by Julie Moss
But that wasn’t the worst suffering in November. A few weeks later, Reed and I split up. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me—and I brought it on myself.
Young love, when combined with long distance, insecurity, and low self-esteem, can sabotage a relationship. These accelerants blew up my relationship with Reed. Slowly and painfully, I took responsibility for self-sabotaging actions. I cried buckets of tears through this process. I had to take responsibility for all the parts of my life that I’d sabotaged and coasted through. No more riding coattails, no more romantic notions of training into the sunset together. No more settling for doing the minimum to get by.
When my love life came to a crashing halt, it was time to get real, to pick myself up, and refocus on getting to the finish line in Kona. Heartache and regret morphed into this motivating idea that I owed it to myself and, in some awkward misguided way, also to Reed, to do better, to be better, to show up and race with integrity. The one thing to prove was to graduate from Cal Poly, and in doing so validate my self-worth. The road to graduation led directly through Kona.
I proceeded to do exactly what you’re not supposed to do when training for an Ironman—too many miles too close to the race. But I didn’t realize or understand any of that. In January 1982, I ran another marathon, and started riding the bike more. Three weeks after that, on February 6, I ran the Ironman. That’s three marathons in three months . . . with a rather long swim and bike ride thrown in.
Days after the second marathon, I flew to Kona.
I showed up in Hawaii overtrained in running and undertrained on the swim and bike. What little I’d learned about training for an Ironman over the past months led me to conclude I hadn’t done enough for a race this length. I’d never swum or biked the Ironman distance in one shot. I’d only started and finished two triathlons of any kind, the Del Mar Days sprint triathlon and Santa Barbara 70.3-miler.
Since I didn’t know any Ironman triathletes but Reed, I was prepared to figure things out on my own. For the first week, I trusted my intuition. I was aware of certain miles I needed for a buildup to the race, and focused on hitting the numbers. What I wasn’t prepared for was the support of the triathletes, or the organic community forming before my eyes. I discovered Kailua-Kona was filled with welcoming members of a brand-new tribe. The Hawaiian word for family is ohana, and I’d just found mine. I didn’t realize how much I craved a support system or how much I’d thrive under the positive mentorship of hundreds of endurance athletes. My newfound ohana made workouts feel less like work and more like fun. Every day was a new aloha adventure.
There was just one problem. I trained my ass off in Hawaii, building conditioning and base, when I should have been tapering. They are the opposite ends of the long-race training spectrum, with entirely different goal outcomes. Ahhh, bright-eyed ignorance! Fortunately, I had my own ohana living in Waimea, my second cousin Frank. He commuted from Waimea to Parker Ranch, where he worked as a paniolo, a cowboy. I threw my bike in the back of his pickup for the drive to the northern interior of the Big Island, just south of the Pu’u O Umi Natural Area Reserve. From the backside of the island to Parker Ranch, I’d get on the bike and go down this long downhill, hit the Queen Kaahumanu (Queen K) highway, then pedal another twenty-five miles into town—about thirty miles in all. I made this commute roundtrip every day so I could hang out with the other triathletes.
At the end of my first week in Hawaii, they held a bike time trial on the course, for which they provided aid stations along with a sag wagon, so you could ride the full 112 miles without stopping. I had to ride thirty miles just to get to the start. By the time we got to the finish, I still had to ride six miles back to town to meet Cousin Frank for my lift back to Waimea. A 150-mile day, two weeks before the race. Shouldn’t I be backing off? What’s backing off? In one of his Trihistory.com blogs, legendary Big Four triathlete and good friend Scott Tinley put it like this: “Intending to use the remaining (time) to ramp up her performance on the bike, she decided to add said commute distance to her planned bike training, which overall amounted to almost 400 miles the week before the race.”
Here’s something I learned: you don’t do that and expect to finish a race standing up. I’d “hit the wall” at the Oakland Marathon at twenty miles, when my glycogen stores dried up and the body started pulling sustenance from its own muscle cells. You can go from smooth striding to cramped walking in a matter of seconds. I’d also hit the wall at twenty-three miles in the Mission Bay Marathon, so if I kept progressing, I’d make it through all 26.2 miles of the Ironman marathon without locking up. Barely. That was the math I was hanging onto.
