by Julie Moss
Then there was high school. The majority of great triathletes come from great high school and/or college sports careers. Some are even high school or collegiate all-Americans. I was not one of them. Not even close. Every time I tried out at Carlsbad High School, I just wanted to be part of the team. That was my goal—not necessarily to play, not to make a headline, or score the winning run, but to be a part of it. I didn’t like being called into basketball games; riding the bench was fine with me! Softball was okay, because I knew where I had to be in the outfield, and I could run pretty fast. With volleyball, we practiced dolphin diving constantly; later, I used it as a San Diego County lifeguard. On our tennis team, I played No. 4 doubles—the lowest-ranked position. The idea of serving and having the ball come firing back at me? I didn’t do too well. But I did earn a varsity letter!
I still get the thrill of contributing to a team. For two seasons, through a wonderful series of circumstances, I contributed directly to my alma mater as an occasional assistant to the Carlsbad High School cross-country team. We dream of things as little girls, and we move on, but I honestly did not see myself coaching a high school sport. I promise you that my high school coaches wouldn’t have seen that possibility either. But that’s the thrill of life, its magical twists and turns. When you put your energy and focus in the right direction, act with intention, and remain open to possibilities you may not see at the time, they seem to breathe themselves into existence.
Sometimes, those opportunities arrive in droves. Whether you’re ready or not.
CHAPTER 7
My Fifteen Minutes
I magine yourself a 23-year-old surfer girl who becomes the most recognized triathlete in the world almost overnight. You weren’t on anyone’s radar, but you wanted to be. (We all would, in some way.) Suddenly, after the most popular sports show in the U.S. features you, sponsors, TV and movie producers, media, corporations, and race directors seek you out, and they keep coming. “Julie the Unbreakable arrived right when America needed her most; she showed she had the sand to stick it out when most of us were wondering, privately, how many of us did,” bestselling author Christopher McDougall wrote in Natural Born Heroes.
When America needed her most . . . It’s hard for anyone to imagine being perceived in this way. Certainly this otherwise ordinary college kid.
Sudden fame carries a dual effect. A head-swelling impact can accompany the leap to international recognition. Or crawl. I’m not sure how you avoid it, especially when it hits like a tsunami to wash aside the life you knew. Articles come out, TV stations call, people start talking, and you start believing your own press. In my case, you also suffer through the terrifying feeling of pretending to be a professional athlete when you are really not. How to handle all of this?
I went with the fake-it-’til-you-make-it approach.
This scary, crazy, wild, and wonderful ride followed the 1982 Ironman, Wide World of Sports, and Armen Keteyian’s article. It took me a while to inwardly absorb and appreciate the accolades and superlatives, but I was not shy about my outer reaction. I generally did what many young people do when we get our fifteen minutes of fame—ate it up like Michelin five-star cuisine. I walked toward the attention, rather than from it; I loved being noticed. “When Julie walks into a room, you definitely know she’s there,” Lisette says. “Her energy and confidence draw you in, she loves people, and she can hold conversations with anyone.”
The truth of it all? I needed to believe my own press to feel like I belonged with the other women athletes. Never mind I’d just finished second in the most important triathlon. As long as I continued protecting myself from the humiliation of “losing control of bodily functions” in the final meters, as Diana Nyad put it, I was all-in. I still did not understand why so many people drew inspiration from my race, since I didn’t win and I had to crawl, rather than run, across the line.
Little did I know my fifteen minutes would span four decades.
After declining David Letterman’s invitation, I was contacted by ProServ, a prestigious athlete management firm. Among others, ProServ managed the careers of NBA superstar Moses Malone and two of America’s sporting sweethearts, U.S. Open tennis champ Tracy Austin and 1979 world figure skating champion Tai Babilonia. I decided not to sign, for the stated reason that I wanted to train and race on my own. “Basically, that’s not what I’m into,” I told Armen in the San Diego Union. “Do I promote and go while the going’s good? I asked myself what’s my goal. I know it’s to do well in October [in 1982, Ironman was contested twice]. I kind of had to draw the line.”
