What is to give light must endure burning.
—VIKTOR FRANKL
Three weeks after finishing second in the 1989 Ironman, Dave Scott traveled to New Braunfels, Texas, to host a weekend triathlon camp. Assisting him were fellow professional triathletes Paula Newby-Fraser and Ray Browning as well as 1981 Ironman winner John Howard, now retired, and celebrity bike mechanic Dan Rock. That Sunday happened to be the day on which ABC’s coverage of the recent Ironman was broadcast. Dan and Ray watched the show together in the room they shared on the second floor of a major-chain business hotel. Dave watched it alone in his ground-floor room. Forty-five minutes into the program, Ray stood up.
“I’m going to check on Dave,” he announced.
“Okay,” Dan said with a knowing smile. “I’m going to stay here and see what happens.”
Both men not only knew what had happened but were among the first to have known, having competed in the race themselves.
Ray entered Dave’s room at the precise moment when, on the nineteen-inch screen Dave was watching, Mark was breaking away from him on Palani Hill.
“Hey, Dave, what’s going on?” Ray said.
Dave’s eyes continued to bore holes into the television screen as he delivered his full-throated reply: “I’m losing!”
NEVER HAS AN ATHLETE lost so well. The sheer valiance of Dave’s Iron War defeat was as magnificent as any victory. Refusing to accept his van-quishment until it was an irreversible fait accompli, if even then, the Man ran as hard as he could all the way to the finish line, though there was no real cause to do so and though the cost in agony was immense. The race was over the moment Dave lost contact with Mark at the base of Palani Hill, with 1.7 miles left to go. From there Mark flew ever farther ahead of his nemesis on the giddy wings of assured victory. Meanwhile, the next guy behind Dave, Ken Glah (who would be passed by Greg Welch less than a mile from the finish), was so far back that Dave could literally have walked the rest of the way and still beaten him.
But he did not walk. Instead he fought for every second over the remaining distance, because anything could happen—and even if the race was lost, a great finish time was not. The competitor in him had been mortally wounded, but Dave still had a chance to break 8:10, and he still cared.
Dave ran like a man with a bullet in his chest. It was ugly. Yet his determined death sprint was also beautiful as an expression of his incredible, pointless unwillingness to relent. Among the witnesses was Jim Curl, who had last seen Dave at his condo, relaxed and ready, on the eve of the race. Jim was having a tough day, walking up Pay-’n’-Save Hill as Dave came down it like an avalanche in futile yet unyielding pursuit of Mark.
Thank you, triathlon gods, Jim said to himself as he carried this humbling image of perseverance—of carrying on despite everything—through the remaining nineteen miles of his own race—and, after that, through the rest of his life.
In triathlon today, it is customary for race winners to purposely dog the homestretch, high-fiving fans along the barricades, mugging for cameras, hoisting their children, and all but turning cartwheels in a show of savoring their triumph. Such behavior drives Dave nuts, not because he sees it as showing up those finishing behind the winner but because it demonstrates a lack of respect for the clock. How can these kids, today’s so-called professional racers, allow their precious finish times to bloat by ten, twenty, even thirty seconds while gamboling like simpletons for the mere sake of extending their winning moments?
“It’s a race!” he raves. “You’re supposed to finish it as fast as you can!”
So deeply time-obsessed was Dave, and so terrific was the second-place time he achieved in the 1989 Ironman (8:10:13), that, as much as he hated to lose, he was not as immediately disappointed by his defeat as one might have expected. But his satisfaction did not last long.
Dave had not even caught his breath when he saw Carol Hogan standing before him. The local reporter who in 1980 had asked Dave if he was going to retire after he won his first Ironman still worshipped the ground he walked on. A diminutive woman, she looked up at her vanquished hero with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Dave,” she cried, “you lost!”
“I know,” Dave said with a sigh. “I had a great race. Mark had a fabulous race.”
Carol’s disappointment made Dave feel suddenly defensive about his feeling that he had in fact had a great race. But it was another post-race incident that really took the wind out of his sails.
Anna pushed her way to her husband scant seconds after he crossed the finish line—teetering with exhaustion, his face cadaverous—and threw her arms around him. Insofar as his brain was working well enough to expect anything, he expected her to say, “You did great, Dave,” or “Better luck next time, honey.” But instead she whispered something about a suspicious canister that Dave was believed to have discarded during the marathon. Anna warned her disoriented and uncomprehending husband that the race officials were buzzing about it and that he should expect to be interrogated.
“What?” Dave mumbled, barely above a whisper. “A canister? What kind of canister?”
“I don’t know. A film canister, I think.”
Then he remembered that he had seen an item like that tucked into Mark’s running shorts. Apparently Mark had tossed it away at some point, and a race official had picked it up, wrongly assuming that it was Dave who had dropped it and that the canister—whatever it had contained; probably something innocuous like salt tablets—must have been given to him illegally by a friend or supporter earlier in the race.
Sure enough, a race official soon found Dave and pulled him aside to ask about the canister. Dave told the man what little he knew. The official then left him, whether to question Mark or to deliver his findings he would never know, as the matter never again came to Dave’s attention. Most likely the officials prudently decided against ruining the greatest race ever run by disqualifying either of its heroes over an unproven minor infraction. Nevertheless, that arbitrary and accusatory intrusion on Dave’s immediate emotional processing of the race’s outcome spoiled whatever satisfaction in his performance he might otherwise have enjoyed.
At the awards ceremony the next night Valerie Silk broke from tradition and allowed Dave to say a few words before the winner spoke. Dave took the gesture of respect as his due and stayed resolute in his refusal to forgive the previous day’s insult.
I’ll show them. Wait till next time.
