Iron War: Dave Scott, Mark Allen, and the Greatest Race Ever Run

By Matt Fitzgerald

The classic account of an unforgettable endurance test, now updated with a new introduction

The 1989 Ironman World Championship was the greatest race ever in endurance sports. In a spectacular duel that became known as the Iron War, the world's two strongest athletes raced side by side at world-record pace for a grueling 139 miles.

Driven by one of the fiercest rivalries in triathlon, Dave Scott and Mark Allen raced shoulder to shoulder through Ironman's 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike race, and 26.2-mile marathon. After 8 punishing hours, both men would demolish the previous record--and cross the finish line a mere 58 seconds apart.

In Iron War, sports journalist Matt Fitzgerald writes a riveting epic about how Allen and Scott drove themselves and each other through the most awe-inspiring race in sports history. Iron War goes beyond the pulse-pounding race story to offer a fascinating exploration of the lives of the world's two toughest men and their unquenchable desire to succeed.

Weaving an examination of mental resolve into a gripping tale of athletic adventure, Iron War is a soaring narrative of two champions and the paths that led to their stunning final showdown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637270233

Matt Fitzgerald

Matt Fitzgerald is an acclaimed endurance sports author, coach, and nutritionist. His many books include The Comeback Quotient, 80/20 Running, and Pain & Performance. Matt has also written for a number of leading sports and fitness publications, including Runner’s World and Triathlete, and for popular websites such as outsideonline.com and nbcnews.com. Matt is cofounder of 80/20 Endurance, the world's premier endurance sports training brand, and creator of Dream Run Camp, a pro-style residential training camp for runners of all abilities based in Flagstaff, Arizona. He also codirects the Coaches of Color Initiative, a nonprofit program that seeks to improve diversity in endurance coaching. A lifelong endurance athlete, Matt speaks frequently at events throughout the United States and internationally.

Book preview

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Praise for Iron War

"Captivating, animated, uniquely readable and downright thrilling. [Iron War] is a truly great read—and an ode to our sport with all its quirky characters and epic venues. . . . It is absolutely comparable to Krakauer, Bowden (Blackhawk Down) or Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm). . . . Iron War is what we buy books for: Excitement, entertainment, information and inspiration." —TriSports.com

A true page-turner about a too-little-known great moment in sports. —Booklist (American Library Association)

"For any triathlete or endurance athlete, or anyone who wonders what it takes to be the best in sport, Iron War is an excellent read. . . . Readers will come away with a very strong understanding and appreciation for two of the true legends of our sport . . . as well as a very clear look at the greatest race ever run."—Triathlete.com

"Iron War really is a book that should be on your bookshelf if you have even the slightest interest in the sport of triathlon, but it also is a great read for anyone looking for inspiration in general."—Slowtwitch.com

Fitzgerald eases readers into the nuances of the sport, capturing imaginations with a satisfying study of two exceptional athletes and what makes them tick.—ForeWord magazine

"Iron War is the very first time our sport has engaged in Krakauer-style journalism, where full-featured personalities are presented to readers without excuse, or pause, or an author’s self-censorship. Iron War is Fitzgerald’s Krakauer moment."—Slowtwitch.com

"Iron War by Matt Fitzgerald recounts the fabled Ironman world championship battle between triathlete legends Dave Scott and Mark Allen. By the end of the story, [triathletes] will feel like [they] personally know the athletes, raced side-by-side with them, and understand the amazing contribution they made to the sport." —Active.com

"In his new book Iron War, Fitzgerald recounts in gripping detail the showdown between Mark Allen and Dave Scott. Iron War delves into the vastly different personalities and psyches of these two iconic athletes and presents an anatomy of mental toughness that both men shared."—Triathlete magazine

"In an exhaustively researched book, Fitzgerald recreates the famous race between Dave Scott and Mark Allen in the 1989 Ironman World Championship. . . . [Iron War] captures the strength of character of both athletes better than any other publication to date."—Xtri.com

"The real gems of [Iron War] . . . are the robust descriptions of the race itself: the pain and suffering, the strategy, the story arc. The telling of this story gives insight into the race far beyond what we could see on the ABC special . . . or on YouTube today. It’s an insight that casual fans (and perhaps even athletes themselves) don’t often get. And for that reason alone, [Iron War] was one I could not put down."—TriMadness

Dedication

In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and some unknown x. . . . That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not, fighting under the command of a genius, in two- or three-line formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute. Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting.