There is another reason: I had no idea what it took to be a professional athlete. The frightened little girl beneath my confident public persona arose when the suggestion came up. She thought, I’m not ready. I’m not as ready as these other girls. I was afraid ProServ would call my bluff. So I never let them.
Meanwhile, I kept processing my race, connecting some dots, learning to articulate the deeper meaning of my effort, what it meant not to quit, to give everything . . . literally. “You know the neatest thing? An athlete rarely has a chance to take himself or herself to the limit, and then go on,” I told Armen. “I know if I ever have to, I can do it. I can take it to the very end. Not many people can say that. And it’s a feeling I can hang on to forever.”
These realizations formed the most authentic part of my Ironman experience. I began to describe them more often. I wasn’t comfortable talking about the messy bits, and I still felt inwardly unsettled by the credit I was receiving for the surge in triathlon and endurance sports worldwide. I had no idea what the sport was going to become. I told an interviewer in 2017, “It was this strange event that happened once a year and was televised. I loved being in Hawaii. I was soaking it all up. The idea of having to do a race was not exactly an afterthought, but I wasn’t too worried about the race until the gun went off.”
Wish I would’ve remembered that simple wisdom a few times since, like in Kona in 2017! It’s the perfect way to do an Ironman: hold no expectations, remain completely in the moment. Out of the mouths of babes . . .
I started sharpening my message. By tapping into the larger experience of my race, I found I could better accept the impact of it. I told my story to hundreds of journalists, which further clarified the moment. This repeated telling planted an anchor that slowly moored the experience into my body, mind, and soul, where it could always empower me and positively impact the lives of others. Twenty years later, when I returned to Kona for the twenty-fifth anniversary Ironman, I told Kevin Mackinnon of Ironman.com, “Everyone has a defining moment, and mine got captured on film. Every time the tape’s played and I hear Tim Weisberg’s flute, it hits this deep emotional chord that says I discovered something new about myself on that day, and people get to see it.” A few years later, I pointed out to Julia Morrill of Sports Illustrated, “What I did that day wasn’t pretty to see. What shined through was the humanness of my struggle. The determination is inside everybody.”
Once the post-race buzz subsided . . . well, it didn’t, not for a long time. It seemed everyone wanted to hear my story. I wasn’t used to that. I was the little-noticed schoolgirl who showed off with crazy antics to gain attention. Now, the spotlight fell right onto me. Thankfully, I love people—and triathlon fans. My relationship to the fans has always been strong.
Attention rained on me like a Hawaiian downpour. Invitations flowed in from sources you might expect—and plenty you wouldn’t. Right after the Wide World of Sports airing, I was invited to New Zealand for Survival of the Fittest, a popular CBS TV show. I also was featured in the “Jock” section of People magazine, and received an invitation to speak to an IBM convention in Hawaii. Me? On stage? Speaking to audiences? Competing on a televised event halfway around the world? Sounds great!
Think of Survival of the Fittest as a proto-Survivor, involving real sports feats rather than contestants arguing over the most innocuous things. Our diverse, renowned “cast” included two-time Survival o
f the Fittest champion Kevin Swigert, a cross-country skier from Idaho; world-class white water kayaker Dan Schnurrenberger; mountain climbing superstar Lynn Hill, the first woman to climb the “nose” of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite Valley; recently crowned Ironman champ Scott Tinley; and a few others whose names escape me. Plus myself.
We were taken to the interior of the South Island and housed on the Lake Wanaka shoreline. We helicoptered to the Mount Aspiring National Park region, and jet boated to our river swim location on the Clutha River, one of the glacier-fed rivers that interlaced the park. Jet boating is thrilling, adventurous, and exciting, a robust New Zealand thing. We enjoyed it immensely. We then swam the Clutha River through Grade 2 and Grade 3 rapids, with “wave” faces sometimes hitting three to five feet, plus the challenges you’d associate with a fast-moving river, like dangerous currents, eddies, exposed rocks, and broken water.