My other issue, which I didn’t really know was an issue, concerned my apparel. I showed up in Hawaii with a tank top, shorts, and running shoes, the basic wardrobe for any good long run . . . right? Well, shortly before the race, after one of my training swims, a man named Frank Finizio, who I’d met on the bike time trial, approached. “What are you gonna wear?” he asked. I followed the unspoken second half of his question pretty easily . . . in the three phases of the Ironman?
“This cotton tank top [Olympic speed skating gold medalist and top cyclist] Eric Heiden signed after doing a criterium in San Luis Obispo, and I’ve got some shorts.”
“No, you need a lycra speedsuit.”
“Well, that’s nice, but . . .”
“No, no, no, I’ve got a friend in Orange County who can overnight one so you can race in it.” That’s Ironman ohana.
I stitched everything together on a student’s budget. My biggest expense was my $295 Univega bike and the $85 Ironman entry fee. Dooley McCluskey’s, the Carlsbad bar where my brother Marshall worked, sponsored my airfare. I used my training Speedo for the swim, the free speedsuit from Frank, free lodging, and a free trucker’s cap from the swag bag. I didn’t wear sunglasses, and I put a sweatband on underneath the hat. My helmet was not a cyclist’s helmet, but a skateboarding helmet that cost less and featured more air holes. I also wore front-hooking bra to save time, but the hook broke during my transition from cycling to running.
With my equipment set, if you can call it that, I was ready to race. Except for one last detail that could prove to me the costliest: I hadn’t seen my ex-boyfriend in my first two weeks in Kona. The thought of running into Reed became the albatross around my neck. I knew that even a brief encounter had the potential to throw me into a tailspin, and I couldn’t afford to face him on race morning. A negative reaction could put my whole race under a cloud of pain and regret. I had spent weeks working hard to move forward and focus on my training. I needed my heart to be strong when the cannon blasted to start the race.
What happened? I took matters into my own hands and knocked on his condo door at the beginning of race week. The word that I’d use to describe our brief encounter is graceful. It left me with a sense of relief and peace. Seeing him was bittersweet, but I knew I was going to be okay. Even if I was there to prove something to him more than myself, as I later admitted to Triathlete magazine.
Three nights before the race, competitors got together for an Ironman carboloading party. There were 580 people entered (up from 380 the year before; thank you, Wide World of Sports), but as the new kid on the block, I didn’t know many elite triathletes. Apparently, a couple knew about me. Kathleen had, like me, watched her first Ironman the year before. While I cozied up in front of my TV, she stood on the Kona seawall to watch her boyfriend (and future husband), Dennis Hearst. Many pundits considered her a prerace favorite, and she’d also clocked the winning time in the recent Ironman bike time trial.
For some crazy reason, though, Kathleen focused on the gossip circulating about all my final training miles. My time trial wasn’t too shabby, either, even with a thirty-mile warm up. But it was still hard to imagine anyone concerned about me, when this was all so new—the race, the faces, my obvious inexperience. I did love one thing about it: the positive attention directed at me. I wasn’t used to that.
The whole scene at Kona, capped by the carbo-load party, was so grassroots and low-key that it was fun. But fun was about to turn into something else entirely.
CHAPTER 2
Cannon Blast: Here We Go!
Where’s the aloha spirit? Where did my ohana go?
Three weeks of new friendships, fun times, and workouts in the spirit of shared purpose evaporated before my eyes. Down at the Kailua Pier, race day became all business for athletes, crew, and officials alike. Everyone was so serious! The specter of the upcoming race engulfed the pier like a thick fog, or vog, the air pollution that develops when an erupting volcano’s gases and particles interact with moisture in sunlit air. In other words, highly unsettling to me.