—leo tolstoy, war and peace

Contents

Introduction

1. The Moment

2. A Drop Too Much

3. Get a Grip

4. Pain Community

5. You Again

6. Dig Me Beach

7. Iron Will

8. Shot out of a Cannon

9. Burning Matches

10. Vision Quest

11. Breaking Point

12. The Man’s Search for Meaning

13. Shaman Surfer

Epilogue

Notes

Course Map

Timeline

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

On January 7, 2011, I spent an hour and a half on the telephone with Dave Scott, leading him through a long list of questions I’d prepared in advance. A famously willing interviewee, the 55-year-old retired triathlon legend spoke with his usual candor and wry humor from his home in Boulder, Colorado, while I listened, took notes, and let my audio recorder do the rest from a cubicle inside the San Diego headquarters of Competitor Group, Inc., where I worked as a writer and editor. We hit a range of topics in those ninety minutes, delving into everything from Dave’s adolescent ritual of racing the morning school bus on his bike to the state of his recovery from a recent collision with an SUV during a training ride, but we lingered longest on a single event: Iron War, aka the greatest race ever run, aka the 1989 Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii, where Dave waged an epic final battle against his longtime archnemesis, Mark Allen.

At my prompting, Dave recounted the entire eight-hour race from his perspective, sparing no detail. I was on the edge of my seat, as though the actions being described were currently unfolding, their outcome underdetermined, until a sudden snag broke the spell. It happened at the end of Dave’s review of the bike leg, a point in the race where Dave was leading a group of four other contenders that included Mark. Except that’s not how Dave remembered it. Understandably, considering what came after (not to mention the subsequent passage of twenty-two years), Dave’s recollections of that fateful day placed him alone with Mark, already ahead of everyone except for doomed leader Wolfgang Dittrich. Mustering my most deferential tone, I gently corrected Dave, or at least I tried to, but he wasn’t having it. So insistent was he on the accuracy of his memory that I had to pull up the race results and read off the relevant bike splits before he relented.

This awkward moment (for it’s not every day that a sportswriter is obliged to fact-check an athlete-hero in real time concerning his own biography) is for me a distant memory—more than a decade past—yet when I reflect on why I wrote this book, it leaps freshly to mind, charged with symbolism. I had been working on Iron War for several months when my phone interview with Dave took place, but it wasn’t until I bore witness to his accidental revisionism that I truly understood why I was researching and writing about the greatest race ever run with such feverish urgency: to preserve it.

There were other reasons, too, I suppose, but the big one was that the story moved me, deeply, in much the same way I am moved by my favorite songs, films, and novels. From the moment I saw it (three weeks after the fact on ABC Sports’ delayed TV coverage of the event), I regarded the climax of Dave and Mark’s singular athletic drama as a kind of performance art, and a masterpiece of its kind. Unlike other works of art that preserve themselves, however, Iron War was an historical event and, as such, susceptible to oblivion. In writing this book, I sought above all to communicate the whole story in a form that afforded it the posterity I felt it deserved.

It is not for me to say how successful I was in this effort. What I can say is that it would be far more difficult to pull off today. Eye-witness memories of the events described in these pages have only gotten older and less reliable since I completed my work. A number of the women and men I talked to for the book—including Mike Plant, who served as the onsite announcer for the 1989 Ironman and supplied me with a trove of precious behind-the-scenes insights into the race—have since passed away. Records have become further scattered. At some point in my research, I got my hands on a copy of the official program for the race; I’m not sure it would be quite so easy today.

