When I first met my wife 20 years ago, doing another ironman
was about the furthest thing from my mind. Pretty much as soon as I’d gotten
out of Kona harbor in October of ’87 I’d gone cold turkey with swimming, which
had been my weakest event in any case.
And, except for commuting on a mountain bike, I had a road/TT bike that
collected dust. For a decade, I did refocus on a passion for running, but even
that got old as my body began telling me that other activities made me feel
better.
Over the years, students and athletes who knew of my
triathlon background would sporadically tell me of TV coverage of Kona’s big
October event or some other televised tri, asking me if I’d seen it. But I never had, and so, for a number of
decades, Kona remained well off the back burner of consciousness, a chapter in
my life that seemed increasingly vague and unimaginable.
Whenever I pondered Kona and the lessons learned from three
races there in ’84, ’86, and ’87, thoughts inevitably returned to ’85, a race I
didn’t even do. It seemed strange, but
the more I tried to put that chapter of my life behind me, the more those
pages’ unwritten paragraphs spoke to me.
Folks often asked about the ’84 race, but to me the ’84 race lacked
punctuation, an incomplete sentence that suggested and implied, rather than clearly
stated.
So the ironman remained, outwardly impressive bio in most
people’s eyes but inwardly a question mark, a silent, relentless siren song
that only I could hear. I knew that in
‘84 I’d beaten Chris Hinshaw, the following year’s second place finisher, and
that during the ’84 marathon leg I’d been gaining on Mark Allen and John Howard
just ahead of me in 5th and 6th place, especially in the
latter stages. But, as I learned with
perspective gained only with time and reflection, ’84 was more broadly special
as well.
’84 was the first time Kona was won in under 9 hours – Dave
Scott. The first time a runner broke 3 hours
– Dave Scott. The first time cyclists
broke 5 hours – John Howard and Mark Allen.
The first time a swimmer broke 50 minutes – Chris Hinshaw. The stars
must have been aligned that day, since it was also the hottest day on record
for a Hawaii ironman; little wonder that it also has one of the highest
drop-out rates on record. Four of the top six males in the ’84 race represented
15 past, present or future Kona race victories and countless other triathlon
titles.
Among the top group that day was Dutchman Rob Barel, certainly
a harbinger of top finishers to come as the only non-American of the
bunch. Rob would deftly bridge the early
world of triathlon with the approaching new millenium by staying amazingly fit
and fast, competing 16 years later in Sydney - in his’40s - in the first
Olympic triathlon.
Not to be outdone, unknown to most that day was a young guy
out of Pennsylvania by the name of Kenny Glah, who finished the first of what
has now become 28 consecutive Hawaii Ironman World Championships, an unbroken
string of Kona races that no triathlete will touch for a very long time, if
ever.
Yet ’84 was pioneering in another way as well since, on that
day, the triathlon’s top-dogs apparently realized that in order to keep billing
itself as the “World Championship,” a trophy and a handshake would no longer
suffice. No wonder then that ’84 was the
last time so much triathlon talent was ever assembled to race an ironman
without the possibility of financial reward.
Voting with their feet, fully 75% of top-8 from ’84, including icons
Dave Scott and Mark Allen, chose to not participate in ’85.
On perhaps no other day than October 6, 1984 had the then
young sport matured so quickly and begun to define itself so clearly. And yet in ’85, when I might have been
showing folks that ’84 hadn’t been a fluke, I was instead watching race
coverage from my living room, happy for Scott T., Chris H. and company but
wallowing in a bit of self-pity. Earlier
that year a reckless driver had sent my rear derailleur through my right leg as
her car crushed my bike and sent me flying like a rag doll down the country
road. I knew I was lucky to be alive and
fortunate to have had successful surgeries and physical therapy, but the
competitor in me was heartbroken.
In ’86, racing again, I was named a member of a four-man U.S. team in a new national
team division at Kona, but I put too much pressure on myself to repeat ‘84’s
performance and ended up a DNF. By ’87
I’d finished my graduate work at U of Michigan and was about to enter the full-time
workforce, but Kona’s allure snared me one more time. I finished, knowing that I had to, in almost exactly
the time I’d posted in ’84. But I’d been
through too much and my heart had moved on; the ironman, and Kona in
particular, no longer pulled on my heartstrings.
Which is why it was easy for me to promise my new wife in
the early ‘90s that I’d never do another ironman. Never. Less than two years ago, now living
and working overseas, my tune still hadn’t changed. Sure, I’d lived a life of fitness, which
included cycling, the less and less frequent swim, and the much less frequent
run, but the idea of putting all three together again, especially over such a
great distance, just didn’t compute.
Besides, I had a wife, a family, a full-time job, other interests.
And then the emails
began coming from a former training partner who’d fallen hard for triathlon
while living in Sun Valley. We’d done
plenty of ski and adventure races together in our families’ shared decade in
Seattle, and, knowing of my Paleolithic tri-sport past, he began sharing opinions
about his newfound endurance sport love, occasionally asking for advice. True to form, he rocketed to the head of the
class, easily qualified for Kona and, soon after his maiden journey down Ali’i
Drive, was wondering if I’d care to meet him in 2011 at the pier. Naturally, my first thought was about ’85 and
the race that wasn’t. Our exchanges had
blown air on the embers of the subconscious; suddenly, I began asking myself
the “what ifs” that so often preface life’s big decisions.
Some guys’ mid-life crises involve fast cars; I got
triathlon’s equivalent by updating my road bike by 25 years and purchasing the
kind of TT bike I’d only seen in Tour de France coverage. Meanwhile, it took me three weeks to finally
get up the courage to ask my wife if I could dedicate nearly a year at 15+
extra hours a week to a triathlon renaissance.
She appreciated the barrenness of our university compound life, knew that
I was about to turn 50, and had come to make peace with her husband’s lifelong
love affair with sport. I promised to do
as much of the training in the wee hours of the morning so as not to disrupt
family life too much. And, once I added
up all the many costs of re-entering a sport that had gone from pricey to
exorbitant, I also vowed that it’d be a one-time deal: October 2011, full stop. Besides, teachers are generally very busy in
October, and I’d been lucky this time to have a school give me the time off for
both the April qualifier and the October granddaddy.
27 years is a long time between podium appearances at Kona,
perhaps a longer time than any other triathlete can claim. The world wars were closer together. Having already experienced the good, the bad,
and the ugly at Kona, I knew to take nothing for granted this past October. The racecourse, the competing athletes, the
town, the body - all had changed over the years. But one thing was for sure: I still loved
racing and was determined to fully enjoy this reprise. In the end a 9:50 fifth place age-group
finish was less than seven minutes or about 1% slower than the 9:43 I’d first
posted in Kona in 1984 at the tender age of 23 when 10 bananas, a couple
gallons of water, and sheer youthful exuberance and naivete had powered me all
those 140.6 miles.
It may be a long time before I return to Kona, if ever. But yesterday, in reading about a 74 year-old
Spanish climber who is attempting to become the oldest person to scale all the
8,000m mountains and who has maintained a life of steady fitness to get where
he is today, I realized something: I’ve always wanted to be like these kinds of
guys. In fact, given that it was 24
years since my last Kona race and that in 24 more years I’ll be 74, I just may
have to think about Kona again in a few more decades….
