triathletes?). Nothing makes me feel this sense more acutely than watching someone like Peter
Reid run through illimitable misery for a reward that is only imagined to matter.
And no experience of this kind affects me more powerfully than Iron War, the race where two men tried as hard as anyone has ever tried for anything.
THERE IS A TENDENCY to treat true stories from the world of sports as vehicles for practical inspiration. Readers and hearers and watchers of true sports stories expect to come away from these tales of others’ victories with an impetus toward their own. When I started my journey into Iron War, I harbored a notion that I would find one great lesson at the end of it to distill and pass on. One can, of course, find any number of different lessons and inspirations in the story of the 1989 Ironman, some of them very familiar. The old never give up lesson is in fact the chief lesson Mark Allen himself learned from living the story.
“Had I not had those bad experiences,” he said in an interview, referring to the six failures that preceded his first triumph in Kona, “and learned those lessons about how to hold it together when it’s not going well, I wouldn’t have won the other six. That experience of having to drag yourself across the finish line when there’s a thousand and one times you want to quit, when you don’t feel you can make it, but somehow you do, it gives you a perspective within which to always have a shred of hope that somehow it will turn around for you. And when you have that inside, no matter how bad it looks, there is always a part of you that will continue to give it what you have.”
While there are zillions of stories about not quitting, few tellers of such tales ever really explore the source of the will to endure, the substance of trying harder. Most raconteurs of sport just take it as given that any seer or hearer of a story of outrageous persistence can be inspired to try harder, as Julie Moss’s stirring crawl in February 1982 inspired Mark Allen to overcome the choker inside him and to do his first Ironman. But, as I learned in my efforts to understand the why and how of Iron War, modern science has enabled us to put this kind of courage under the microscope as never before, and the results have not been kind to the myth of the communicability of will. Scientists including Samuele Marcora and Stephen McGregor have demonstrated that the bravery of the likes of Dave Scott and Mark Allen is a physical thing subject to physical laws and cannot be freely chosen by just anyone. It is certainly affected by psychological influences, such as poor parenting, but one cannot, in the absence of that kind of influence, simply manufacture the sort of hunger that drives the son of a bad father to practically kill himself to win. And no less important than the life experiences that forge iron will are the biological determinants—such as the freakishly strong anterior cingulate cortex that Dave Scott perhaps inherited from one of his parents, or perhaps not—which are even less accessible to free choice.
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