The more time passes, the more I appreciate how perfectly situated I was to research and write Iron War when I did. The occupant of the office nearest my cubicle at Competitor Group was none other than Bob Babbitt, the man who’d given Iron War its name while trailing Dave and Mark through the lava fields aboard a Jeep in his capacity as publisher of Competitor magazine. Bob knew more than anyone about the story I wished to tell, and he was beyond willing to share it, going so far as to guide me through a three-hour historical automobile tour of the Ironman racecourse during a visit to the Big Island for the 2011 Ironman. And not only did Bob know everything about the Scott–Allen rivalry, but he also knew everyone else who knew anything about it. You know who you should talk to… he’d say to me almost daily before offering up yet another name.

Within spitting distance of my cubicle in another direction stood a row of metal bookcases that contained complete archives of Competitor, Triathlete, and Inside Triathlon—a virtual Smithsonian of information relevant to the story. The whole setup was an embarrassment of riches. Heck, even Lois Schwartz, the photographer who’d captured the iconic image of Dave and Mark running shoulder to shoulder on the Queen Kaahumanu Highway—the shot that simply had to be used on the cover of the book I was writing—also worked right there in the same building.

Prior to undertaking this project, I was never big on research. I preferred the easy kind of sourcing, where you make a phone call or two or read a couple of studies and then write about what you’ve learned, steering clear of projects that required deep and exhaustive legwork. But my desire to do this particular story full justice was such that I overcame my natural aversion to old-fashioned shoe-leather reportage and embraced a no-stone-unturned commitment to the investigative process, and to my happy surprise, I acquired a taste for it.

Like any writer who goes all-in in search of the full story, I met my share of discouraging dead ends. My efforts to track down raw video footage of the 1989 Ironman, for example, led me from Bob to Ironman producer Peter Henning to ABC Sports director of rights and clearance Louise Argianas to a warehouse in New Jersey and stopped there. The tapes couldn’t be found.

These disappointments were more than made up for, though, by the wild-goose chases that led me to an actual goose. Very early in the research process, I discovered that minor players in the story often retained clearer memories of important moments than did Dave and Mark themselves. It makes sense, if you think about it. Suppose you got an opportunity to meet your favorite professional athlete. Which of the two of you would be more likely to remember the encounter ten years later—the superstar or you? Nothing personal, but the answer is obvious. Among the bit-part characters I was able to track down was Brian Hughes, who worked as an assistant to Mark’s agent, Charlie Graves, at the time in question. In the interview I conducted with him, Brian recounted in photographic detail certain events I couldn’t have learned about from any other source, including the handoff of the small American flag that Mark carried across the finish line of the 1989 Ironman.

I came to refer to these small details as golden nuggets. In isolation, they contributed little to the narrative, but collectively they transformed it from the dry chronology I started out with to the novelistic drama I envisioned. In certain cases a single nugget made all the difference, its interpolation into the narrative binding together everything that came before and after, and creating the immersive verisimilitude I wanted my readers to experience. Ironman co-announcer Mike Reilly’s odd, almost spooky encounter with Mark at the edge of Kailua Pier minutes before the start of the 1989 Ironman was perhaps the most golden nugget of all, leaving me whistling for days after its unearthing.

The research process was not without drama. The first big crisis struck early, when I spoke with Julie Moss, the woman who’d put Ironman on the map by crawling across the finish line in February 1982 and who was subsequently married to Mark for thirteen years. Toward the end of our conversion, in answer to a question about where Mark’s intense drive came from, Julie spoke of classic father issues and an abusive situation in his childhood home. Blindsided by this disclosure, I fumbled my way through a few dazed follow-ups before signing off and racing into Bob’s office to tell him what had happened.

Did you know? I asked, my voice an octave higher than normal.

I had my answer before Bob even opened his mouth. It lay in his stricken expression, which must have mirrored my own. The man who knew everything about Dave Scott, Mark Allen, and the greatest race ever run hadn’t known this one giant detail either.

What should I do? I pleaded.

I felt trapped. On the one hand, I liked Mark and I wanted him to like my book and I could safely assume he wouldn’t like my including in it sensitive information he had never shared publicly. On the other hand, I had a responsibility to deliver on my promise to tell the whole story. It seemed a no-win situation, and I wrestled with it for days before finding a perspective on the conundrum that made the way forward a sudden no-brainer. I asked myself how I would feel if someone else were writing the book and I were just one reader among many. It wasn’t so much the answer I got from this mental exercise as the exercise itself that released me from my ambivalence. It reminded me that, as a reader, I expect the writers in whose work I choose to invest my time to place their loyalty to me above all competing loyalties. Others may disagree, but as a reader and as a writer, I have always felt this way—that the bond between writer and reader is sacred, and a writer has no business forming such a bond unless he is willing to commit totally to honoring the reader’s trust.

