Jessica.” Others are for today only: “Go Rick!”Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack.
—SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR
Dave Scott launches out of the ocean, tearing the swim cap and goggles off his head and casting them aside in the water to save the single second it would take him to remove his headgear in the transition area. He scampers up the swim exit ramp on the balls of his bare feet, loosening the tie on his swim brief to save the two seconds it would take him to do so in transition. Hands free, Dave needlessly brushes away the race officials and spectators who form a tunnel of noise along a narrow, fenced-off gangway and hurries ahead onto the pier. Mark Allen is right behind him.
Neither man pauses under the makeshift freshwater shower that has been set up at the entrance to the transition area for their comfort and convenience. Instead they charge straight through and into a space containing row upon row of plastic transition bags marked with race numbers hanging from long metal racks. Grabbing their bags on the fly, they enter a semi-private changing area where, in company with others from their swim pack, they pull off their swim briefs and suit up in cycling clothes. Dave’s kit is white and lime. Mark dons a white jersey with rainbow striping and black shorts. Dave gets his wardrobe together first and mounts his bike before Mark, who loses five seconds fastening a heart rate monitor strap around his chest. Mark receives his bike from Gary—flushed and sweaty from his just-completed tire repair—and throws a leg over the machine, one eye on what he’s doing and the other on Dave, who’s now pedaling away ahead of him.
The Ironman bike course begins, as it should in the world’s toughest triathlon, with a grueling hill climb: notorious Pay-’n’-Save Hill. The transition area spits the athletes onto Ali’i Drive just at the point where it bends away from the coast and heads inland—which on the Big Island, as on most islands, means up—becoming Palani Road. From the perspective of cyclists at its base, the road looks something like a three-quarters-of-a-mile-long, 300-foot-high water slide, forming three distinct undulations as it drops steeply from the top at its intersection with the Queen K highway, levels out briefly at the traffic light that allows access to the Pay-’n’-Save supermarket on the north side and to another shopping center standing opposite, tilts downward again to the intersection at Kuakini Highway, and there flattens again briefly before dropping once more toward the King Kam and the pier.
Dave Scott scorches up the hill, face ugly with exertion, bouncing on his pedals, leaning far over the handlebar like a ski jumper over his skis and rocking his bike from side to side to squeeze out that extra dram of power. His strategy here, already evident, is the same as it was in the swim: to start hard enough to make Mark feel real discomfort and perhaps second-guess his own strategy of shadowing Dave regardless of what Dave does. To send a message: So, you’re going to let me dictate the pace, Mark? Okay, then, how about this pace?
Before the race Dave told Pat Feeney that when he started the bike leg, he would pretend it was not 112 miles long but only 25 miles, the standard USTS distance, and would ride the first 20 miles at his usual short-course speed. Dave knows that he has only a couple of speeds, so the plan’s not quite as crazy as it would be for another athlete. But still, it’s a gamble.
And it works rather well, initially, as Mark, in his urgency to check Dave’s escape, struggles to get his feet into his bike shoes, which, unlike Dave, he preclipped onto his pedals so that he wouldn’t have to run from the changing room to his bike in the shoes—always an awkward maneuver given the clunky knob under the ball of the foot. Mark loses precious starting momentum in the first segment of the climb as he fumbles with his footwear. Strapped in at last, he stands on his pedals and launches into a full sprint, holding nothing back in his effort to shrink Dave’s dangerous early advantage. Just ahead of him Ken Glah does the same. Ken knows as well as Mark that at Ironman, the race is wherever Dave Scott is—so he’s damned if he’s going to let Dave get away.
A scene of awful carnage plays out on Pay-’n’-Save Hill as several members of the lead swim pack fail to maintain contact with Dave in his rocketing ascent. Some of the greatest long-distance triathletes in the world are among the casualties, including three-time European champion (and one of Mark’s New Zealand training partners) Rob Barel of the Netherlands and recent Ironman Canada winner Ray Browning. A few of them judge Dave’s speed suicidal, for themselves if not for him, and willingly let him go. Others try to stay with him but can’t. All of them know they’re watching any hope they had of winning disappear up the road with Dave, who, judging by precedent, will not be caught from behind later in the day.
By the time he reaches the Queen K, Dave has already passed a couple of the ten athletes who finished the swim ahead of him, among them Dirk Aschmoneit, who came down with an ill-timed flu earlier in the week and now puts up no fight, and defending European champion Yves Cordier, who counters by leaping out of his seat and stomping on his pedals. Yves has come here to win.
Turning left onto the highway, Dave drops his butt onto the seat at last and rests his forearms on the aerobars, hunkering down for the long haul. Yves continues his standing sprint until he’s established contact with Dave. Ken Glah makes the turn next and continues to shovel coal into the fire until he’s locked on to Dave and Yves, towing Mark behind him. Mike Pigg now sweeps around the corner and puts all his chips into joining the group, latching on as it crests Palani Hill and prepares to drop into the lava fields below.
The vista that greets them there is deathly, Dantean—perfectly constituted to terrify the triathlete who faces it one or two hours into a nine-, eleven-, or fourteen-hour day. Coal-like rock sprawls for miles ahead on the vast expanse below. In the far distance mountains tower, offering a dubious reprieve from the magma pits the athletes must traverse to reach them.
