1984 to 2011 - A Retrospective

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 5^th and 6^th 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….