Dave did not sleep well the night after the race, or the night after that. As he lay awake, the Man (was he still the Man?) seared his memories of the great fight he had narrowly lost into the tender tissues of his brain with the hot iron of voluntary recall. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed the race, Dave replayed it obsessively in his mind, trying to figure out how he could make it come out differently. And he succeeded in that effort.
Dave recognized that he’d made a few small, tactical errors, such as letting Mark take the inside position at the marathon aid stations as they ran side by side through all but the last 1.7 miles. Identifying such errors afforded him some relief because it meant he could have beaten Mark—and if he could have beaten Mark, then he still might. Next time.
After a short off-season break, Dave resumed training with great optimism and ample motivation, confident he could come up with the fifty-nine seconds he would need to turn the tables on Mark in the 1990 Ironman. Little did he know that he would never get his chance to exact vengeance on Mark Allen—not in 1990; not ever. An ankle injury kept Dave out of his first rematch opportunity, which Mark won, and also the 1991 Ironman, where Mark collected his third title. The following year, still recovering, Dave allowed the responsibilities of fatherhood (he and Anna had a second son, Drew, by then) and an expanding coaching business to distract him from his still smoldering desire to return to Kona, where Mark won yet again.
There were several “beanbag-chair” periods in those years, precipitated by the mutiny of Dave’s body, stress from his side business, fear of aging and its effects on the physical powers that had always been the pride of his life, and the slow unraveling of his marriage—sometimes individually and sometimes in combination.
Ray Browning witnessed a number of these downswings from his vantage point as a partner in Dave’s training-camp business. He always saw them coming, like storm clouds on the horizon. First Dave would become irritable—everything was a hassle. Then he would just disappear. Phone calls would not be returned. Ray became worried enough about Dave on some occasions to contact other friends and acquaintances and ask if they had seen him. Usually nobody had.
In 1992, at age 38, Dave formally announced his retirement from professional racing. It was an emotionally driven gesture of frustration and largely self-directed disgust precipitated by another nagging knee injury. Dave had not exercised in ten days when Outside writer John Brant came to Boulder—where Dave and his family were staying with his sister Jane, who had recently moved there—to follow Dave around for a couple of days and gather material for a profile to mark the end of Dave’s legendary career. Ironically, John’s visit was just the sort of thing that was guaranteed to pull Dave off the couch; he had always rallied under a spotlight.
Sure enough, on the first morning of John’s visit, Dave proposed that John follow along in his rental car while Dave rode his bike for a few hours. They met at Jane’s house. John was led through the living room, where Legos, Babar books, an inflatable whale, and other children’s belongings were scattered about, and seated at the kitchen table, from which vantage point he quietly observed the family dynamics while Dave got ready.
“Look at these hairy legs,” said Dave, who had stopped shaving them when he had stopped training. “I’ll be the laughingstock of every triathlete in Boulder.”
“So go ahead and shave them,” Jane said. “Anyway, who’s going to challenge you?”
Dave smiled boyishly at his sister’s not-so-subtle flattery before taking another dig at himself.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “If I shaved my legs, everyone would see that I don’t have any muscles down there.”
Anna now spoke to John directly. “My husband,” she said, “has more problems with body image than a 15-year-old.”
Ready at last, Dave clomped outside in his cycling shoes and mounted a road bike. John took the wheel of his car and followed Dave out the driveway. An eighth of a mile down the road, Dave pointed out a house to John: Mark Allen’s summer house. Dave did not stop to see whether Mark, currently training toward his fourth straight Ironman victory, cared to come along.
Dave rode first through the flats east of Boulder and then into the hills. The workout ended abruptly at the top of the famous Left Hand Canyon climb when an approaching storm forced Dave to pull over, throw his bike into the back of John’s car, and hitch a ride home.
“That was fun,” Dave said, beaming like a child, after settling into the passenger seat.
They rode in silence for a minute or two, watching the storm gather.
“The funny thing is,” Dave said eventually, “now that I’ve decided to stop racing, my knee feels better than it has in three years.”
Again silence filled the vehicle.
“You start working out,” Dave said, unprompted, “you start getting ideas.”
By the time John Brant’s article about Dave’s retirement was published, its subject was already out of retirement, at least privately. His training became increasingly consistent and intensive over the next several months. Although he was healthy, Dave held himself out of the 1993 Ironman, feeling that he was not yet fit enough to achieve a performance worthy of his name. Instead he watched Mark claim his fifth consecutive Ironman title.
Dave Scott was 40 years old and had been almost completely absent from competition for nearly five years when he committed to race the 1994 Ironman, which, as fate would have it, Mark Allen skipped, citing burnout. Dave knew that no athlete in any endurance sport had ever returned from pasture at his age to win a major championship. In light of this lack of precedent, he wondered, what should his goal be for his return to Ironman? What could he expect?
Screw precedent.
“The only level that I could do Ironman, contrary to what I might have said at the time, was to do well again,” Dave said afterward. “And well is not sixth place.”
He had to win.
But first he needed confidence that he could. He sought that confidence at the Gulf Coast Triathlon, a half-Ironman held in Panama City, Florida, in May. Having lost his bike sponsor during his long layoff and needing the support of a new one, Dave unwisely competed on a bike he had never ridden before, which was shipped to the race site by a prospective new sponsor. Its geometry was just different enough from what Dave was used to, and perhaps his aging body had lost just enough of its former adaptability, to leave him standing next to the bike some 40 miles into the 56-mile cycling leg, trying desperately to stretch out vicious cramps in his hamstrings.