So I forged ahead. Yet the fact remained that I respected Mark and was determined to tell his story in a respectful way. This effort was aided by subsequent golden nugget discoveries, among which were my acquisition of the transcript of a 2010 LAVA magazine interview in which Mark himself touched upon his rough, abusive upbringing and a phone interview that I was able to arrange with the very source of that rough treatment, Mark’s father, Ken Allen. He predictably dodged the issue when I brought it up. (Well, I don’t remember a whole lot about that,) which was just as well because it was Mark’s side of the story I cared most about.

In retrospect, I am astonished by my own naivete. The shit hit the fan shortly after I shared a copyedited draft of the complete manuscript with Bob, who then turned around and shared it with Mark without my knowledge. Bob meant well. He loved the book and he was convinced Mark would, too. But Mark did not, and in hindsight I get it. Mark had kept mostly quiet about his paternal maltreatment for a reason, and no matter how carefully someone else broadcast it, the very fact that it was someone else doing the broadcasting must have galled him to the limit. A lawsuit was threatened, and lawyers brought in. Worse, Mark somehow persuaded Dave, the perennial oil to his water, to take his side. I was in way over my head and could do no more than trust and obey my publisher’s attorneys and hope I hadn’t accidentally destroyed my career and reputation.

Worst of all, though, was the possibility of the book’s release being scratched altogether. What simpler way, after all (from the publisher’s perspective), to make the legal headache disappear? After weeks of toing and froing between the men in suits, word came down that unless I could substantiate every last purported fact in my 260-page manuscript with solid sourcing Iron War would never see the light of day. The notes section you’ll find at the back of this book is the product of this monumental clerical effort, which, thank goodness, achieved the desired effect. The threatened lawsuit was withdrawn, and the book printed right on schedule.

I dig up these unhappy memories not to upset myself but for their relevance to the present context, as they assure you that every word of the story you’re about to read is true. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. No mortal human could ever write a 100 percent error-free book of this length, nor did I. After Iron War was published, a handful of small factual mistakes were brought to my attention by interested parties and other readers. Naturally, all have been corrected for this new edition.

Beyond the usual errata, though, I will confess that a limited amount of artistic license was exercised in weaving together the facts I worked so hard to compile for the story I wished to tell. I don’t want to stray too deep into matters of journalistic ethics here, but I feel I owe it to you to let you know where I stand on them. And where I stand is on the side of David Dow, a distinguished death-row defense attorney and author, who has written, The facts matter, but the story matters more. For writers like Dow and myself, a truth exists that is greater than the sum of its constituent facts, a truth for which there is no better word than Dow’s choice, story, and which is different from a mere collection of facts in essentially the same way that being there is different from knowing everything that happened in your absence.

Relax—I’m not about to tell you that I made stuff up. Here’s a specific example of what I’m talking about: In my interview with Julie—the one where she dropped the bombshell about Mark’s abusive childhood—she related to me a conversation she’d had with Mark after he completed his very first triathlon before they started dating. Considering all that followed, it was a seminal event in their lives, and Julie remembered it well; so well, in fact, that she told the story in dialogue form (He said…And then I said…) rather than merely reviewing the topics they covered. Odds are the specific language Julie used was not a word-for-word recitation of the tête-à-tête, yet I chose to treat the material as though it were because I liked this option a lot better than the alternative of reducing the living story back to dead, third-person facts for purity’s sake.

Shortly before word came down from the men in suits that my publisher was going to go ahead with the release of Iron War, I stumbled upon and watched a television documentary about forensic facial reconstruction. This technique is used to recreate the facial appearance of a deceased person whose identity is unknown. It requires the person’s intact skull and is greatly helped by the availability of a DNA sample and information about the person’s race, age at time of death, diet, and other relevant biographical details. The method involves deep collaboration between a forensic anthropologist and a sculptor with special knowledge of facial anatomy whose job is to apply clay (representing flesh) to the skull in strict obedience to all of the known facts.