Dave sees the colorful dots of other competitors spaced out on the vanishing ribbon of road ahead. Automatically he sets his sights on the nearest. Chasing fast swimmers who can’t ride for shit is always a good game, and in this case it’s a game that dovetails nicely with Dave’s strategy of making Mark hurt. So torrid is Dave’s tempo that Ken Glah and Mike Pigg, both of whom know they need a lead off the bike to have any chance of winning the race, follow him without even a thought of attempting a pass. They’re like boxers pressed against the ropes with their forearms raised as shields, warding off a furious barrage of blows from an opponent intent on a first-round knockout, hoping for nothing more than to survive to the bell, saving all plans for a counterattack for some wished-for future round. Yves Cordier, who, with a stab of panic, has discovered a problem with his gear shifters, checks his speedometer, which reads 44 kph. C’est de la folie, he thinks. This is insanity.
It is said that each athlete starts Ironman with a book of matches. If at any time he puts out an effort that exceeds the maximum effort he could sustain evenly from start to finish, he burns a match. There are only so many matches to burn, and when they’re gone the athlete himself flames out. Dave burned a match right away climbing Pay-’n’-Save Hill, and he’s already burning another as he mows down the dwindling number of riders ahead of him, one by one, and forces Mark to burn a few of his own matches, hoping his nemesis started with one fewer.
The chugging five-man, ten-wheel train catches and drops Joachim Zemke, sixth man out of the water. Patrick Bateman, fourth, is chewed up and excreted minutes later. The next victim is Chris Hinshaw, fifth in the swim. But Chris gamely increases his effort and hitches a ride on the back of the train, becoming its sixth car—the caboose.
Civilization drops away behind the convoy along with its few discarded quasi rivals. Frowning with exertion, the six lowered heads roll through an unsightly warehouse district on the town’s outskirts. Massive metal electrical poles lining the inland side of the road complete the industrial wasteland aesthetic. A passenger jet rises ahead, silent from this distance, as the group churns toward the airport eight miles outside town. The riders pass the city dump on the right, its great heaps of garbage plainly visible, and all too plainly smelled, from the road.
Then nothing. Nothing but oily black lava rock spreading in all directions. A natural disaster frozen—if that’s the word—in time. Some lava patches still look fresh, soft, and hot.
There is life, though. Tufts of golden fountain grass sprout through gaps in the sooty ground. Here and there stands a tall hibiscus bush festooned with magenta flowers, their prettiness augmented by their deathly backdrop. Luminous white pumice rocks, which seem almost living in context, dot the landscape. Most of those close to the road have been gathered to form messages. Some are for those who made them: “David Jessica.” Others are for today only: “Go Rick!”
The sun chases Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Ken Glah, Mike Pigg, Yves Cordier, and Chris Hinshaw from behind while they pursue the only men left ahead of them, Wolfgang Dittrich and Rob Mackle. As Apollo drives his burning chariot ever higher above them, the air warms steadily, whisking any remaining salt water from their skin and leaching sweat from their bodies. The athletes suck greedily on the two or even three squeeze bottles they carry in cages on their bike frames: one on the downtube, a second on the seat tube, and perhaps a third behind the seat. These will be emptied and replaced multiple times in the next four hours.
Each man has his own special formula. This is still the Wild West era of ultraendurance nutrition. Everyone’s experimenting. Mike Pigg drinks a sort of fruit smoothie from his bottle. Mark Allen sucks on a meal replacement shake diluted with extra water and spiked with added salt, as indicated by his recent testing at Duke University. Dave Scott carries a couple of bananas in his jersey pocket.
A mile up the road Wolfgang is drinking baby food and pulling away from Rob. The two men are well-matched cyclists, but whereas Rob is cautious, fearful of overextending himself in only his second Ironman, Wolfgang just wants to be left alone in the lead. He hates having other athletes around him on the bike. They are annoying. Their presence exerts an insidious pull that threatens to yank him out of his ideal rhythm.
Rob reads the interior signals of his body and concludes that although he could stay with Wolfgang, he’d better not. He lets the German drift ahead. After shaking off his tagalong companion of the past seventy-five minutes, Wolfgang pulls a Twix candy bar out of his jersey pocket and shoves it down his gullet.
With Rob now behind him, Wolfgang is left solitary. Here he is, the leader of the most important triathlon in the world, yet there is not a single race official present to guide him (not that he could possibly get lost on this simple out-and-back route) or a journalist to document his exploits. Meanwhile, a pod of media and official race vehicles—ABC cameras in vans, course marshals on mopeds, still photographers on motorcycles, print journalists in cars—has formed around Dave’s group. There is a total consensus among them that Wolfgang Dittrich is a plucky but ultimately defenseless sheep straying helplessly toward the looming shadow of the slaughterhouse. He’ll be dragged in soon enough. No need to go looking.
Cathy Plant, wife of race announcer Mike Plant, is working as a spotter and riding in the backseat of a convertible with three other Ironman officials. Her job is to repeatedly leapfrog ahead of the leader, whoever it may be, order the driver to pull over, start a watch when the leader passes, stop it when the chasers follow by, and then report the time gap back to her husband at the finish line and to the chasing cyclists themselves after her car catches them again. She stops at the twenty-mile point of the bike leg and notes a gap of 2:20, down from 3:00 at the start.
The slaughterhouse looms.