By the time he rolled into the transition area, the pro bike rack was already filled with his opponents’ machines—a sight Dave had never seen before. And it was about to get a whole lot worse. The moment he dismounted from his ill-fitting bike, the entire back side of his body seized up, and he flopped to the ground as though he had been Tasered. This happened just as the race announcer, already embarrassed for Dave on account of his tardy return from the bike course, was drawing the crowd’s attention to the great legend’s presence. Medics rushed to his aid. Humiliated, he waved them off, scrambled for and painfully laced up his running shoes, and hobbled onto the run course, as much to escape the pitying attention of the crowd as to continue the race.
Dave heard the chatter afterward.
He’s washed up.
Why is he doing this to himself?
He’s tarnishing his legacy.
Just what a man who trained and raced best with a chip on his shoulder needed. As Dave trained through the summer in Boulder, where he now lived full time with his family, he savored fantasies of the shock and regret his doubters would express when he won Ironman despite his disastrous rust-buster in Panama City. He came to Kona even leaner than he’d been in 1989. Having shaved his trademark mustache, he looked about 28, or the age at which he’d told Linda Buchanan that he intended to be fitter at 40 than he was then. And so he was.
Nevertheless, the doubters seemed halfway vindicated when Dave exited the swim eighteenth, nearly a minute and a half behind pre-race favorite Greg Welch, the very man who’d finished a galactically distant third behind Dave and Mark in ’89. But on the bike Dave performed like his old—or young—self. Anger plainly written on his grimacing, clean-shaven face, the Man mowed down all seventeen athletes ahead of him and snatched the lead from Greg at forty miles.
Mark Allen, working for NBC Sports (ABC had given up rights to broadcast the race in 1990), witnessed the moment from inside a VIP vehicle. The producer of that year’s Ironman special, Lisa Lax, sat next to him in the backseat of the convertible, trying to guess what he was thinking. Was he nostalgically rooting for the old-timer? Sickened by the very idea of Dave winning yet another Ironman? Desperately wishing he was in the race to squash Dave’s return to glory? She would never know, as Mark said nothing.
The 1994 Ironman scarcely resembled Dave’s first Ironman. In 1980 the swimmer from Davis who’d believed he could “pound it out with anyone at the end” had competed against 107 mostly ill-prepared Californian endurance misfits on inadequate bikes. Now he faced more than 1,500 superbly trained qualifiers from all over the world riding multithousand-dollar machines whose materials and components had not even existed at the time of Dave’s first Ironman. But one thing had not changed in fourteen years: the man leading the race halfway through the bike leg.
At eighty-five miles, Dave found himself in a lead pack with Greg Welch, Ken Glah, Jürgen Zäck, and Peter Kropko. A flag marking the Timex Bike Prime—a $1,500 prize awarded to the race leader at that point of the race—appeared ahead. Jürgen and Peter took off after it. Greg made to follow, not so much for the sake of the prime as to mark the others. But Dave called out to him.
“Let it go, Welchy,” he said. “That’s not the race. The race is here.”
Greg took Dave’s advice and let the others get away. Later he wondered why Dave had given the free counsel. Since his last Ironman in 1989, Dave had drifted back into his coaching roots. He had even coached Greg himself, informally, over the summer. Perhaps Dave just couldn’t help himself at this stage of his life—couldn’t help being a good coach even at his own expense as an athlete.
Dave and Greg quickly dispatched Jürgen and company at the start of the marathon. Peter Kropko was last seen stumbling into a dolphin-shaped mailbox and tearing it out of the ground by the post as he fell over, clinging to it like a life preserver. Greg pulled twenty seconds ahead of Dave over the first half of the run. Dave surged, classically, on a long downhill stretch with ten miles to go and drew within eleven seconds of regaining the lead. Reports of the dramatic chase, radioed from the lava fields back to the finish area, sent the crowd into a frenzy. Although Dave liked to focus on his doubters, he had fifty believers for every hater.
The Man had played his last card, however. The miracle was not to be. As Dave folded, Greg went all in and stretched his lead to four minutes over the last miles. Dave held on for second place and put the exclamation point on the statement he’d sought to make. His finish time of 8:24:32 was better than any of his winning times at Ironman, and obliterated the men’s 40-plus age-group record by thirty-five minutes.
“That race proved to me that it wasn’t about age,” Dave said later. “Age was the biggest hurdle, deterrent, and handicap that everyone else put on me, and I recognized it, but at 40 I didn’t really think I was old.”
A confident, hungry Dave Scott left the island already thinking ahead to his next opportunity.
Fit and ready for a final showdown with Mark Allen at the 1995 Ironman, which Grip, now 37, had decided would be his last, Dave dropped a dumbbell on his foot before the race, breaking a toe. With Dave watching, Mark won his sixth title, matching Dave’s career haul.
Well, that was disappointing. But another year of consistent training in Boulder’s moderate altitude, which seemed to agree with Dave, more than made up for any physical decline wrought by another year of aging, and when he arrived back in Kona in October 1996, now 42, he believed in his heart that he could win number seven and thus surpass Mark in his absence, although he kept this belief to himself for fear of being socially straitjacketed.
No matter. He was whispered about anyway, ridiculed in some quarters for daring to compete in a professional division dominated by men whom he might have babysat a quarter century earlier. Cameron Widoff, a brash and rising young pro who had placed twelfth at Ironman the previous year, had caught sight of Dave in Kona a few days before the race and elbowed Triathlete editor T. J. Murphy in the ribs.
“What the hell is he doing here?” he’d sneered.
Dave certainly looked out of place. He still wore no sports watch or heart rate monitor, even though he was now sponsored by heart rate monitor manufacturer Polar. His bike was an anachronism. No power meter, no mileage counter, nothing.
Just give me a water bottle and get out of my way.
