by Julie Moss
Surfing is kind of like dropping into a movie thriller, except the pursuer is big, real, and either yielding or relentless, depending on how well you paddle, position yourself on the wave, dive, or bail out. Or just scream and hold your breath! I love that adrenaline surge, feeling like a world champion after long rides, then stroking like hell to get back out before the next set of waves unloads on my head. Surfing is a constant parade of figuring things out—wave heights, direction, interval between breaks, currents, winds, tides, where to paddle for best position, where and whether to take off . . . and do I keep riding, or cut out? Or wipe out? Decisions come much faster in surfing than triathlon, but the choices and options are similar in their complexity.
For me, surfing isn’t about being a man or a woman; it’s about being one with the ocean, staying out for hours to catch more waves, observe the reef, or absorb the rhythm of the sea. It is an endurance sport, especially when the waves are big. I love that feeling of both endurance and absorption.
As I became a more proficient surfer during my teens and early twenties, I found myself in risky situations. While I was living and training in Los Osos, near San Luis Obispo, Reed and I drove to a horseshoe-shaped spot, but it was crowded. So we continued farther down a rutted dirt road until we saw a promising break, reminiscent of Robert August and Mike Hynson’s surfing safaris in the epic 1966 film The Endless Summer. That movie spurred me to seek my own endless summer, along with countless others. I’m still chasing summer.
We paddled out atop what I’ll call “The Day of Reckoning Reef.” It is considered a secret spot, and in the common respect among surfers, you don’t divulge names and locations of secret spots—especially if you’re not truly a local! Soon, the water shifted ominously, rearing up into huge, menacing walls . . . aimed at our heads. I thought quickly: I’m going to end up on one set of rocks or the other. But right now, I need to push the board as far away from me as I can, and dive down.
I was scared, very scared, but also enthralled by this mystery enveloping me, this big water holding me down, pushing me around. I thought I was going to end up on the reef. The next wave hit, and the next, and each time, I popped back up. Then I paddled in as fast as I could.
That session was probably the closest to death I’ve come. I’d never had a wave like that enter my life, where I honestly didn’t know how my day would turn out. Or if I’d see the next day. That was pivotal: Dive, dive into the core of your potential, find out what it is, and it might turn out okay. In this case, I held my breath for a long time and resurfaced in one piece.
Recently, I gave a talk to the Santa Barbara Triathlon Club about complete commitment, finishing no matter what, the essence of endurance sports. I always wanted more of that commitment. I thought it would come through challenging myself and surfing mighty waves for hours at a time, but it didn’t. However, one piece stuck: the ocean can become something intrinsically dangerous. Wiping out on a two-story mountain of a wave can make you think, I survived something. I’m willing to take my chances, not really sure if I’m going to make it out of the wave. It isn’t panic; it’s just this “I don’t know.” The ocean taught me that it isn’t about winning or the accolades, but am I going to survive? And what will I do with my changed perspective if I do survive?
In order to fuel our dedication and commitment, we need a driving force. Passion carries us into action. Together, passion and commitment spark our outcomes and drive us to greater aspirations. No one becomes a great athlete, or great at any profession or hobby, without a strong mixture of these two qualities. It puts together the physical and emotional. Gotta have them both.
Surfing has been around for a thousand years. Polynesian royals carved koa tree trunks into 120-pound planks and paddled into waves from Samoa to Tonga, and, as the Beach Boys sang, “catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.”
Endurance sports have been around much longer, since our distant ancestors embarked on hours- or days-long slow runs in pursuit of their prey, captured beautifully in Chris McDougall’s bestselling Born to Run. Putting thousands of years of subsistence living aside, what is the most incredible endurance sports feat of recent times? Scientists and historians looked at the six-day foot races contested by professional British and American athletes from 1874–1888; they expended about 60,000 kcal, six times the energy an elite triathlete uses in an Ironman. What about Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911–12 Antarctic expedition, in which he and his team walked up to 10 hours per day for 159 consecutive days through conditions we’d rather curl up in a blanket and read about in National Geographic or watch on the Weather Channel? They expended about one million kcal, the equivalent of one hundred Ironman triathlons.