It doesn’t take long for the gang of six to catch Rob Mackle and become seven. Rob does not lament his envelopment. Like everyone else, he knows that wherever Dave Scott is, that’s where the race is. Although Dave’s group is riding at least as fast as Wolfgang, whose pace Rob judged unsafe for himself, he doesn’t want to fall any farther back than he has already, so he lifts his tempo and latches on. Unlike Wolfgang, Rob would much rather ride with a group, especially the group with all the cameras around it, than alone.
All six riders behind Dave are careful to stay at least seven meters off the back wheel of the next bike ahead, as the race’s antidrafting rules require. Some believe there is nevertheless an advantage to being at the back of such a paceline. Not Dave. He steadfastly refuses to allow any of the other riders to get ahead of him, for he experiences an intolerable psychosomatic enervation whenever another athlete creeps in front of him. Nor does he covet the much-whined-about advantage of riding directly behind media vehicles, whose noxious exhaust he’d rather not inhale.
Mark shows no interest in leading the pack as the group burrows into the heart of the bike leg. He stays near the back as resolutely as Dave holds the front. While Dave snarls and gestures trucks out of his path, Mark keeps his eyes downcast. He seems almost tuned out, like a teenager at church or—almost the opposite—as one witness observes, as though he is praying. But it’s really just a continuation of the silent withdrawal Mark retreated into in the days before the race. His efforts, or antiefforts, to conserve energy seem nearly superstitious in their absoluteness. One could imagine Mark catching himself holding too much tension in his fingers and consciously relaxing their hold on the bar ends, reminding himself that such waste could cost him the race. If he could ride with his eyes closed, he would. He appears very nearly unconscious as he is.
At twenty-four miles, the bike train and its hovering pod pass Waikoloa Beach Resort, a verdant oasis in the charred surrounding landscape. They are cheered by a smattering of spectators who have managed to cannonball there from Kailua-Kona on the High Road, the Queen K being closed to normal vehicle traffic. With Dave setting a nearly vehicular tempo of 27 mph, and with the route to this point via the High Road being a few miles longer than the direct way on the Queen K, it takes good planning and vigorous driving to arrive ahead of the lead cyclists after watching the swim, and few fans bother trying, save the most interested. Among those who took the chance and succeeded are half of Dave’s circle of confidence: Verne and Anna Scott and Pat Feeney. Also present is Mark’s entourage—Charlie Graves, Mike Rubano, Brian Hughes, and John Martin. These men are fortunate to possess a VIP course pass and have been following directly behind Mark and the others in their Jeep. A few minutes ago they decided to shoot ahead and stop at Waikoloa to cheer, not realizing Dave’s people had already staked it out. The rival camps stand awkwardly apart, shouting at their respective champions as they pass. The riders are within earshot for all of fifteen seconds. Then they’re gone. Forty minutes of dangerous driving for that.
Having no chance of beating the bikes via the High Road to Kawaihae, where Dave and his followers will turn onto a part of the course that is inaccessible to nonofficial vehicles, Verne’s group settles in to await the athletes’ return in a couple of hours. Mark’s people, with their VIP placard, could continue to follow the cyclists on the Queen K as far as Kawaihae, but they decide to kill time with a swim at nearby Waikoloa Beach instead. It’s a long day.
BACK AT KAILUA PIER, a barrel-chested 49-year-old man is lifting his rigid, emaciated 27-year-old son out of an inflated rubber raft. Dick Hoyt swim-towed the raft, with 125-pound Rick Hoyt inside it, behind him in the water for 2.4 miles. With an ABC camera aimed at him, Dick carries Rick up the swim exit ramp and through the labyrinthine transition area, then carefully sets him down in a forward-facing, hammock-like passenger seat at the front of a specially made three-wheel bicycle.
Rick Hoyt was born with cerebral palsy. When he was an infant, a specialist told Dick and his wife, Judy, “Forget about the boy. Put him in an institution. He’s going to be nothing but a vegetable the rest of his life.”
They couldn’t bear to do it. But they could scarcely bear the alternative of raising him.
“At first I wanted him to die,” Judy admitted in an ABC interview, “so I wouldn’t have to deal with it.”
By the time Rick was a toddler his parents had figured out that although he could not move or speak, the boy was no vegetable—there was absolutely nothing wrong with his mind. They had him outfitted with a computer that he could use to communicate, and with it he communicated perfectly well. The young Bostonian’s first words were “Go, Bruins!”
The family struggled along until, at age 16, Rick asked his father to push him though a local 5K charity running race. Dick was not a runner, but he did it. Something magical happened over those three miles. Rick spoke to his father through the computer as soon as they got home. “When we were running, it felt like my disability disappeared,” he said.
Dick felt it too. As strange a thing as it was to push his nearly grown boy through a running race, it seemed right—almost predestined. So he did it again, but went farther this time. And again, farther still. The father-son team quickly worked up to running full marathons. They not only went the distance but finished well toward the front of each race. Though he had the build of a plumber, Dick turned out to be a fine endurance athlete. Yet he had no interest in seeing what he could do alone and unburdened and swore he was faster with Rick than without him, anyway.
The Hoyts’ exploits at the Boston Marathon and elsewhere garnered them heaps of press attention, which they never shied away from, and eventually they made the predictable move of establishing their own charitable foundation. But there was no end game. All they really wanted was to be able to keep running, because it gave Rick a life and Dick a stronger relationship with his child.