Dave felt as out of place as he looked for the first five hours of the race. He had an unaccountably terrible swim. Worse, although he had ridden better than ever in his summer training, his legs betrayed him on the bike. It seemed as if the mighty red fibers of his thighs and shanks had been scooped out and replaced with vanilla pudding. Dave had been greedy in the last month before the race, pushing himself more and more in training as the fumes of his simmering fitness had gone to his head, and now he was paying the price. As a parade of young pros and even age groupers whizzed by him like Manhattan pedestrians overtaking an octogenarian with a walker, he was, for the first time in ten tries, seriously tempted to quit Ironman.
Tempted.
At eighty-five miles, Dave decided to stop feeling sorry for himself. Knowing from experience that an atrocious ride can sometimes inexplicably be followed by a great run, he mentally flushed his horrendous bike leg and decided to let it all hang out in the marathon.
Dave reached the bike-run transition in twenty-sixth place, farther back by a long shot than he had ever been in Hawaii. He burst onto the run course as if he’d stepped on a hornet’s nest and almost immediately began to pass other runners. It became a classic Dave Scott game, a kind of kinetic outdoor cousin of Pac-Man. Five thousand morale points per pass, as it were. Having accepted the race as an unsalvageable disaster, Dave still wanted to see what he could do.
A few miles into the marathon, Dave began to receive accurate information on his position from tuned-in spectators, and the game became even more exciting.
“You’re in sixteenth place!” he heard.
Dave had never been in sixteenth place before. He should have been ashamed. Instead he was exhilarated. Here I go! he told himself. I’m in sixteenth place! This is terrific! Let me get to tenth! Dave caught the tenth man at about mile thirteen, a scenario he would have considered nightmarish before the race but which now felt more like waking from a nightmare. He had never had so much fun.
Among those Dave passed as he approached the top ten was Cameron Widoff. Cam What-the-Heck-Is-He-Doing-Here Widoff.
Dave did not stop there. With four miles left in the race, 42-year-old Dave Scott moved into fifth place. As he sprinted the final stretch on Ali’i Drive, Ironman race announcer Mike Reilly, who had taken over Mike Plant’s job in 1991, recognized the Man’s distinctive duck-like stride from his perch above the finish line. He nearly swallowed his tongue.
“Here comes Dave Scott in fifth place!” he hollered into his microphone. It wasn’t quite his “The band is on the field!” moment, but it was pretty darn close.
As he crossed the finish line, Dave pumped his fist in grim satisfaction.
“No one would introduce me as Dave Scott, six-time Ironman champion, and oh, by the way, he got fifth in 1996,” Dave said in a 2010 interview. “That’s a real blight on my résumé. But for mental fortitude and tenacity, it was one of my best races ever, if not the best.”
Dave knew winning as well as any athlete, yet he would ultimately rank two losses—1996 and Iron War—as his favorite racing memories.
Dave walked away from the finish line of the 1996 Ironman with an obvious limp, leaning on Anna, who with her free arm held the couple’s third child, Kara, as Ryan and Drew gallivanted proudly ahead of their parents. Dave had hurt his knee during the run. That same knee was still bothering him when he started his next Ironman in 2001, racing in the pro division once more at age 47 (and deservedly, having run a 1:15 half-marathon in the Vineman Triathlon earlier in the season). Dave dropped out forty-five miles into the bike leg, his knee on fire. For the first time in ten tries, he quit Ironman. Afterward Dave announced—as he had five years before—that he’d raced his last race in Kona. But he soon discovered that he couldn’t live with failing to reach the finish line of his final Ironman. On top of that, he couldn’t live without Ironman.
In 2002, the year after his uprecedented DNF, Dave got permission from Ironman to access the racecourse in a car, which he shared with Competitor publisher Bob Babbitt. Dave insisted on driving and followed the men’s professional race so closely that he practically seemed to be in the race. Dave and Bob were cruising next to first-timer Chris McCormack when Chris took the lead on the bike.
“What should I do?” he shouted at Dave. Chris had been an adoring Dave Scott fan long before he met him.
“Go for it!” Dave bellowed.
When Dave and Bob reached the barricade barring access to the narrow section of the bike course between Kawaihae and Hawi, Dave argued his way past it, very nearly pulling the “Do you know who I am?” card.
Dave spoke almost without pause through the entire day, more to himself than to Bob, analyzing every move, volunteering what he would be doing if he were in the race.
“What the hell are they doing?” Dave said as the lead cyclists made what he considered a rather timid descent from Hawi. “There’s practically no wind! These guys should be flying!”
Dave’s eyes met Bob’s; that mad gleam was still there. For an instant Bob was convinced that Dave was going to pull over, haul a bike out of the trunk, and show the young punks how it was done. He did not—perhaps only because there was no bike in the trunk.
IN 2003 DAVE SCOTT was recruited to participate in a charity event called Ironman Revisited, in which athletes were invited to swim, bike, and run the original Ironman course on Oahu. More or less healthy, although only “80 percent fit,” as he told anyone who would listen, Dave agreed to ride the bike course as part of a relay with challenged athletes Rudy Garcia-Tolson, who would swim, and “One-Arm” Willie Stewart, who would run. Shortly before the race, Dave was talked into doing the swim, too, as a guide to 15-year-old Rudy, a two-leg amputee. Having completed the bike leg in first place, Dave jumped into a car—again with Bob Babbitt—and followed Willie as he ran. A steady stream of tensely voiced encouragement issued from Dave’s wide-open window toward Willie, who clung to a two-minute lead over David Lourens, the top individual racer. With thirteen miles to go, Willie weakened, and his lead shrank. Dave stopped the car, scrambled out, and ran with Willie through the final thirteen miles of the race, to victory.