What’s interesting to me about forensic facial reconstruction is how creativity is used to restore to fullness a reality that is in large measure irretrievably lost and only hinted at by the surviving facts. Although the careful and informed guesswork of the sculptor is not sufficient to perfectly reconstruct the facial appearance of an unknown deceased person, it gets us much closer than the starting point of a bare skull.

As I watched the documentary, I couldn’t help but see my approach to writing Iron War as analogous to the process I was learning about. I’ll give you one more example. Both protagonists remembered Dave looking back twice to check on Mark’s whereabouts during the cycling leg of the 1989 Ironman, but neither could recall exactly where these stolen glances occurred. A purist would have either left this detail out of his account of the race or just stated that the two glances took place. I chose instead to insert the events into my account of the race at the moments I judged them most likely to have occurred.

That sound you hear is Edward R. Murrow rolling over in his grave. But if the small bit of artistic license I allowed myself in writing Iron War is too much for the purists, at least I cannot be accused of defying the Golden Rule of journalistic ethics. I say again that if some other writer had scooped me in telling this story, I would have wanted that person to grant himself the same degree of license—no more, no less.

Nothing that has occurred in the more than ten years since Iron War was released has caused me to regret the approach I took. The most gratifying feedback I received from the book’s early readers came from those who really were there and were therefore in the best position to judge whether I had succeeded in telling the story in a way that brought those long-past events back to full-color, three-dimensional life. When Paul Huddle—Mark’s erstwhile training partner and housemate—reached out to thank me for allowing him to relive those crazy times, I knew I hadn’t blown it completely.

Almost as gratifying was an encounter I had with a triathlete at a speaking event I did in support of a different book in 2014. During the few minutes I spent chatting with this individual, it emerged that—oblivious to the hullabaloo surrounding Iron War when it was first released—he had asked Dave Scott to sign a copy of the book at one of Dave’s public appearances, and he had obliged. While I did not take this gesture as a belated endorsement, the anecdote did affirm my hope that in time Dave and Mark would discover that their humanizing portrayal within these pages would make them more appreciated, not less.

Both men are now well into their sixties. A time will come—not soon, I hope—when my book will carry forward their legacy in a way they themselves no longer can. This will only happen, though, if the book remains publicly available, and there was a moment when it wasn’t. In 2020, a year we’d all just as soon forget, Iron War’s original publisher was acquired by a larger company, and soon thereafter I was informed that a decision had been made to remove the title from the imprint’s backlist and return all rights to me. Luckily, I have an outstanding literary agent, Linda Konner, who had championed Iron War the first time around and stepped up to do so again, eventually finding a new home for the title with Triumph Books.

I couldn’t have asked for a better partner for the revival of my creation. When I explained to the folks at Triumph why the same Lois Schwartz photo that graced the cover of the first edition just had to be used for the second, they listened, understood, agreed, and made it happen. When I presented my case for leaving the original text alone—aside from the aforementioned corrections—and including a lengthy introduction that would do what this introduction has done, they supported me. In a word, they got it.

Writing this book was, as I’ve suggested, an effort to freeze time on my part. But no single person can freeze time forever. I needed help to pull it off, and I got it from publisher Noah Amstadter and his excellent team. I’m told there are athletes and others who ritually reread Iron War each year before the Ironman World Championship, some of them on the plane to Kona, Hawaii, as a kind of literary psych-up for the event. I like to picture someone doing this 50 or even 100 years from now (if airplanes still exist), and if this vision comes to pass, we will all have Triumph Books to thank for it.

1. The Moment

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

—ralph waldo emerson

Two men run shoulder to shoulder down the middle of the Queen Kaahumanu Highway on Hawaii’s Big Island, pressing southward toward the coastal town of Kailua-Kona. The road they travel cuts a narrow artery through a vast black lava field that supports no life save for a few scattered tufts of hardy fountain grass. Hazy clouds above trap muggy hotness below like the lid of a steaming kettle. A slick coat of rank sweat—a microcosm of the smothering atmosphere—bastes the skin of the hard-breathing runners, sealing in the heat churned out by the fiery furnaces of their muscles.