The mood of the two men is serious yet quietly celebratory as they prepare to hit the bike course. They have a long way to go. But they survived the swim, completing it with twenty minutes to spare before the cutoff time after having failed to make it in their first Ironman last year and having been forced to withdraw from the race. Valerie Silk has made a special rules exception to allow the pair to participate, but all other rules apply. Rick may receive no assistance (except medical help) from anyone other than his father, and, like everyone else in the race, the duo must reach the finish line by midnight or they will be pulled off the course once again. Dick shifts anxiously back and forth on his feet as he waits for a nurse to remove a catheter from his son’s penis.
“Come on, come on!” he mutters, wearing an expression much like Dave Scott’s twenty-eight miles up the road.
APPROACHING THIRTY MILES into the bike leg, Wolfgang still has not been caught. A course marshal decides he’d better scoot ahead to check on him. Minutes later the lone but not lonely German sees a motor scooter pull alongside him. The course marshal shouts something that he doesn’t catch.
“What?” he shouts back.
“Don’t draft!” the marshal repeats.
Wolfgang stares at him a moment, processing the words. He turns his head to look at the empty road in front of him. Then he looks at the marshal again.
Are you fucking kidding me?
He thinks these words but knows better than to say them. The retort would go over about as well as the same words spoken to a highway patrolman during a traffic stop.
At thirty-one miles Dave’s group comes upon a Shimano Technical Support station set up at the roadside. Yves pulls himself out of the paceline and stops. He needs to get his shifters fixed before he starts the climb toward Hawi. He wouldn’t have survived Dave’s tempo much longer anyway. The lead chase group is thus reduced to six.
The landscape changes. As Dave’s group draws near the hills crowding the northwest point of the Big Island, black and gold give way to brown and green; hardened lava spills are replaced by fields of low, dry grass. Already the terrain has become more undulant. The Queen K section of the Ironman bike course is considered the flat part, but it’s only flat relative to the climb to Hawi. The thirty-two-mile stretch of pavement between Kailua-Kona and Kawaihae is in fact consistently rolling, thwarting racers’ wish to hold a steady rhythm.
Dave now leads the pack up a bitch of a hill approaching the Route 270 intersection at Kawaihae, where, he knows, the other half of his circle of confidence awaits. He stands out of the saddle, forcing everyone else to do the same—everyone except Mark, who almost never stands to climb.
As Dave thrashes his way up the incline, Mark glides. The two men’s riding styles contrast in more or less the same way their personalities do. While Mark rides with a quiet posture, in harmony with his machine, Dave wrestles his bike, lashes it along as though continuously punishing it for not going fast enough.
Chris Hinshaw cracks. He’s been redlining ever since he latched on to this train, and now he’s over the line and exploding. Each year at Ironman Chris affixes a printout of the split times he hopes to hit at various points of the bike course to the top tube of his bike. When the group passed the twenty-five-mile point, they were seven minutes ahead of his schedule. He tore the printout off his bike and tossed it into the wind, knowing he was doomed. Lungs heaving, he now falls behind the other five like a sinking stone. With the climb toward Hawi approaching, it’s only going to get worse. Chris will finish the bike leg sixteen minutes behind Dave and Mark. Next year the 1985 Ironman runner-up will quit the sport, having decided it’s left him behind.
As he climbs Dave is struck by the thought that he has not actually seen Mark since the transition area. But he knows he’s there. He can feel him. Mark has been as good as his promise to shadow his nemesis. Clearly he wants Dave to sense but not see him, as in the swim. He wants to be outside Dave’s vision and inside his head.
If Dave were to suddenly lose his mind and launch into a full sprint less than halfway through the bike leg, and sustain it until he keeled over in exhaustion, taking himself out of the race, Mark would too.
If Dave were to stop dead in the middle of the road and refuse to continue unless Mark went before him, the two men would remain at that spot forever.
At least that’s what Mark wants Dave to believe, and Dave almost believes it.
The group tops the hill and hits the Route 270 intersection, at thirty-three miles. Mike Norton and John Reganold are there. John cheers. Mike shouts out a time gap.
“One forty!” he calls.
Dave winces. They’ve pulled only forty seconds closer to Wolfgang in the past nine miles. Dave is galled by how little progress he’s made despite almost dangerous efforts.
Immediately after the turn onto Route 270, the road drops steeply toward the Port of Kawaihae. The five men stop pedaling and crouch into their most aerodynamic positions, letting gravity drag them to speeds nearing 45 mph. At the base of the hill they bear right to stay on 270, and the road turns upward. The eighteen-mile climb to the turnaround point at Hawi has begun.
Dave stays seated but pushes the pedals with impatient force, aiming for a tempo that is slightly faster than Wolfgang’s up the road. He figures catching Wolfgang before Hawi is a good game for the moment.
Heart rates climb; breathing deepens. Another match is lit, albeit a slow burner this time.
The ABC crew members are growing restless. They decide to send forward a woodie station wagon containing a cameraman and Mike Adamle, a broadcaster who used to play football and will later achieve his greatest fame as the host of American Gladiators, to get some footage of the surprising upstart, figuring Wolfgang has earned it.