Dave returned to Ironman Revisited each year thereafter. In 2007 he raced it as part of a relay team with sons Ryan and Drew, now 17 and 15 years old and showing a strong interest in the family business. The trio took second place. Dave felt stronger and more sound of body than he had in years. Perhaps this perception was not strictly physical in origin but was an effect of doing the thing he loved most with two of the most important people in his life. In any case, Dave flew home with his boys fixated on the idea of returning to Ironman—the real Ironman—now that his children, including 11-year-old daughter Kara, were old enough to really appreciate it, and while he still had the ability to do it well, by his standard.
Dave’s form did not come around in time for the 2008 Ironman, but by February 2009 the Man was divulging to those in his circle of confidence that he was thinking about returning to the Kona start line in October. His plan was to throw himself into his training for six weeks in May and June, see where that left him, and then make a formal decision. Dave made an informal decision midway through that training block, during a fifty-six-mile solo ride on Sunday, May 17. He rode hard and felt great, and when he returned to the Boulder outskirts he calculated that his total time for the ride, including the ten minutes it would take him to cruise through town to his front door, would be about 2:23. Solid.
As he rolled westward along Broadway toward his home in North Boulder, Dave began to run some numbers in his head. His swim pace in recent workouts was only two seconds per 100 yards slower than it had been in his prime. He figured he could go 0:52, maybe 0:51 in the Ironman swim. With five months to build on his current cycling fitness, an Ironman bike split of 4:45 seemed realistic. On a great day, perhaps 4:41 would be possible; on a lousy day, he would surely ride no worse than 4:51. The run was more of a mystery. He had not done enough running lately to know exactly where he stood, but 6:30 miles still felt pretty easy. A sub-three-hour marathon in Kona was thus a conservative hope. Tallying his estimates, Dave came up with a projected finish time of roughly 8:40. That time would have placed him twelfth in the previous year’s Ironman and represented a sixty-seven-minute improvement on the existing course record for the men’s 55 to 59 age group.
Dave knew better than to go public with such an estimate. It would be much doubted. But he had no reason to second-guess his projection. Dave had correctly predicted that he would lop more than an hour off the Ironman course record on his first try in 1980. He had rightly predicted that it would take about an 8:10 to win the race in 1989, when the existing course record was 8:28. Nobody was better able to estimate his Ironman performance capacity at any given moment than Dave Scott. He’d been doing it every day for thirty years. Not a single rotation of planet Earth was completed, not one, without Dave’s being able to accurately guess how fast he could finish Ironman at his present fitness level. It was as routine as checking his appearance in the bathroom mirror.
In high spirits, Dave turned right off Broadway onto Poplar Avenue. Immediately he noticed a beige BMW X5 sport utility truck stopped in the middle of the right lane ahead of him. Dave assumed the driver must be looking for someone or something. The driver, 61-year-old Ramona Sands, was in fact looking for an open house. As Dave approached the vehicle from behind, wondering if he’d been seen in the rearview mirror, the BMW began moving. Dave continued to ride at a steady 24 mph as the accelerating truck pulled away.
A few hundred yards later the driver stopped again, in the middle of the road, without signaling. Dave’s antenna went up. Thirty years of cycling experience had taught him the warning signs of a bike-blind motorist.
Again Dave drew closer to the BMW from behind, and once more it began moving before he could overtake it. He saw the truck reach a stop sign ahead and turn left onto Wonderland Hill Avenue, the same direction he was going. The vehicle disappeared from Dave’s sight until he completed the turn, and then it reappeared above him on a long hill that he now began to climb. The truck stopped at the top of the hill and remained stationary almost long enough for Dave to catch up to it. He was just deciding whether to pass it on the right or the left when it took off yet again, accelerating down the back side of the hill. A quarter mile later, at the bottom, the driver veered onto the right shoulder, no signal, and stopped just behind two parked cars. This was a popular area for dog walking. Dave supposed the motorist had at last found her destination.
Nevertheless, he remained alert. As he came down the hill behind the SUV, Dave was prepared to swerve wide to the left if the driver suddenly swung back onto the road and began moving forward. What he was not prepared for was an abrupt U-turn, and that was exactly what happened. At the worst possible moment during Dave’s approach from the driver’s rear, Ramona pulled onto the road without signaling or looking behind her. Dave knew instantly that he was going to hit the truck broadside, and hard.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” he shouted as he clenched his brakes.
Ramona heard the shouts, but it was too late. Dave plowed into the side of the vehicle at full speed and dropped to the ground like a sandbag. The double impact of Dave’s body striking first the car and then the ground shattered his left wrist into several pieces; fractured and dislocated his left ring finger, leaving a bone projecting through the skin; fractured his left wrist; crushed his left shoulder blade; and caused a bone-deep bruise to his right thigh and multiple cuts and abrasions.
Ramona scrambled out of her vehicle and stood over Dave, who had not lost consciousness.
“Call 911,” he croaked.
The pain in his shoulder was searing. He knew his leg was in bad shape too. He lay faceup, biting his lip as Ramona made the emergency call. Moments later he heard a familiar voice. It was Lars Finanger, a local triathlete who was out for a ride when he happened upon the scene.
“Dave, what can I do?” Lars asked, looming above him. “Can I call someone?”
Dave asked Lars to call his sister Jane and his daughter, Kara, and have them meet him at the hospital. A police car pulled up while Lars was on the phone with Jane. An ambulance arrived a moment later.
As he lay in the street under his bike, knowing he’d been badly hurt, a number of worries traveled through Dave’s mind.
Will I ever be whole again?
How long will I be unable to travel for my business?