Nonetheless, I was lucky to be free of the expectations that others carried into their races. Some athletes came to win, others to place as highly as possible. Some came to take their shot at this slowly growing juggernaut of endurance sports events, maybe get some good press, or pick up a sponsor from the slim pickings available. I wanted nothing to do with that energy. Whatever these people were going through, their personalities had changed overnight, becoming moody, even unfriendly in some cases. It reminded me of thoroughbreds at the starting gate. If this is what competition felt like, I didn’t want any part of it. I wanted my happy ohana back.
My mantra was much simpler: I just have to finish. I paid my dues in the lava fields by hammering long bike rides in preparation, I earned my spot on the starting line, and paid then-$85 entry fee. I joined 579 other starters at the water, ready to roll, ready to head off for the fifth running of the Ironman World Championship. I didn’t come to win, or even to compete. I just wanted to ensure my graduation. With only two marathons and two triathlons, that added up to less than Ironman distance under my belt, plus furious last-minute training on the Big Island, I didn’t exactly have the background of a serious contender. I didn’t care either.
I just have to finish. For my degree. For myself.
During my seventeen days of training and meeting people on the Big Island, I’d learned a few more things. I also started meeting the subjects of articles I’d read on triathlon for my Cal Poly research paper. One of the most prominent was Tom Warren, profiled in a major Sports Illustrated story in May 1979, three months after he won the second Ironman. His profile fit my initial perception of Ironman and its athletes to a T: the fledgling sport and its enthusiasts were operating on a remote, borderline sane island. In reality, though, the Ironman was born on quite populated Oahu, where fifteen hearty souls tried it in 1978, and another fifteen set out a year later. Twelve finished each time, including the first two winners, Gordon Haller and Tom Warren. The competitors in 1979 gained further street cred by surviving horrendous conditions for 140.6 miles of anything—gale force winds, huge swells, and stinging rain from a storm that dumped five feet of rain on the east coast of the Big Island. It was so nasty that a twenty-year navy veteran assigned to the rescue crew couldn’t get his boat out of the harbor to reach competitors. Right there, most would call it a day and head for high ground and a beer. However, stuff like this drew me in, just like the 1981 Ironman television segment.
As I met more triathletes, and learned why they were so impassioned, something else struck me: nearly all were very smart and insanely driven, Tom Warren among them. Dive beneath this man of a million different workout routines, and you found a focused, hard-working physics degree recipient, owner of several homes and apartments, and proprietor of one of the best beach bars in San Diego. In 1975, he also started a great San Diego race and tradition, the Tug’s Tavern Swim-Run-Swim. It consisted of a half-mile swim around Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach, followed by a five-mile run on the sand to the Mission Beach Jetty and back, with a swim around the pier and a run to the finish.
Others I met included doctors, real estate investors, business owners, exercise physiology majors and graduates, and people cooking up ideas toward the decade-long explosion in entrepreneurship that was ramping up. These athletes were brainy, thoughtful risk-taskers, driven by possibility and excellence, possessors of tremendous work ethics, and, to the young woman in me, very good-looking. Did I mention that before?
The other thing I began to understand was how significant Southern California was to triathlon. Hawaii might be the launching pad for the Ironman concept and Ironman World Championship, but San Diego County is the cradle of triathlon. It makes total sense: where else can you find perfect, moderate training weather nearly every day of the year, or landscape that varies from beaches and rolling hills to mountains—all within a ninety-minute drive? Where could you find countless running trails in open coastal foothills and scenic cycling routes, an ocean in which to swim, and so many young, health-conscious fitness freaks? And stores and restaurants that served natural, organic food? In the 1970s, we were the place.
We Southern Californians are known for setting fitness and fashion trends. Put wheels on surfboard-shaped decks, and you have skateboards. Match choreographed exercise routines to music, and you have Jazzercise. Take polyethylene foam and pour it into a mold about half the size of a surfboard, and you have the boogie board. It made perfect sense that some San Diego lifeguards who liked to run and swim would add bike riding to create a whole new athletic animal. Which leads to the next question: what do you call three sports strung together? A multisport relay? Triangle? Swim-Bike-Runathon? Don Shanahan, codirector of the inaugural Mission Bay Triathlon in 1974, crafted a clever hybrid of “tri” (for three) and the “athlon” suffix attached to multi-sport competitions (pentathlon, duathlon, decathlon, biathlon). He settled on triathlon because the trophy maker called him and didn’t know how to spell the word. Apparently, that’s when Don realized he had found a unique name for a unique sport.