On any given day mumuku winds roar through this part of the island. They come in violent, unpredictable gusts from the ocean, shoving riders left to right across the road as they climb toward Hawi and right to left during their subsequent descent. At a minimum, the mumuku are a nuisance, forcing athletes to pedal with tension held in every muscle as they brace for the next invisible shove. At worst, they are deadly. Cyclists are routinely blown clear off their bikes by sudden 60-mph gusts. In more than one instance riders have been forced to lean so far to one side to stay upright that a wheel edge has scraped the road, stripping the tire from the rim.
Today, however, the mumuku are unusually quiet. Only soft breezes blow in from the water. This happens twice a month or so—or once in every fifteen Ironmans. Mike Adamle has been told about the legendary mumuku and notices their absence as his van catches up with Wolfgang six miles into the climb.
“Not too much wind today, huh?” he shouts through an open window.
Conversation between athletes and reporters during competition is unthinkable in most sporting events, but at Ironman it has a rich tradition. It’s a long day, and in a way everyone’s in it together.
“No wind,” Wolfgang answers. “It’s all right. Maybe in two hours. We will see.”
It’s not only the language barrier that forces Wolfgang to speak like a caveman. He’s climbing a tough hill at an aggressive tempo, standing out of the saddle and mashing on the pedals, pushing a massive gear at a low, diesel cadence of sixty revolutions per minute. But with the camera on him, he will spare what breath he can.
“How’s your stamina at this point?” Adamle persists. “Pretty good?”
“Yeah,” Wolfgang answers. “It’s very good today. Good swim. Not very good, but good. Bike is okay.”
“Are you aware of how close Dave Scott and Mark Allen are behind you?”
“How far?” Wolfgang asks, not sure he’s understood the question.
“Yes. Are you aware?”
“Nah. It doesn’t matter. I will make my race, and we will see.”
The terrain that surrounds Wolfgang is nothing like the arid coastal plain he traveled through along the Queen K. He now pedals through fertile tropical highlands. Whereas the ride through the lava fields was totally exposed, the road here is intermittently banked on either side by hedges, earth mounds, and rock formations. Squat trees grow close to the roadway. Grassy hills rise into the distance on the inland side. Here and there a small pack of cattle or a solitary horse grazes on a hill. Wooden fences along the roadside mark the boundaries of ranches and are virtually the only signs of civilization. The ocean is intermittently visible to the left, falling farther below with each reappearance. Sunlight sparkles on the rippled surface of the sea. On any other day those ripples would be bearded with white foam, a warning to competitors to fear the mumuku on the way down.
The climb starts at sea level at the Port of Kawaihae and tops out at almost 700 feet of elevation in Hawi. There is a three-mile reprieve from the ascent roughly halfway up, where the road turns gently rolling before bending consistently upward again. If not for this break from the fight against gravity, 190-pound Rob Mackle would be in trouble. Climbing is not his forte, and he burns matches like a pyromaniacal 7-year-old through the heart of the climb. The reprieve affords him just enough recovery to stay in contact with the group, usurping Mark’s place at the back of the caravan, all the way to the top.
Unable to resist, Dave sneaks a look back at Mark as they ascend. Mark quickly lowers his head so Dave can’t see his face.
So that’s how it’s going to be, eh?
Fifty miles—the distance between Kailua-Kona and Hawi—is a long way, especially on an island as small as Hawaii. Hawi is a place unto itself, with no connection to Ironman’s host city. Yet it’s close enough for intervillage resentment. Hawi locals complain that, despite the event organizers’ assurances, Ironman is not, in fact, good for business. Sure, a fair crowd assembles in Hawi on race day to see the bikes come through, but then the roads are closed to vehicle traffic and not a single new customer blows in after early morning. It’s not as if the athletes pause to shop.
Hawi is tiny—little more than a main street with craft shops, boutiques, and homey restaurants packed into the space of a few blocks and serving a clientele that is almost exclusively tourists. There are other streets tucked behind the main, but the chamber of commerce prefers that they not be seen. Most of the town’s residents, many of whom are mainlanders who moved here to “get away from it all,” live in shacks; some in veritable shanties. Times have been hard in Hawi since the sugar industry went bust in the 1970s. Even the structures on the commercial strip show long neglect. Faded paint and sagging eaves add sad character to much of the nineteenth-century western colonial architecture.
Hawi is the sort of village where you’re sure to see a mangy dog running loose in the middle of a street if you stay longer than fifteen minutes.
Wolfgang Dittrich’s blue-and-green kit becomes visible at the edge of town. Now back in the aero position, he grinds toward a banner floating above the road and marking the turnaround point of the bike course. A few dozen spectators and an almost equal number of volunteers wearing light blue T-shirts greet his arrival. Closely following the scooter-riding course marshal who warned him against drafting, Wolfgang makes a hard left turn at a traffic cone onto a paved cul-de-sac that passes through a tiny park and dumps him back on Route 270 heading back the way he just came. He grabs a squeeze bottle from one volunteer but does not avail himself of the portable toilets. Like the other top contenders, he will urinate on the fly.
A full three minutes pass before Dave Scott’s group follows, having seen Wolfgang making his way down. Wolfgang will later claim that he did not see Dave and the others approaching, so thick was the swarm of race and press vehicles around them, but that is a memory of convenience. In fact, all press vehicles except ABC’s are stopped at Kawaihae and prevented from climbing to Hawi because the road is so narrow.
Dave winces anew when he makes the turn and learns that, far from erasing Wolfgang’s remaining 1:40 advantage on the climb, he’s allowed Wolfgang to nearly double it. Dave’s blood boils, as though the leader has gone back on an earlier promise to cooperate.