Ironman is certainly one of the world’s toughest endurance sports tests. If you win or place highly, you’re among the fittest women or men on earth. Period. However, multiday events in places like the Sahara Desert, Greece, South America, and the U.S. (think 200- and 300-mile running races, cycling’s Tour de France and Race Across America, or trail runners who run the Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trails) would boggle anyone’s mind, including this Ironman veteran’s. Take the Ultraman or Ultra 515, a race held over three days on the Big Island of Hawaii. The total distance nearly equals three Ironmans. Ultraman opens with a 6.2-mile ocean swim and 90-mile cross-country bike ride that includes 6,000 feet of climbing. On day two, competitors ride another 171.4 miles—a distance longer than any stage of the Tour de France—and climb 4,000 feet. Finally, these competitors can “rest” their weary legs with a 52.4-mile double marathon. They have to finish each daily stage within twelve hours. Tempting for any endurance sports athlete, the ultimate challenge, right? I admit, that is too rich for even my blood! I am content to admire and be inspired from afar.
As I mentioned earlier, the 1980s brought along a fun, fast-paced, and adrenaline-fueled Wild West mentality: Ironman in Hawaii, hair metal bands in LA, people running 100 miles along the Western Sierra, surf contests drawing 100,000 people in Huntington Beach. We early Ironman competitors were right in the middle as participants and lifestyle influencers. Anything was possible, the sky the limit, and we constantly broke through that limit to higher thresholds. That’s what you do in your invincible twenties, right? The possibility of outdoing our parents was there for the taking—and we seized the moment. People got off their couches and easy chairs en masse, including our parents in some cases, and began running, surfing, cycling, swimming, dancing, doing yoga or Jazzercise to MTV videos, playing racquetball, lifting Nautilus weights, or trying hybrid sports that popped up, like snowboarding, skateboarding . . . and triathlon.
Everything was new, exciting, and fresh. Many endurance sports athletes rushed headlong into entrepreneurship—the decade’s business buzzword. Where did Entrepreneur magazine locate their headquarters? In the middle of Orange County, near John Wayne Airport, the epicenter of the business of sun and fun. Much of both the surf and triathlon industries set up shop there. Enterprising sports producers, some of them former competitors, created innovative events and multiple-sport concepts. We reached for our outermost limits and pioneered new moves, techniques, strategies, or entire sports. We became the first generation of athletes to learn sports marketing for ourselves. Everything was possible right here, right now. We hijacked Ram Dass’s “Be Here Now” approach from the sixties and gave it expression in the sports, fitness, and business worlds.
Most important, endurance sports rose up because, in the early 1980s, risk-taking was celebrated and revered. Most parents of baby boomers encouraged us to take risks, which built character and gave us new ideas of what is possible. We did not live in today’s overly cautious society, where concerned parents sometimes put unfortunate lids on risk-taking, bolstered by the rise in school-related violence and a media that sometimes perpetuates a message of fear. Not to mention the messaging of “fitting in,” “conforming,” “thinking in the box” . . . not exactly my cup of tea. If we wanted to run a long race, start a business
, or do something wild and magnificent, well, we got out there and did it. If people tried to caution or warn us off our pursuits, out of their fear, we shrugged it off or used it to further motivate ourselves. You tell me it’s too risky? Watch . . .
When looking back at why endurance sports exploded, I find our risk-taking mentality and commitment to achieve to be twin magnets, attracting the elements and pulling them together. Our greatest conveniences, travel tours, competitions, and shining examples of ingenuity today started with women and men taking risks. Thomas Edison ran 10,000 experiments before nailing down the incandescent light bulb. Imagine if he’d quit after 9,000 attempts? What would have happened if Michael Jordan had quit shooting jumpers after being cut from his junior varsity high school basketball team? That’s what the building block of greatness really looks like—deep risk, sweat and blood, and never quitting.
Another good example is Ironman. With the Ironman World Championships’ current stature, it’s easy to forget that it started with fifteen souls in 1978 paying $3.00 apiece (the registration fee for the 2018 Ironman is $950). The original Hawaiian Triathlon combined Oahu’s three big distance events—the Waikiki Rough Water Swim, Around-Oahu Bike Ride, and Honolulu Marathon. The courses added up to 140.6 miles. The event was created, in part, to settle an argument. Who’s fitter? An endurance swimmer? Lifeguard? Distance cyclist? Or marathon runner? On the rules sheet, cofounder John Collins noted, “Swim 2.4 miles! Bike 112 miles! Run 26.2 miles! Brag for the rest of your life.” Then, “Whoever wins, we’ll call him the Ironman.”