In our cross-country competition, we ran trails to the summit of a 500-foot rock, and then clipped in and rappelled down the face, aided by a top belayer (an expert who controls the safety rope for climbers). In order to move down the sheer face, we had to lift the entire rope to create enough slack. For me, there was a problem: the rope was too heavy. Even when I leaned back with all my weight, I couldn’t get the rope to slide through my harness. As I struggled, I caught the attention of the belayer and exchanged eye glances. I can’t lift the rope. He got my drift. As I yanked on the line, he released the rope, inch by inch. We continued this dance until my body outweighed the remaining rope. Without his help, I would have dangled in my harness until they unclipped me.
Next up was the whitewater kayaking, an aerial obstacle course with commando lines and Burma bridges (think of a challenging “monkey” rope bridge), along with a jousting match twenty feet above the Clutha River. The Washington Post called it “a tailored-for-television sporting circus . . . First prize will be $15,000 and the title of leanest, meanest, grittiest athlete in the whole macho world.”
That’s a little much. You cannot compare a made-for-TV event to an Ironman—at all—but you have to appreciate the promotional gusto. I thought Dan Schnurrenberger found the only valid point in common: “It’s not always the best athletes that win,” he told the Washington Post. “Sometimes, it’s who has the most willpower.”
Sadly, we girls dealt with some gender bias. We were not included in the scree competition, where athletes run, bounce, and skid down the loose mountain chip rock (scree). If the scree is small and deep enough, you can “ski” it in your boots, essentially riding a miniature rockslide. What great fun! But not for the girls. Too dangerous for women, they said. That saddened me. However, it was 1982 and women and men were not considered equal by most TV producers, nor the insurance companies hounding them about the financial and legal necessity of “keeping it safer for the girls.”
Much later, I learned a funny backstory about our Survival of the Fittest experience. It came from the resident expert on all things triathlon, Scott Tinley. In a piece on his Trihistory.com site entitled “Ripples from the 1982 Ironman Triathlon & The Crawl Felt Round The World,” ST recalled his first run-in with Survival of the Fittest executive producer Barry Frank, president of Trans World International, the television division of IMG, the world’s largest sports management firm. The studly, blond, newly-crowned Ironman champion met the short, thick New York executive puffing his cigar at a small bar on Lake Wanaka. It was a match made in . . . TV world.
Frank ordered Scott a beer. After ST suggested he looked a bit out of place, Barry Frank replied, “So are you, Hot Shot. I know that because I’m the reason you’re here.” Fair enough. “Glad you could make it. I enjoyed watching you win in Kona a few weeks ago.”
After ST thanked Frank for the invite and beer, he noticed Frank looking past him, toward the door. He asked if the producer was expecting anyone else. “Julie,” Frank said. “Julie Moss is the new star.”
My sudden appearance on the scene bothered ST a bit at first. He thought of me as an outsider (true enough) who had turned triathlon into a freak show of sorts, or at least its perception by Wide World of Sports viewers. I certainly didn’t mean to; it’s not like I pre-scripted my race, or the final 100 meters. Or the fifteen feet that I crawled. As this perception connected with my personal insecurities, I thought, “Am I a freak? Have I turned the sport into a freak show?”
ST is a smart and perceptive man, sometimes strong with his opinions. He’s also capable of pulling the lens back, taking a longer view, and changing said opinions if he sees beyond his original take. It didn’t take long for him to realize a surge in Ironman and triathlon was about to get underway. Barry Frank’s remark made it clear. “I knew then that the ripples of the 1982 Ironman and Moss’s Big Crawl, not three weeks prior, would lap at the shores of triathlon for decades after the scrapes on her knees healed,” he wrote.
Initially, ST struggled with the idea that an everyday girl had changed the sport. “It was almost too dramatic,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “There were some people that thought the thing was play-acted. That real life wasn’t like this.”
Funny how we perceive things. Chris McDougall portrayed the public perception 180° differently in Natural Born Heroes:
“At first these contests were treated as Battles of the Freaks, until Julie Moss—twenty-three years old, still in college, and One of Us—jolted our eyes from the winners in the front of the pack toward the heroes in the back. TV was soon [actually, already—my note] zooming in to cover these gritty Everymen.”
I think “One of Us” and “Everymen” sound much better than “freak show.” I would add that Sports Illustrated and ABC saw the pre-1982 Ironman competitors the same way as McDougall—which is why SI covered the 1979 race, and Wide World of Sports added the event to its annual roster.