The five riders in Dave’s group grab their special-needs bags from volunteers. Each has his own chosen Ironman feast waiting for him. Rob’s consists of two peanut-butter-and-guava-jelly sandwiches, a can of tomato juice, and a fruit smoothie. He takes both hands off the handlebars, sits up, and forces it all down as fast as he can.
The human body was not really designed to absorb food during exercise, but in an Ironman race the body must defy its nature and absorb food anyway. Completing an Ironman is a 10,000-calorie task. Without refueling on the go, it could be done only at a crawl. Some bodies absorb food energy during exercise better than others, and in Ironman this ability is almost as important as speed and endurance. Many a successful short-course triathlete has failed to make the jump to Ironman because his gastrointestinal system wasn’t up to the challenge, even though his lungs and muscles were.
Mike Pigg’s GI system works just fine, normally. Back in April, however, on his way to the America’s Paradise Triathlon in St. Croix, he stopped in Texas to undergo some physiological testing and, while there, ate a bad hamburger. The intestinal parasite he acquired from the tainted meat has left him largely unable to absorb carbohydrates during exercise so that he now suffers from “runner’s trots” whenever he tries to eat during long workouts and races. Lately Mike has had to plan routes for his long training runs around bathroom opportunities. He’s doing okay so far, but he looks ahead to the run, where things usually get dicey, with dread.
Ken Glah has a different concern. He knows he can’t run with Dave and Mark. To have any chance of winning, he has to get off the bike several minutes ahead of them. Although he doesn’t look it, being tall and lanky like Mark, Ken is a power cyclist, a big-gear guy, stronger going down than up. The descent from Hawi to Kawaihae is therefore tactically his best chance to make a move. He puts himself in position by leading the train through the turnaround and hurriedly scarfing the contents of his special-needs bag. The moment the road turns downward, he gears up, lowers his head, and punches the accelerator. A gap opens. Mike makes the most serious effort to counter the move, as he too is a power rider and knows he must finish the bike leg ahead of Dave and Mark to win. Last year, in fact, Mike caught Ken from behind on the descent from Hawi. But today Ken is stronger, or more willing to burn matches, and he gets away. Some proper mumuku winds would help his cause, but he’ll work with what he has.
Ken’s best hope is to catch Wolfgang alone so the two of them can work together to reach transition ahead of Dave, Mark, Rob, and Mike. He won’t know if his effort is succeeding until he gets a time-gap update when he turns back onto the Queen K, but he is indeed cutting into Wolfgang’s advantage as he barrels toward Kawaihae at speeds exceeding 40 mph on the steeper declines. Unfortunately for Ken, his chasers are also pulling closer to Wolfgang, having silently agreed to work hard enough to keep Ken’s margin in check.
Several media vehicles have sat parked on the dirt shoulder of the road at the Port of Kawaihae as their occupants waited for the race leaders to climb to Hawi and return. Now they see Ken Glah come screaming down the last descent and merge back onto the port access section of Highway 270. Among those who stopped and waited was Triathlete’s CJ Olivares, who has been a passenger on the back of a motorcycle with a bulky camera slung around his neck. Seeing Ken fly by, CJ leaps back into the saddle and taps the driver’s back. The driver pulls out blindly and is immediately sideswiped by the station wagon carrying Mike Adamle. The Harley fishtails as it rebounds back onto the dirt shoulder, and it’s all the driver can do to keep it upright.
This kind of thing can happen at any time, not just to journalists but also to racers, whose awareness of such ever-present danger causes them to ride in an uninterrupted state of low-grade mental stress. Later today Lisa Laiti, a top female pro, will collide with a car on her bike and break her neck.
Ken starts up the nasty hill from the Port of Kawaihae to the Queen K just fifteen seconds ahead of his chasers—not enough, given his relative weakness as a climber. By the time he reaches the top, he has been swallowed up.
“Two thirty!” Mike Norton shouts at Dave as the re-formed group passes. Wolfgang’s up-and-down lead is coming down again.
As soon as they’ve completed the turn onto the Queen K, Mike Pigg moves to the front and ratchets up the tempo. Mike is as gutsy as any athlete in the sport, and although he doesn’t feel great, he’s still racing to win. The weakest runner in the group besides the behemoth Rob Mackle, he has to take his shot now. And he has the chops to do it. There isn’t a triathlete in the world who can match Mike’s top-end speed on the bike. In April 1988 he rode perhaps the greatest bike leg in the history of the sport, outsplitting all rivals, including Dave, Mark, and even Lance Armstrong, by more than seven minutes on the grueling 58-mile course in St. Croix, which includes a hill known as the Beast.
Mike pulls hard for a few miles, but he’s unable to achieve any separation. Dave refuses to let him go, Mark refuses to let Dave go, and Rob and Ken are just hanging on. Like Mark, Mike wears a heart rate monitor. His Ironman heart rate is 165 beats per minute. If he goes any higher, he’s burning matches. Mike checks his monitor and sees he’s lighting matches by twos and threes, and to no avail. He eases up, and Dave moves back to the front of the train.
Rising heat ripples the air above the road in front of the group. It’s almost eleven o’clock. The sun has moved high overhead. The day continues to heat up—80 degrees and climbing.