And at least one other worry.
“I knew there was a finality to my exercise regimen and any thoughts of racing,” Dave told a reporter afterward. “I was very aware of that even when I was lying on the ground.”
Nothing had changed. A week without a workout remained for Dave like a week without water or sunlight for a vegetable garden. Endorphin junkies are a dime a dozen. Dave Scott had become a self-described endorphin lunatic.
“If I don’t get it,” he said, referring to exercise, “it just makes me go haywire. It rules my life. It’s a powerful drug for me. It’s huge. It’s gigantic.”
Too big, Anna had finally decided. Dave and Anna separated in 2000 and divorced five years later. During their separation Dave just had to get a workout one day when Kara, born in 1996, was in his care. He put her on a little bike and instructed her to ride along behind him while he ran, which turned out to be not nearly as much fun for the child as he had imagined. Later Kara tearfully reported the incident to her mother. Anna knew that Dave would never have exposed his child to any real risk, but the situation was symbolic of the couple’s irreconcilable differences.
On Father’s Day 2003 Dave’s three children had given him a handmade card that read, “Dear Dad, you can do anything you want for Father’s Day except swim, bike, or run.”
Dave Scott is, by all accounts, as good a father to Ryan, Drew, and Kara as Verne was to him. But it wasn’t always easy to live under the same roof as the Man, given the “drop too much” that nature had given him.
“When I’m on,” Dave confessed in one interview, “and when I feel good about my exercise and I’ve been on a good wave, I feel invincible. I can handle any kind of hurdle and I can meet any kind of challenge head-on. And when I don’t have it, when I don’t have that morphine-like endorphin feeling that resonates throughout my body, it affects everything. It affects my personality, it affects my confidence, it affects my ability to interact with other people.”
And so, even in 2009, as the paramedics gingerly loaded him onto a stretcher, Dave foresaw in his coming period of postaccident immobility his own personal hell, an experience far more terrible than the same situation would be for most people. Upon learning of his accident, Dave’s family and friends feared for his mind as much as they did for his body, and rightly so. They knew he was likely to do desperate things for a fix while he recovered, and his doctors and therapists were duly warned.
Dave was taken by ambulance from the site of the accident to Boulder Community Hospital, where he was stabilized and spent one night before being transferred to the famous Steadman Clinic in Vail for surgery on his shoulder. On her first visit there Jane pulled aside his orthopedic surgeon, Randy Viola, and delivered a warning in the form of a story. Many years ago, she told him, Dave had been hospitalized after another bike wreck. Early one morning his doctor had entered Dave’s room during his rounds and found him lying on the floor, bench-pressing his own bed.
Randy soon discovered that time had not mellowed his patient. Dave tested the limits any way he could, to the point where the staff had to assign nurses to keep a close watch on him, to protect him—from himself.
The doctors at the Steadman Clinic had found a blood clot in Dave’s lung. He was told he must avoid any kind of exercise until the clot was broken up with anticoagulants. Knowing the chance he was taking, Dave took it anyway. A fate worse than death awaited him, he felt, if he obeyed doctors’ orders and went stir-crazy like never before.
Walking was the first form of exercise Dave was actually allowed to do after the blood clot had dispersed. Running was forbidden, but Dave tried it anyway, convincing himself that he was not disobeying doctors’ orders if he renamed the activity “quick steps.”
One afternoon Dave was joined on a walk by Peyman Razifard, a member of Dave’s Wednesday-morning running group. Before they started Peyman joked, “This is the first time I’ll be able to beat you.”
Big mistake. Dave said nothing, but when the pair reached the base of a long hill, Dave began to quick-step, and soon his challenger was left in his dust.
Dave was able to swim with one arm before he could swim with both, so, naturally, he did. One morning Mirinda Carfrae, who would win Ironman the following year, arrived at the Flatiron Athletic Club pool in Boulder to find Dave swimming with fins on his feet and his left arm pinned against his side.
“What are you doing today?” Dave asked her.
“Oh, just some 200s,” she said, already knowing where this was going.
“Mind if I join you?”
Sure enough, Dave did not merely join Mirinda but tried to egg her into competition. Possessed of her own competitive nature and an impish sense of humor, Mirinda swam just hard enough to nip Dave at the wall on each interval. But the wounded old man put everything he had into the final 200 and outreached her by a hair’s breadth.
“Only the last one counts,” he deadpanned.
ON A SATURDAY MORNING in June 2010, a little more than a year after his accident, Dave Scott drove to Boulder Reservoir with his 19-year-old-son, Drew, who was home for the summer from Montana State University, where he competed on the Nordic ski team. They were drawn there by an open-water swim competition organized by Jane. Dave was out of town most weekends leading triathlon clinics, at which he typically found little time to train. He planned to take advantage of being home this particular weekend to work out to his heart’s content.
As they were preparing to leave the house, Drew had emerged from his bedroom with a triathlon wetsuit slung over a shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Dave said, scowling.
“I’m bringing my wetsuit,” Drew said, defensive.
“No, you’re not. The water’s 70 degrees. You’ll get a better workout without it. You’ll see the truth—the truth of how your swimming is now.”
With an adolescent groan, Drew turned around and put the wetsuit back in his room. As they drove toward the reservoir, Dave completed his sermon.
“You can’t always take the easy way, Drew,” he said. “Sometimes it’s okay. If your ego needs a boost, go ahead, wear a wetsuit. But other times, take the windy road. See what you can do.”
Drew absorbed the speech without comment.
At the reservoir, Dave and Drew wove through the gathering crowd of swimmers and found Jane, who was checking off names on a clipboard and handing out swim caps to competitors.