Both men are tall and lean, with the characteristic legs of elite triathletes—lither than those of cyclists, more muscular than those of runners—extending sinuously beneath skimpy 1980s running shorts. Each man hides a thousand-yard stare behind sport sunglasses, but their slack cheeks betray a deathly weariness.

They are not alone. A caravan of mopeds, bicycles, cars, Jeeps, and trucks has formed behind the athletes, the spectators aboard these conveyances having been drawn into the convoy by the spreading news of the spectacle they now behold. A few of the motorized vehicles and most of the bikes should not be where they are, as the highway is closed to normal transit, but the race marshals have lost control and no longer care. Caught up in the same hypnosis as everyone else, they simply follow and watch.

It is a strange apparition, this silent caravan, a sort of motley roving amphitheater, made stranger still by its silence. Those watching dare not speak a word for fear of breaking the spell in which all are complicit. Aside from the occasional shout of encouragement from a volunteer at a roadside drink station, the only sound to be heard is the rhythmic huffing of the athletes’ exhalations and the soft slapping of their feet against the pavement.

Right on! screams one young man as the runners approach the drink station he’s staffing. Right! On! he repeats, cheering not for one runner or the other but for the performance itself, losing his mind in excitement as he witnesses the consummation of every fan’s notion of the best thing that could possibly be happening in this, the most anticipated showdown in the history of triathlon—the sport’s two towering heroes running each other into the ground, obliterating records and annihilating all other competitors, eight hours into a duel in which they have never been more than a few feet apart.

The man on the right, dressed in green, black, and white Brooks apparel, is Dave Scott, six-time winner of this race, the Ironman World Championship. The runner in yellow, black, and white Nike apparel is Mark Allen, six-time loser of Ironman, winner of everything else.

They continue. Each man runs not as fast as he can but as fast as the other can, having already swum 2.4 miles, bicycled 112 miles, and run 24 miles, with the balance of a marathon left to run, all in tar-melting heat. That is why the pair remains as if tethered wrist to wrist after racing nearly a full-day shift, well ahead of 1,284 of the best triathletes in the world. Each is trying with all his might to break the body, mind, or spirit of the other, but although all of these elements in both have been stretched to the breaking point, none has yet broken.

Within their minds a pitched battle is being waged between unimaginable suffering and an equally intense desire to resist that suffering and win. The pain in their thighs, especially, is so severe that in any other context they would find it impossible to walk a single step. Yet each continues to run sub-six-minute miles because each still believes the pain is worth the hope of winning.

An expectant crowd waits at the finish line in downtown Kailua-Kona. All they know of the great struggle taking place on the Queen K Highway is what little information the race announcer provides in sporadic updates based on garbled two-way radio reports from the field. Yet these crumbs are more than enough to captivate them.

While the multitude waits, the competitor who is currently in twenty-seventh place in the race encounters Dave Scott and Mark Allen and their silent caravan head-on (it’s an out-and-back course) and stops cold to watch them. He has devoted months of hard training to preparing for this day. For several seconds he claps and shouts like any other spectator, momentarily indifferent to his own performance.

A photographer leaps off the back of his chauffeured motorcycle and attempts to capture close-up images of the combatants while sprinting alongside them. Immediately he recognizes his mistake. Although young and fit himself, he quits in exhaustion after fifty yards. Before leaping back on his motorcycle, he watches the runners speed away down the road, the camera slung from his neck briefly forgotten.

Seated on the trunk of a convertible some fifty feet behind Dave and Mark, his shoes resting on the back seat, is Bob Babbitt, the 38-year-old publisher of San Diego–based Competitor magazine. His face is frozen in a faint grin. He believes he is watching the greatest race ever run. The cover line for the next issue of his publication has already come to him: Iron War.