By this time most of the other athletes in the race have passed Dave’s train coming the opposite way. There now approaches a strange bike with three wheels bearing a young man whose body is locked and twisted and who wears an openmouthed grin, catching a ride on a hammock-like seat in front of a barrel-chested pedaler.
Dave and Mark and the others watch the Hoyts with mild interest as they pass. The father-son team will not finish until well after dark, but they will finish. Dick’s total lack of desire to race except as his son’s workhorse is a world away from Dave’s consuming need to see what his body can do and to prove himself able to outlast anyone. Dick’s utterly selfless support of his son’s brave but pitiable athletic ambitions is a world away from Ken Allen’s neglect of his son and subsequent efforts to hitch his wagon to Mark’s star. Yet here they are, in the same race, all belonging equally in their own ways, each getting what he alone needs from the challenge.
WOLFGANG’S PURSUERS have now ridden seventy-five miles. If anyone in this group is going to make a move that has a meaningful effect on the race, it must happen soon. But Ken and Mike have already given their best shots and failed to escape. It’s obvious that Mark will not initiate anything. Nothing is expected of Rob, who after all started the bike leg three minutes ahead of the other four. It’s all on Dave. Either he goes or no one does. Meanwhile, Wolfgang continues to ride frequently out of sight ahead, although easily tracked from behind by the helicopter floating above him.
At eighty miles the group returns to the Waikoloa Road intersection. Dave’s supporters are still there. Pat Feeney started a watch when Wolfgang passed and now shouts out the gap: “Three minutes!”
Golly! Dave thinks. This is ridiculous. Who the heck does that crazy Euro think he is? Underneath his anger, Dave knows it doesn’t matter. Wolfgang won’t survive long on the run even with a three-minute lead off the bike. But still.
The hills of the Queen K are bigger on the way back to Kailua-Kona than on the way out. At least they feel bigger. A slow leak of fatigue has sprung in all five members of Dave’s pack. Exhaustion is still many miles away, but none feels as fresh as he did charging up Pay-’n’-Save Hill. Every turn of the pedals is now experienced as something like the sixth repetition in a set of ten machine leg extensions. But all perceptions are relative, and Dave feels fantastic relative to this point in past Ironmans. He has matches to burn, and his confidence inflates as he fingers them in his pocket.
The biggest hill on the Queen K section of the course comes at eighty-four miles. It ascends more than 250 feet at a steady grade of 7 percent. When Dave reaches the base of the climb, he jumps out of the saddle and launches. It’s a serious move, requiring the others to show their cards. Mark is ready and counters with apparent ease. Mike and Ken lose ground initially but are able to hang on. Rob, his meaty butt still in the saddle, teeters at the brink of freefall at the back. Dave sees none of this, and doesn’t need to see. He can assess the damage later. Right now he needs to inflict it.
As he reaches the summit of the hill, Ken cranes his neck to the left and vomits. Throwing up is never done more nonchalantly than in an Ironman. Stomach emptied, Ken calmly returns to his aero position and chases after Dave and Mark. A mile farther down the road, and another match poorer, he regains contact. Mike and, eventually, Rob follow.
Ninety miles into the bike leg the five men in Dave’s group can’t wait to get it over with, including the two—Mike and Rob—who dread the run. Their butts are killing them. No matter how often they ride 100 miles in training, athletes’ bodies never fully adapt to passing four or five hours hunched in a near-fetal posture, with 60 percent of their body weight supported by a three-inch strip of tender flesh between the private parts and the butt crack, so that the perineum and low back scream always for relief in the final miles of such a journey. Rob is especially uncomfortable. He has spondylosis, degenerative arthritis in his L3 vertebra, and must stand and stretch frequently to slow the steady intensification of pain in his low back.
The last big hill comes at ninety-six miles, about eight miles outside town, just before the airport. As Dave leads the approach toward the base of the 200-foot rise, the four men behind him are asking themselves, Will he do it again?
He does. As abruptly as a stalking cat pounces at an unsuspecting field mouse, Dave leaps out of the saddle and crushes his pedals. This is his last chance to soften up Mark before the run, and he’s going to make the most of it. Ken cracks almost immediately; he leans over and barfs a second time. Pigg tells his heart rate monitor to go to hell and chases with everything he has. Given the choice between staying within his known physiological limits and staying in the race, he will always choose to risk all and fight.
Despite his abandonment of all caution, Pigg loses ground. Rob lifts his tempo enough to prevent a cataclysmic time hemorrhage but stops short of crossing the red line, knowing he’ll be left behind on the run soon enough anyway. Dave and Mark have been together all morning, but for the first time in this race they are alone together as they pull away from their longtime traveling partners.
CJ Olivares, none the worse for his recent collision with Mike Adamle’s station wagon, observes the moment from the back of his motorcycle and appreciates its significance.
Here we go!
Again Dave does not see the immediate effect of his surge, but he senses that one and only one rider has been able to respond, and he knows it’s Mark. He can’t fool himself any longer. He wishes to hell he could see the guy and assess his status. If only he could observe Mark’s body language. Is he starting to rock from side to side? Are there any soft spots in his pedal stroke? Is he coasting at any point because he’s tired or his low back hurts? If any of these things is happening, it would be helpful to Dave to know it. If not, it’s just as well that he doesn’t know.
Dave can’t help himself. He looks back. Mark lowers his head.