“How are you?” Dave asked her quietly, looking deeply into her eyes as though that was where he expected to find the true answer, regardless of what her mouth said.
This encounter was more than an ordinary meeting of the siblings, who saw each other a few times a week. Jane had learned four days earlier that she had uterine cancer. Dave had been coaching a regular Tuesday swim workout at Flatiron Athletic Club, where Jane also coached, when his cell phone rang. He checked the number. It was Jane. His entire body clenched. Jane had already told him that some abnormal cells had been found in a recent Pap smear and that she was having further tests. Dave answered.
“I’m out in the parking lot,” Jane whispered. “Please come.”
Dave abandoned his swimmers, raced outside, found her car, and climbed in. She told him what he already knew. They broke down together and sobbed in each other’s arms. Dave and Jane had been as close as a brother and sister could be for their whole lives. Their entire journey had been shared—every high and every low. They had started swimming together, then built a coaching business together. Jane had cheered Dave through almost all of his Ironmans. They had moved to Boulder together. Now this.
“We’ve got to have faith,” Dave said, gathering himself. “We’ve got to have faith.”
Dave was likely speaking to Jane from precisely the same place from which he spoke to himself when things were looking bad at Ironman.
Now, having received a swim cap from Jane, Dave stripped down to his swimsuit and made small talk on the beach with friends and acquaintances in the minutes before the race started. He still looked damn good in a Speedo. Six firm rectus abdominus muscles were outlined like small loaves of wheat bread under his bronzed skin. His swimmer’s chest looked as though it would meet a fist with a satisfyingly deep thudding sound. His thighs retained that bulgingly lean form that makes the legs appear skinny from some angles, massive from others, and is witnessed only in endurance athletes of the highest caliber—an undeceiving outward manifestation of inward ability.
Dave no longer looked younger than his age. Any stranger could see his 56 years in his crow’s feet and in the flecks of gray in his close-cropped hair. He just looked like the fittest 56-year-old man in the history of the world. And he probably was, despite everything.
A hub of the Boulder athletic community, Dave knew almost all of the four or five dozen other athletes present and greeted many with his trademark gentle sarcasm.
“Looking kind of pasty, Matt,” he told one swimmer, eyeing his luminously white belly, which he correctly judged to be a source of self- consciousness.
Moments before the start, a sinewy woman with hair hanging in shoulder-length coils sidled up to Dave. She was three-time Ironman winner and Ironman world record holder Chrissie Wellington, whom Dave had recently begun to coach. Dave demonstratively eyeballed the wetsuit she wore but said nothing.
“Aw, come on, Dave!” she pleaded with a laugh.
“Okay, this time,” he said.
There were 1-mile and 2-mile swim options. Dave, of course, chose the longer alternative. He covered the course in 47:15, finishing three minutes behind Chrissie. Had Dave swum the full 2.4-mile Ironman distance at the same pace, he would have finished in 56:38. Not bad for a 56-year-old man who lacked full range of motion in his left shoulder, could not straighten his left ring finger, and suffered from constricted breathing associated with lingering damage from his bike wreck. But not good enough.
“I used to be an athlete; now I just exist,” Dave told a friend with an unconvincing smile as he air-dried on the beach.
Age was his new archnemesis. In 2000, when Dave was 46, a reporter had asked what motivated him to continue working out several hours a day even though he scarcely raced anymore.
“I think it’s age—awareness of age,” Dave said. “I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to start slipping.”
While Dave talked with others about their respective swim experiences, he eagerly scanned the water for Drew’s familiar stroke. He waited and waited. At last he spied his son’s flailing arms. Drew got out of the water at fifty-five minutes and change.
“Your stroke looks terrible,” Dave teased.
Father and son walked together to the parking lot to pull bikes out of their truck. Their friend Marek, who falls between them in age, met them there, already dressed to ride. Disdaining the concept of the warm-up as much as his father, Drew hunkered into his aerobars and dropped the hammer before they had even left the reservoir’s mile-long access road. Marek held fast at Drew’s shoulder, and Dave tucked in behind them.
It was a beautiful day, dry and sunny with temperatures in the low 80s. The trio chose a mostly flat route, heading west and then north along Highway 36. On such terrain, after more than a year of recovery and fitness rebuilding, Dave often felt as strong, or almost as strong, as he had on the day of his accident. He would lock into an effortless rhythm at 23 mph, and it would seem as though he could go forever. Could he get back to 24 in Kona? It seemed possible.
After ninety minutes of comfortable spinning, the three men ventured into the hills, turning off the highway and ascending more than 2,000 feet in Left Hand Canyon, the same climb Dave had made with John Brant during his 1992 retirement. It was every man for himself. Marek fell back first. Dave held on to his son’s back wheel for several minutes, but then Drew stood out of the saddle and surged away easily. As Dave’s breathing deepened, that all-too-familiar feeling of constriction seized his lungs. This now happened every time he started sucking wind while exercising. He just couldn’t draw a belly breath anymore. It was enough to bring tears to his eyes at such moments—the frustration of effectively having a governor on his respiration, limiting him to 80 percent of his normal capacity.
It’s over, he thought in these moments. He would never compete at Ironman again. People who encouraged him to do the race just to do it had no clue what it meant to him. Crawling through the race in ten hours at age 56 when he knew he could have finished in 8:40 or 8:50 at age 55, blowing people’s minds one more time, would do absolutely nothing for him. Less than nothing.
At the top of the hill, Drew sat up triumphantly and waited for the losers to catch him. Dave rode right past his son and began the descent without even looking at him.