Ironman in 1989 means more to the young sport of triathlon than any other major championship means to any other sport. It is virtually the sport itself—the only race that really matters. Fans and sponsors don’t care how many other triathlons you win if you don’t win Ironman. That’s why short-course specialist Mike Pigg, feared in two-hour races, is competing in this race even though it’s way too long for him. It’s why Scott Molina, winner of numerous events in cooler places, kept doing Ironman, despite being no good in the heat, until he cherry-picked a victory last year, taking advantage of Dave’s absence and Mark’s bad luck. Hell, even duathlon star Kenny Souza, dominant in run-bike-run events, feels compelled to try, and he can’t really swim.

Mark Allen is virtually unbeatable in other triathlons and has amassed nine wins in nine races this year ahead of Hawaii, two of those wins over Dave Scott. But those victories count for little in his reckoning.

When you come to Ironman, you have to put everything you’ve done before it in the garbage can, Mark told ABC Sports before the 1987 Ironman. It all means zero.

It is this race Mark wants, and he is snakebit here. Dave and the island have his number.

Dave Scott dominates Ironman as few athletes have ever dominated a major championship in any sport. Before today he has raced it seven times, won it six times, and finished second once. And then there’s how he wins—crushingly, wielding a force field of invincibility like a weapon. At the start of the marathon leg of the 1983 Ironman, trailing Scott Tinley by twenty seconds, Dave looked into an ABC television camera trained on him and snarled, "I’m going to bury this guy," then promptly fulfilled the promise.

They call him the Man.

Mark Allen is his only equal, almost untouchable in triathlons held everyplace except Hawaii. His nickname is Grip. As in death grip.

Seldom do the two greatest champions of a generation in sport, each with a career prime that will ultimately span more than a decade, achieve their finest moments on the very same day, but Dave Scott and Mark Allen appear to be doing just that. On this day, they are not merely the best in the sport; they are literally the best by miles. Here in the final stretch of the marathon leg of the race, Dave and Mark are three miles ahead of their nearest challenger. With every stride they are redefining the possible, on pace to run a sub-2:40 marathon in almost 90-degree heat following a four-and-a-half-hour cycling time trial and a fifty-minute all-out swim effort in open water—a feat that nobody would previously have believed to fall within the scope of human potential.

Earlier in the year, in anticipation of this collision, Bob Babbitt set out to fan the hype by creating a cover for his publication that depicted the two men standing back to back, fisted arms crossed against their chests, in the style of a classic boxing poster.

Sure, I’ll do it—if Dave comes here, said Mark, who was training in Boulder, Colorado, when Bob called.

Yeah, I’ll do it—if Mark comes here, countered Dave, born and raised and still living in Davis, California.

In the end a photographer traveled to both places to shoot each man with the same backdrop behind him, then spliced the two halves together. The rivals appeared to be as close as they are now. The cover line read, "

showdown on the kona coast

."

It’s not that Dave and Mark really hate each other. They just can’t like each other. Only one race matters, and only one man can win it. They’re like two ravenous tigers fighting over a kill. Dave was an Ironman legend before Mark even owned a bike. But the younger man was quickly dubbed his elder’s heir apparent. Dave resented it, and Mark knew it.

It was like coming home after a hard day at work and expecting the family to cater to him, Mark wrote of Dave in his 1988 book, The Total Triathlete. When he got home, when he arrived in Hawaii, someone else was in his house getting all his attention. And that someone else was me.

Dave has beaten Mark five times in this event, but the overall rivalry is hardly lopsided. Mark defeats Dave routinely in most other triathlons. Each loss here deepens Mark’s desire to turn the tables, and both men know—or at least one fears and the other has faith—that Mark is capable. Twice he has finished second to Dave, and twice he has amassed huge leads over his rival before falling apart. There is broad agreement that Dave keeps beating Mark in Hawaii not because Dave is simply better but because Dave has mastered the race and Mark has not.

It’s not so much Dave Scott has defeated me, or Scott Tinley, or whoever’s come in ahead of me, Mark said dismissively in an interview for ABC television before the race they are now near completing. It’s always been the course—the elements, the wind, the heat, the humidity, and the distance under that sun for eight and a half hours.

In support of Mark’s point, when Dave pulled out of the ’88 Ironman two days before the race with an injury, Mark became the prohibitive favorite. But he suffered two flat tires on the bike and finished fifth. It seemed as if Fate was not content for Mark to become the Ironman champion except by beating his nemesis. If ever.