No chance, Dave.
Ahead, Wolfgang has also started to struggle. His ascent of the same hill minutes ago brought his supply of matches critically low. He has made the dreadful discovery that, through a combination of being alone, off the front, inexperienced, under the spotlight, and naturally aggressive, he rode just a little—maybe 1 percent—too hard. And now he’s carrying an anvil on his back, pedaling in squares, pumping his torso in rhythm with his legs to compensate for their loss of power. Adding insult to injury, the winds have finally picked up and are coming stiffly from the south—straight into Wolfgang’s face. His lead is coming down again, and this time there’s no chance of a rebound. The last twelve miles to the Kona Surf Hotel will be an eternity for him.
At the top of the hill, Dave dials back the intensity just a bit. He’s done what he can do. It’s going to come down to the run. But he still feels strong, and there’s no reason to make it easy for anyone else. Mike Pigg continues to execute his strategy of staying with the leaders as long as possible, which, given his present state of depletion, amounts to clinging to a ten-second deficit like driftwood behind Dave and Mark. Rob is another ten seconds back and grateful that the last big hill is behind him. Ken vomits one more time for good measure after topping the hill last of the five.
Dave and Mark pass a sign marking the ninety-nine-mile point of the bike leg. It sits at the base of Palani Hill, at the very spot Mark has chosen to break Dave in the marathon should they reach that place together three hours from now. As he whizzes past it, Mark cannot help but cast his mind ahead to that possible moment, as he has done dozens of times already in the preceding days.
The hill tops out some 300 yards from Palani Road and then descends gently toward the intersection. This is where Dave plans to pull away from Mark in the marathon, if it comes to that—if he can’t somehow finish Mark off sooner.
But the bike course does not go there. Instead, just beyond the ninety-nine-mile sign, Dave and his followers turn right onto Kaiwi Street, which takes them into the heart of the warehouse district on the outskirts of town and past B & L, the shop where Mark got his bike fixed on Tuesday. Three blocks down they turn left onto Kuakini Highway. Moments later they zip through the intersection at Palani Road, just one block above the pier, where it all started. A sizable crowd of spectators—the first since Hawi—is gathered there and makes a joyful noise as they pass. Three blocks farther on, Dave and Mark lean hard to the right and turn onto Hualalai Road, in the heart of town. More alley than avenue, it drops them quickly down to Ali’i Drive and the Hot Corner. The crowd is massive and raucous, having been expertly fomented by rookie secondary race announcer Mike Reilly, and by libations in the case of many. The mob, which for a long time had little to entertain it besides thumping music and Mike’s infrequent race updates from the field, was primed to fever pitch by Wolfgang’s passage through a little more than two minutes ago. Now, as the two titans of Ironman come into sight, everyone goes berserk. The noise is so great that it pains the ears of its chief objects as they accelerate savagely from the top of the block, brake just enough, and then lean hard left to make the turn onto Ali’i Drive.
Dave and Mark now head south through the most urban portion of the bike course, blazing between two-story wooden buildings containing restaurants, jewelry shops, clothing boutiques, and knickknack stores. Spectators line the street thickly for a few blocks, but their presence dwindles as Dave and Mark move swiftly away from the village center. They pass through an area of resort hotels and condominiums, including Sea Village, where Dave woke up seven hours ago, and then into more residential and vegetated surroundings.
As they approach one house on the water side, Dave’s eyes alight on a man lying faceup on a fully reclined lounge chair. He is shirtless, and his exposed, freshly sunburned belly is distended like a bullfrog’s throat pouch. A pile of empty beer cans surrounds him.
The commotion of Dave and Mark’s advance seems to wake the man from a drunken slumber. His head snaps up. His eyes bulge as they work to focus. Dave makes a mental note that he will see this character again a couple of miles into the run.
The last hill climb on the Ironman bike course falls between 110 and 111 miles, as Ali’i Drive veers away from the water. It is short but very steep. Wolfgang’s legs burn terribly as he climbs it with atrocious form, flopping all over his bike in an effort to find unused muscles to take him the rest of the way. At the top he follows Ali’i as it bends right to run along a ridge above the water. He passes the Kona Country Club, half of its green holes to his left, half to his right, and then turns right onto Ehukai Street. He plunges down a hill that is the mirror image of the climb that burned the last match he had left for this segment of the race and sweeps into the vast parking lot of the Kona Surf Hotel. A race official hastens to meet him at the bike dismount line and holds his handlebar steady as he shakily climbs off. A race clock positioned there displays the cumulative race time: 5:27:17.
Two legs down, one to go. Wolfgang Dittrich still leads the 1989 Ironman World Championship.
A large, party-minded crowd has gathered at the bike-run transition area, creating a scene and an energy not unlike those of a Tour de France stage finish. Wolfgang receives a nice welcome, but the crowd explodes when Dave Scott and Mark Allen race in together one minute fifty-one seconds later.
Mark’s bike split is 4:37:52, third fastest in the history of the race.
Dave’s bike split is 4:37:53.
Mike Pigg comes in ten seconds behind them, Rob Mackle eleven seconds after Mike, and a somewhat recovered and refueled Ken Glah forty-nine seconds after Rob.
Mike Plant has come down from the finish-line tower to lead the celebration. His steady microphone chatter trails off as he watches Dave and Mark tear into the transition area almost on top of each other. He can feel what’s coming.