Almost eight years later, I carbo-loaded in Kona among early creators and top competitors. Newcomers like me looked at people like Scott and Jeff Tinley, Scott Molina, 1980 winner Dave Scott, returning champ John Howard, Sally Edwards, Lyn Brooks, Claire McCarthy, and Ardis Bow as the stars of our tiny sport. These people were deadly serious about winning and excelling, with guys like ST (Scott Tinley) also learning everything they could about training techniques, equipment, using race conditions to your advantage, and borrowing conditioning ideas from fitness buffs of all different walks and talks. I might be running Ironman to get my college degree, which I cared deeply about, but triathlon was ST’s life. He was the first and, I would argue, still the most knowledgeable “professor” on triathlon and its history. Which makes sense—today, Scott is an exercise physiology professor, prolific author, and a testament to continual, lifelong learning and the ability to turn your athletic talent into a deeply meaningful and serviceful life. He carries a PhD in cultural studies from Claremont Graduate University, and two master’s degrees from San Diego State—a master’s of Fine Art in fiction writing/literature, and a master’s in social psychology of sport. He also has a BA in Recreation and Leisure Management. Really.
I took all of this in while asking myself, would I ever commit to the sport like this? Would I commit to anything like this? Sometimes we run into moments where we bear witness to people germinating something very special with their shared purpose. That’s how I felt around this crew, though I couldn’t imagine how a sport so far on the outer, extreme frontiers of performance could grow much. Or who was going to be the “forcing function” to elevate it to another level.
I felt something else too: a palpable camaraderie between people who probably (and obviously, in some cases) were rebels, social outcasts, or “different” in the eyes of conventional society. Well, they were different: they were smarter, more fit, and about to do something crazier than anyone I knew. It touched that part of me that loved being on the team, regardless of my position. I loved their vibe, and their belief that anything and everything is possible if you believe in yourself. Get that piece down, and then the world opens up for you to help you make it happen.
I came to Hawaii to see how my world might
open up. So I fit right in.
Time to go. With the sweet, beautiful vibe of common purpose replaced by the thick, tense racer’s edge, we waded sixty meters offshore. I watched others position their bodies, shoot quick looks at each other, and tread water . . . without speaking. The huge mood shift throttled me, so I decided to get away from everyone. With all those bodies in the water, that might be hard, but I would try. After all, I wasn’t in it to win it, just to finish . . .
Finally, the cannon blasted. We’re off!
A year earlier, that same blast shook a seawall spectator to the core, causing her to seek her own Ironman goals. By the time Kathleen McCartney returned to Kona, she had trained for ten months, won three races, and done so convincingly. Now, she was the prerace favorite. The Ironman cannon blast can be a powerful thing.
However, Kathleen’s last few days hadn’t gone well. Far from it. Three mornings before the cannon blast, she woke up unable to stand without fainting. By later that morning, she was in the hospital, receiving tests for problems ranging from a serious virus to dehydration. She never received a certain diagnosis, though many (including her) suspected food poisoning. Not sure what she ate at the carbo-load dinner, but it must’ve been something. When she showed up at the starting line, she looked more like an ailing athlete who just wanted to get it over with than one who would become a part of sports history in eleven hours.
I swam away from the pack and starting-line stress, letting the balmy 76°F water settle me as I pushed forward. Once my breathing relaxed, I found a fluid inner zone, just blue water and motion. It was the same feeling I knew when surfing alone, in my aquatic environment, my soul’s open-ocean playground. I started looking at the coral patterns, which I’d learned from swimming the course for days before the race. I knew where the coral took on sand, where it showed clearly. I immersed further in the quietness of being underwater as I stroked, disregarding the water churning like a hungry school of piranha beside me.