I’ve always been a voracious consumer of magazines. During medical school in the 70s, while gone on a ski trip, my housemates were astounded by the number of magazines which piled up for me in the mail – 15 during the couple of weeks I was gone. and this when I was a starving student.
That decade, two of those magazines featured articles which profoundly affected how I’ve thought about athletics ever since.
In 1972, I was still buying Rolling Stone at the newstand when I could afford it and the cover moved me. I bought one issue for the promise on the cover of an article about Mark Spitz, then a swimming hero about to go after 7 gold medals in the Munich Olympics. (The cover of the magazine was a black ink drawing, filled with ink splotches and grotesque nightmare images of lizards driving a convertible in the Mojave desert – it was the first installment of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But that really is a whole other story.)
The article was by Tim Cahill, who was an aspiring writer from my home town of Cincinnati, where he’d been a somewhat well-known swimmer himself at St. Xavier High School. The details of his profile are lost to me, but one phrase has remained, etched in the granite of my memory ever since. “Spitz embodies the prime athletic virtues of speed, grace, and reckless courage. [Emphasis added.]
Seven years later, a long Sports Illustrated article (this magazine I’d been subscribing to for 23 out of my 30 years at this point) about the second Hawaii Ironman also captivated me. It described a lifestyle I could only wish I had for myself – endless bouts of running, swimming, and biking, easch person trying to outdo the next with the outrageousness of his exploits.
Flash forward 33 years, and here I am on a plane to Hawaii, returning to the Kona coast, where I;ve been so many times before, some just to swim, bike and run, and others to actually to that crazy race described in 1979. I am reading a new book, Iron War, (which I’ll review when I finish it), chronicling the 1989 Ironman, the one featuring a race to the finish between the sport’s iconic heroes, Dave Scott and Mark Allen. At that point, Scott had won 6 of the last 8 races on the Island, and Allen (who would later go on to also win 6 times), had yet to finish first.
The book describes in some detail the personalities of each man. Scott seems almost manic-depressive, alternating between fits of super-human endurance training, and sitting for months despondent in his beanbag chair. Allen is a new-age spiritualist, haunted by fears of failure, but blessed by a body built for the nascent sport of triathlon.
Scott seems to have an abundance of speed and reckless courage, while Allen embodies speed and grace. Neither was able to succeed at the ultimate one-day endurance test on Hawaii until he found his way to the third athletic virtue.
(To be cont’d)