In the November 1985 Tri-Athlete “Material Girl” cover story, I tried to capture the spirit. “I would like to think that if you really want something, then it’s time to start working for it,” I said in reference to my new contract with Bridgestone Tires. “Things aren’t going to fall into your lap. I have been lucky—that moment on ABC’s Wide World of Sports just happened. That was a nice start, but from then on it was hard work. Japan has been the culmination of strategic planning from a business and sponsorship point of view. My agent, Murphy Reinschreiber, and I pitched to Bridgestone that I was one of the top female triathletes in the world. And Bridgestone went for it. From that point on, I had to prove myself. The moment I arrived in Japan it was lectures, clinics, and press conferences. It was a major buildup—the way you’d treat any woman who was favored to win an Ironman race.”
When you think about it, every time someone competes in an Ironman today or tries a multihour, multisport, or multistate competition, the resulting effort echoes back on the can-do, all-in spirit of the eighties. Every time someone comes up to me and says, “You were the reason I decided to try an Ironman (or running, or swimming, or choose your activity),” I’ve felt grateful and proud to be a part of such a pivotal moment and time that carries forth today.
With our rising endurance-sports stature came a new level of respect for others and myself. I began to accept that others respected me. Even stars from other professional sports put us on pedestals, and I loved it. It’s like, “You did what?” As a guest of a Monday Night Football luncheon hosted by ABC, I walked among a group of NFL players in New York. These big men looked at me like, “Whoa, you know what she did?” I loved that instant recognition.
It brings to mind Pam Reed, the five-time winner of the infamous Badwater ultramarathon. How BAD is Badwater? Very. From the bottom of Death Valley, 282 feet below sea level, the hale and hearty run 135 miles to the portal of Mount Whitney, elevation 9,000 feet above—in mid-July. Temperatures of 120°F and a body-parching five percent humidity are common; so are hallucinations, delusional thinking, and other weird things that happen under extreme duress from overexertion and surface road heat that can fry eggs—let alone the soles of running shoes. Pam is beyond badass. She channels her inner Wonder Woman in an amazing way. After competing in gymnastics as a teenager, Pam started thinking about running long distances, spurred on in part by my Wide World of Sports moment. Today, she reigns as one of the toughest champions we’ve seen in American sport.
Take my situation, multiply it by hundreds of equally supercharged athletes with visions of their own, and it produced the melting pot of athletes, marketers, promoters, visionaries, and dreamers that constellated from the 1982 Ironman and helped thousands, and then a few million, find endurance sports of all kinds. With marathon racing already booming, thanks to the efforts of Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar, and later Joan Benoit Samuelson, the world was ready for another take on that 26.2-mile race.
About a year after Wide World of Sports used my 1982 finish to promote its next Ironman telecast, a New York Times headline read, triathlon thrives on wide world. Any sociologist will tell you that when a performance or event leaps into the public consciousness and dissolves barriers about what is possible, quantum growth follows. The media and savvy promoters, marketers, and businessmen took it from there. I was still on Wide World of Sports’ mind in 1986, when I was among the athletes seated in the studio audience for their twenty-fifth-anniversary show. I shook hands with Muhammad Ali and chatted with other legends. When Jim McKay discussed the heart as being the intangible key to performance, I could hardly believe it when a studio camera panned the crowd and homed in on me.
The crazy thing is, I never sought out these opportunities. I still don’t. They tend to find me. It seems hard to believe in our “promote thyself at all costs” world, but it’s the truth. To me, it’s a measure of aligning mind, heart, and soul to the place where passion, personal interests, commitment, and livelihood intersect. When we align, we operate within the law of attraction—receiving what we give. I gave all of myself to Kona, and by extension, to millions on TV. I received a livelihood, a career, and a platform to continue giving of myself. From that, I received more blessings—friends, experiences, opportunities. My future husband. That’s how it works. The presence of that magnetism is why I found it hard to think beyond triathlon, even though it didn’t offer much of a career early on. I didn’t have a next step. Thankfully, opportunities kept popping. Give, and gratefully receive. Be sure to accept gifts when offered; otherwise, we may slow the main valve of the law of attraction.