THE NEXT MORNING the group reconvened at Marek’s condo for a trail run. Again Drew took off hard from the start. Dave groaned in pain with each landing of his left foot for the first ten minutes, until it went numb or he just got used to the hurt. He’d injured it after the crash in his haste to return to training, and it remained unhealed, in part because he refused to stop running.
They ran for forty minutes and then turned around. Along the way they met several other groups of runners. Dave knew them all, including a pair of older women, members of Dave’s Wednesday running group, who came walking in his direction.
“You’re supposed to be running, not walking, ladies,” Dave admonished as they passed.
“We were, I swear!” one of them said. “We just stopped.”
“Yeah, right.”
Dave began to tire noticeably with about three miles left to run. Still a better downhill than uphill runner, he fell into a pattern of slipping behind the others on the climbs and then running them down on the back sides. On the last big hill, a long, gentle rise followed by a long, gentle descent, much like Palani Hill in Kona, Dave fell way back. He figured he had seen the last of his workout partners until they regrouped at the finish. But when he crested the hill, Dave looked ahead and saw that Drew had broken away from Marek, who appeared to be struggling.
Blood in the water. Dave went after Marek like a torpedo. He had about a mile in which to make up 200 yards on the little punk: numbers that exactly matched what he’d needed to do to catch Mark in 1989 upon reaching the top of Palani Hill. Perhaps Dave even imagined himself back there, back then, enjoying a second chance to make the greatest race ever run come out differently. His pace dipped under six minutes per mile, just as it had twenty-one years before. The gap steadily closed. Marek felt Dave coming, turned back, and flinched at the sight of the oncoming missile. He sped up, but he didn’t stand a chance. Dave shot past Marek in the final fifty yards. He won.
“I thought you were toast,” Marek said after he’d caught his breath. “How did you do that?”
“I still like to play the game,” Dave said with a smile. “I can push myself as hard as I ever have. Even now, with all my limitations, I can reach down deep into that barrel of discomfort and pull out one single thing that allows me to hang on. I like doing that. I take pride in doing that.”
He looked proud.
BETWEEN HIS SECOND AND THIRD workouts of the day—another ride and a swim at Flatiron Athletic Club—Dave returned home with Drew to wash up and refuel. After showering, Dave called his parents, who now lived in Boulder also, to confirm plans for a family meeting at their home. Dave and Jane would drive over separately in the evening. Patti, who lived and still coached swimmers in Sonora, California, would join them by phone. The spoken purpose of the meeting was to discuss Jane’s illness and impending emergency surgery. The real purpose of the meeting was to comfort Verne and Dot, who had been hit hard by the news. Both had passed their eightieth birthdays, and they did not want to outlive their youngest child, having made it this far.
Hanging up, Dave blended several batches of smoothies, whipped up a bowl of guacamole, and sat down with Drew to watch World Cup soccer. The United States was playing Ghana. Dave shouted at the television. He drank two full blenders and ate several pieces of whole fruit plus a dinner party’s worth of mixed nuts and corn chips with guacamole.
Dave’s house is smaller and less sparkling than some might expect the home of a six-time world champion to be. But then, his total prize haul for those six titles was less than $50,000. Throughout Dave’s career Verne had urged him to market himself more aggressively to compensate for the sport’s dearth of race booty.
“You should be the next Jack LaLanne!” he’d said. “You have to put yourself out there more!”
His advice fell on deaf ears. Dave refused to take a single step to the left or the right of his independently chosen path for an extra dollar. He turned down a sponsorship offer from Timex because it would have required him to wear a watch during races, which he refused to do. He returned a hefty book advance to the publisher because he couldn’t make the manuscript meet his standards.
Dave’s finances, never as robust as they might have been, were not helped by his divorce from Anna. But he makes little effort to increase his income beyond hanging out a shingle as a triathlon coach. And he doesn’t even make as much money in coaching as he could because, although Dave remains very much in demand as a coach, he weeds out athletes.
An athlete has to be a little like Dave Scott in order to be coached by Dave Scott.
“I don’t allow any of my athletes, regardless of their age or background, to be mediocre,” Dave said in his 2011 USA Triathlon Hall of Fame induction speech. “It drives me crazy.”
A few days before he participated in his sister’s open-water swim competition, Dave was swimming with his group when he noticed that another swimmer in his lane was taking the easy way through the set by using a pull buoy. When he left it on the deck for a recovery lap, Dave snatched it, swam to the other end of the pool with it, and hurled it ten feet out of reach.
Dave feels a small sting of disappointment when he scares away such athletes—a sting that is not dulled by any amount of repetition. He suffers a fresh disillusionment each time he rediscovers just how few are willing or able to reach deep down inside that barrel of discomfort in every swim, every ride, and every run. But the stakes are much higher with his own children, all now high-performing athletes themselves. His love for them demands that, in certain ways, he cut them a little more slack than he allows others. Yet he owes it to them and to everything sacred to hold them, when it really matters, as unyieldingly as he holds anyone to what he once called his “high, high, high expectations.”
While Dave and Drew watched professional soccer together, Kara, then 14 years old, was playing soccer at an out-of-town tournament. She was an outstanding defender for the Boulder County Force, and Dave proudly attended many of her team’s games and practices. It was always a bit awkward for him, though, because Dave did not exactly bond with the parents of Kara’s teammates. He vexed them. They, in turn, annoyed him. The focus of Dave’s annoyance was their pointed discouragement of competitiveness in their daughters, their almost sanctimonious way of telling the girls to “have fun” as they took the field for games. Dave, by contrast, told Kara to give everything she had to win.
“You can still have fun when you push yourself as hard as you can possibly go,” he told her. “And if you don’t win, you should be satisfied that you did your best. Figure out how you can do better next time, and maybe you can win next time.”
If there is a next time.