A year later Dave is healthy, and Mark’s rotten luck appears to be behind him. Both men have transformed the agony of their disappointments at the ’88 race into hunger for redemption. Both performed at the highest level of their careers in their summer buildup to this race. Mark went undefeated. Dave set an Ironman world record of 8:01:32 in Japan. Theirs were the only names mentioned in the obsessive Who do you like this year? conversations that ritually devour all other topics during race week in Kailua-Kona. Last year’s winner, Scott Molina, has not returned to defend his crown, writing himself off as a one-time opportunist. Two-time winner Tinley, it is agreed, has been surpassed. Sure enough, with two miles left in the race, Dave and Mark are three miles ahead, inches apart.

The conflict between the two men goes deeper than mere professional self-interest. Under the surface of their Ironman battles is a clash of opposing ways of being. Mark is what some might call a New Age spiritual type. He meditates and favors alternative medicine. He trains smart and isn’t afraid to take a day off when his body needs it. Dave’s a good old-fashioned jock of the no-pain-no-gain school. He believes you win by outworking your competition in training and outsuffering it in races. Meditation? No, thanks.

Like many great athletes, Dave competes best when he competes angry. He feels that being pals with any of his rivals would weaken him as a competitor, so, in stark contrast to his peers, he trains utterly alone in his out-of-the-way hometown, the chief virtue of whose isolated desert environment, in his mind, is that it is not a place that is attractive to anyone else in the sport. It is Dave against the world, and he likes it that way.

Meanwhile, Mark trains with Tinley, Molina, Pigg, Souza—everyone, it seems, in triathlon’s hypersocial birthplace and epicenter: sunny, beachy San Diego.

Generally mild-tempered, Dave goes to great lengths to gather so-called bulletin-board material—insults, perceived slights, and signs of disrespect—to feed the anger that he depends on to race as hard as he does. In 1987 Kellogg created a breakfast cereal called Pro-Grain. Mark Allen’s face appeared on one version of the box along with the tagline Ironman Food.

What a joke, Dave scoffed at the time. Mark has never won Ironman. And that cereal’s not even good for you!

Proving his point at Ironman that year, Dave again chased down Mark on the run, erasing a four-minute deficit and blowing by him to win by eleven minutes. Mark spent the night in a hospital.

As in any great sports rivalry, enmity is mixed with intimacy. In training, Dave and Mark think about each other like targets. Their blood warms whenever their paths cross off the racecourse, as they did at a press conference just two days ago, where they never greeted one another, never even made eye contact, despite being seated in adjacent chairs. As they run together now, each senses clearly how the other feels—whether he is strong or weak in any moment.

Who is ultimately stronger? The answer is undetermined. Dave does not know, nor does Mark, nor do the spectators who trail them in a reverent hush. One of these two men must soon break the other—in body, mind, or spirit. Who will it be? Not necessarily the faster man. The battle being waged now is about will as much as skill. Already both men have pushed deeper than ever before into the inferno of suffering that stands between every racer and his final performance limit. The winner of this fight is likely to be the man who dares to push deepest. Eight hours of racing are culminating in a game of chicken.

Endurance racing is steeped in the art of pacing. Each man has to hold back something. But how little does he gamble holding back? As they blaze southward toward the finish line in Kailua-Kona, Dave Scott and Mark Allen are risking everything, running in a shared state of unmasked desperation, to win—or not lose—right now.

It is one minute before three o’clock on the afternoon of October 14, 1989, and something is about to happen.

2. A Drop Too Much

Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality.

—ralph waldo emerson

Dave Scott was 13 years old in the fall of 1967 and in seventh grade at Davis Junior High School in Davis,

Reviews for Iron War

[fireandice_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Two men run shoulder to shoulder in the sweltering heat during the marathon leg of the 1989 Ironman World Championships; each trying to wear the other down enough to win this race. How did they get here? Determination, training, and a willingness to suffer more than anyone else. This book is a fantastic account of the 1989 Iron War between Dave Scott and Mark Allen - and everything that lead up to that amazing day in Kona.