The same year as my Ironman, the Bud Light U.S. Triathlon Series took off. It was the brainchild of Jim Curl and Carl Thomas, and consisted of a seven-event schedule at Torrey Pines State Beach in June 1982. It blossomed into our multimillion-dollar, twenty-five-to-thirty-event domestic circuit, bringing in athletes from all walks and disciplines. Maybe, just maybe, they too could compete in a triathlon and become good at it. Additional events exploded like firecrackers around the world, causing a fourfold increase in participation in two years (from 250,000 to 1.1 million), one of the greatest participation spikes in sports. We had an adoring media filling our sails, helmed by two magazines of our own—Triathlon, the upgrade of Swim Bike Run, and Triathlete, which followed its rival out of the gate by six months.
The 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics excited the world about participatory sports. While neither triathlon nor surfing was included (triathlon became an Olympic sport in 2000; surfing debuts in 2020), runners, cyclists, and swimmers were on hand—and the hometown Americans put on a show for the ages. Heroes and heroines emerged every day. One of the biggest was inaugural women’s marathon champ Joan Benoit Samuelson, who broke an International Olympic Committee glass ceiling. Not easy, with the all-male crew running the show. Incredibly, prior to 1984, the IOC thought the marathon too dangerous for women! Other instant household names ranged from track and field superstars Carl Lewis, Flo-Jo, Mary Decker Slaney, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee to gymnast Mary Lou Retton, cycling gold medalists Alexi Grewal and Connie Carpenter, and swimmers Tracy Caulkins and Mary T. Meagher. Distance running was solid after the decade-long boom fueled by Shorter, Rodgers, Grete Waitz, and Salazar; if you weren’t lacing up before the Olympics, you were afterward. For the first time, the Olympics were fed to us 24/7 by reporters hammering out story after story about performances and lifestyles for the n
ew round-the-clock outlets.
Lifestyle was the operative word. Everywhere you turned, athletes, announcers, sponsors, and reporters were chatting up this or that lifestyle. The surfing lifestyle. The beach lifestyle. The skateboard lifestyle. The fitness lifestyle. The combination of super-fit bodies and ever-increasing footage of beach- or scenery-oriented competitions from Hawaii and California fueled the buzz. By mid-decade, it seemed everyone wanted their piece of a lifestyle that afforded a growing number of men and women, many with master’s and PhD degrees and thriving professional careers, the opportunity to run around in neon ST shorts, Oakley Factory Pilot Sunglasses, Nike Sock Racers, and sports bras. The sweat glistened on their tanned skin as their finely tuned, toned bodies belted out the miles in spectacular locales. Who wouldn’t want to train to look and feel like this? To visit beautiful places? To practice this lifestyle?
Television loved what it was seeing. Triathlon had Wide World of Sports and, later in the decade, NBC, ESPN, and regional networks like Los Angeles–based Prime Ticket (now Fox Sports West). Surfing lived on Prime Ticket, MTV, and ESPN, the latter thanks to a ten-event-per-year contract Alan Gibby of DynoComm Productions signed in 1983. Gibby went on to produce surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, and the other X Games sports long before the X Games were thought of. This type of lifestyle sports programming started with Roone Arledge and Wide World of Sports. Gibby, Prime Ticket producer Don Meek, and others turned lifestyle sports into regular TV programming. When Bud Light started using triathletes for commercials on all three networks, and scored a TV deal of its own for the USTS, the circle was complete.
Sports bras and bare midriff workouts were symbols of our new lifestyle. The prevalence of sports bras reminded me of my borrowed bra moment in the 1982 Ironman. Later, it reminded me of an ecstatic Brandi Chastain pulling off her game jersey to reveal her black sports bra after hitting the winning penalty kick in the 1999 World Cup soccer finals—the goal that exploded youth soccer program participation in America. The Sports Illustrated cover, photographed by Robert Beck (who lived in Carlsbad for years while also shooting for surfing magazines), was voted SI’s second most iconic cover in its sixty-plus-year history. I might add, the sports bra also celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2017. Know how it was originally created? By sewing two jockstraps together. True story.