McDougall also pointed out something else: how my finish started a new way of approaching races. “Instantly an anthem was born: ‘Just Finishing Is Winning.’” Hear that saying a few times at youth soccer matches, weekend 10Ks, or other participatory sports events? I’m of two minds about this “gold star” sentiment—the participant in me encourages it, while the racer and champion finishes to win. “Just Finishing Is Winning” is now woven into our youth, scholastic, and recreational sports culture.
Back to Scott Tinley. ST and I have come a long way since 1982, and so has his take on an Ironman race for which he should forever be feted as a great champion, since he won so impressively and established himself as the greatest rival to Dave Scott. Had a certain freckle-faced, Bud Light cap-wearing interloper not appeared, he would’ve carried the day. In 30 Years of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship, Scott reflected. “It was a courageous thing. Julie was young. She didn’t know. She was a college coed. She was innocent, and therein lies the heroic deed.”
New Zealand also produced a welcome return to my love life. My exboyfriend Reed, who finished fifth in the Ironman and whom I still missed terribly, had mapped out a personal bike tour of New Zealand. When I was invited to Survival of the Fittest, I realized our trips overlapped. Perfect! After I informed him of this coincidence, he cautiously suggested I bring my bike along, and some panniers and camping gear.
Perfect. Time to try again. After the Survival of the Fittest shoot, we rode much of his bike tour, which cracked open the door for us getting back together. We returned to Southern California as a tentative couple.
I was busy from the moment the plane taxied. I was approached for a made-for-TV movie, Challenge of a Lifetime, starring the great Penny Marshall. Penny is entertainment royalty to us baby boomers, the star of the 1970s smash sitcom Laverne & Shirley and later, a brilliant movie director and producer. In Challenge of a Lifetime, Penny starred as a newly divorced woman trying to show her son (played by future star of the Weekend at Bernie’s movies, Jonathan Silverman) she could pull herself together. To play a triathlete, she copied my Kona running outfit, minus the trucker hat, but including the damned bra straps. I was
given screen credit as a technical consultant, which allowed me to work and hang out with a trio of great Olympians: gymnast Bart Conner, figure skater Cathy Rigby, and seven-time gold medal–winning swimmer Mark Spitz. Bart and Cathy played triathletes, while Mark was cast as the race announcer.
One day, I went to Penny’s house to run through the best training routine for her. I parked my VW Squareback up the street, because God forbid it leaves oil on Penny Marshall’s driveway! It was great fun to work with her, and to travel with the crew to Hawaii, film scenes, and experience life behind the camera. This free trip to give advice on being a triathlete was definitely more fun than torrential rains in Southern California.
While working on the film, I spent time with the team from Specialized Bicycles, which provided bikes to cast and crew. I hung out inside the truck that housed the bikes, chatting with the rep . . . and gaining a sponsorship after a really nice conversation. That’s how I got my first Specialized Allez bike sponsorship. Could it really be this easy?
Meantime, interest in triathlon surged far beyond what the pioneers in San Diego and Kona could have imagined. According to Triathlon Magazine, the sport’s first international publication, 60,000 people entered about 400 triathlons worldwide in 1982. In 1983, those numbers jumped to 250,000 runners and 1,000 triathlons; by 1985, we had 1.1 million participants in 2,100 triathlons, along with our own domestic tour, the Bud Light United States Triathlon Series (USTS). The growth was that fast, and I was cited as the catalyst. As Chris McDougall noted in Natural Born Heroes, people didn’t look at me as a postcard-perfect athlete with the body of Adonis or Athena (aka Scott Tinley or Kathleen McCartney). They saw me as the energetic neighbor girl who took on and faced down a challenge. In me, they imagined themselves surviving a brutal course, high heat and wind, dehydration, subpar training, and her own limits. They saw Don Moss’s little girl riding and falling, getting up, and falling again, until she got the hang of riding a bicycle. The message was pretty simple: “If she can do it, I can do it—or at least something that makes me feel better about myself.” Participation soared through the roof.