TRIATHLONS TRIATHLETES : Lou Gehrig Had Nothing on These Iron Men and Women Who Have Come From All Walks, Runs, Swims and Bikes of Life to Become True Triple Threats in a Grueling Sport

In 1978, they started a race in Hawaii called the Ironman, and it took an insane man to do it. That first year, exactly 15 weirdos took part, and their mission (impossible) was to swim 2.4 miles in the Pacific Ocean, towel off, change clothes, grab a bicycle, ride 112 miles in 112-degree heat, hop off, straighten their backs, grab their sneakers, run 26.2 miles, cross the finish line and say: “No problem.”

Well, 12 did it, and they proudly proclaimed themselves “Triathletes.”

Two years later, though, ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” spanning the globe for the constant variety of sport, discovered the race, which was being held annually in Hawaii. ABC executives planned to show it that winter, hoping the average Joe would be so disgusted with snow that they’d stay home and watch these men and women fry themselves on television.

What a concept.

Then came the coup of ’82. While a future superstar named Scott Tinley was winning his first Ironman, a woman named Julie Moss was losing hers. She had led all the way through the marathon, but with only three miles left, she had to stop. She walked, then ran, then walked, then ran.

“Hey, you guys,” Julie Moss screamed to friends standing nearby. “Find out how far back she is.”

And about a mile or so back, in second place, was Kathleen McCartney.

Later, at 6:35 p.m., more than 11 hours after the race began, Moss had only a quarter-mile left to win. But she fell to the ground. Up she came, but down again she went. Her legs were rubber, her feet cement.

“Don’t touch her,” they said, for that would mean disqualification. Finally, she stood. A crowd applauded. She walked--slowly, very slowly. There were just 200 yards to go.

She ran.

But she fell again. She sat for a while, but got back up. Twice she looked back for McCartney, but could see nothing. She walked, and the crowd walked with her.

Now, she ran.

It was 6:40 p.m., and the finish line was within sight, just 25 yards away. But she fell again. She pawed at the ground as they ooohed and ahhhed. She got up, and she made it within 10 yards, and she was gonna show the average Joe, and so . . .

She ran.

She fell.

Kathleen McCartney ran past.

“Am I first? Am I first?” McCartney cried as a Hawaiian lei was wrapped around her neck.

Yes, she was.

Julie Moss, 29 seconds later, crawled over the finish line.

Well, ABC never heard the end of it, because the public felt that McCartney had no business passing Moss. Jim McKay had the two women in the studio weeks later, and, after much debate, it was learned that McCartney never saw Moss lying on the street.

Well, we haven’t heard the end of triathlons, either. Inspired by Moss and intrigued by these seemingly unachievable distances, athlete after athlete became triathlete. Even non-athletes became triathletes. Their motivation was simple--If I can do this, they thought, I can do anything.

Today, naturally, the frontier is a little overcrowded. The sport of triathlon, not quite 15 years old, has become so commercial that there are (a) triathlon stores (b) two triathlon magazines (c) colleges that offer courses called “Triathlon Conditioning I and II” and “Triathlon Techniques,” (d) drug testing (e) a player’s association (f) kid triathlons and (f) talk of it becoming an Olympic sport by 1992.

And it’s a tad too old to be only a fad. Men have left their jobs, their children and their wives for these swims, bikes and runs.

Matthew Bernstein, a 43-year-old eye surgeon from Los Angeles, tells of how his wife left him because of his training and obsession with triathlons.

“My wife didn’t complain,” he said. “She just left. But I know I can’t be the only divorcee in this sport. The wives come to despise it. It’s a strain. I saw a survey in one magazine where runner’s wives, for instance, had to fit their sex habits around the runner. . . . Yeah, that was a factor in my divorce, too. So I guess triathletes become selfish people. We work out so much more.”

Bernstein, though, says he is a Type-A personality, which is typical of triathletes. They are the proud, the rich, the overachievers. A survey by Triathlon magazine (their competitor is Tri-Athlete magazine) showed:

--90% of the readers have bachelor degrees.

--30% to 40% have post-graduate degrees.

--10% make $100,000 a year or more.

--50% make $50,000 or more.

“You go to marathons and see Volkswagens,” Bernstein said. “But you go to triathlons and see BMWs.”

They are frustrated jocks. They are bored with 10Ks and marathons. They like the variety of three sports rolled into one. They like an endurance event that makes it entirely possible to whup up on young people. The Ironman, the longest of the triathlons, was born that way. Some older Navy guys, looking for ways to feel young again, happened to talk about it over a few beers, got a little drunk and decided to do a race to end all races.

But how could a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run make anyone feel young again?

So why do they race?

“I’M CRAZY.”

There once was a guy named Gordon Gaspar, and, as far as anyone knows, he’s still around, although no one has his phone number.

“He probably lives in a house with 10 other surfers,” said Rick Gaffney, an Ironman public relations man. Gaspar thought triathlons were sort of bitchin’. One year, he’d been standing on the beach in Kailua-Kona, just before a race, and he jumped right in. He swam the 2.4 miles, finished respectably, and asked some dude on the beach for a bike. They gave him one with those high handlebars, and somebody else threw him a football helmet just in case he wiped out.

Anyway, the bike ride was easy, and he even popped a few wheelies. When he was ready to run, someone told him he had no shoes, but he figured he’d just do it like he’d do on the beach.

He finished.

Then there is the Cowman. His original name is Ken Shirk, but when he left the National Guard many years ago, he grew a beard and began to dress like a cowboy. A woman he knew just called him “Cowboy,” but Shirk later changed the name to Cowman because, he said, “my attitude changed. When you mature from a baby to a boy to a man, it’s time to change from a cowboy to cowman.”

On his birth certificate then, he officially is Cowman C. Cowman. In races, he wears a four-pound headdress with horns. Twice, he wore the thing during a race (including the swim), although he’s now only allowed to wear it during the marathon.

“They might think you’re a freak,” he said. “But who cares?

“I feel like I could live to be a couple hundred years old . . . 1,000 years old. I don’t think there’s any end in sight. I know it’s crazy, but I feel that good.

“I like my image, the free-flowing hair. You know, the Indians said they got strength from their hair. And one of the things I feel is that if people have a good heart, they’ll judge you from the inside instead of on the surface or by how much money you have.”

By the way, he doesn’t have much, although he could if he wins his lawsuit. He’d been running in a marathon a few years back and was just a mile from the finish line when a bus ran him over.

“And I was wearing my horns and a full-length Tahitian hula skirt,” Cowman said.

“I’M OLD.”

This year at age 70, Edson Sower of Yuma, Ariz., finished the Ironman in 15 hours 57 minutes. At the post-race banquet, the other triathletes gave him a standing ovation, an honor when you think how tired they all must have been.

Life for Sower began at 60. At the time, he had lived in Milwaukee, had stood and watched a downtown race and decided to run himself.

“When you get to 60 . . . the only important thing is your health. For years, I’d been concerned about my health, and if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. Now, I’ve never felt better. I can do things now I couldn’t do when I was 40. . . . I can bike 100 miles if I want. I can run 30 miles if I want.

“I’m planning on being in a 24-hour race in Phoenix. Last year, I covered 91 miles in 24 hours, and it was a U.S. record for someone 70 years old. I can do better this year. And I would’ve never thought about it at age 40. Gee, I’ve even toyed with the idea of a six-day run.”

Norton Davey, 67, was the oldest triathlete until Sower came along. He had run because of repeated discomfort in his chest. A doctor pleaded with him to run.

“Well, you move from 10Ks to marathons and after 30 or 40 marathons, you look for something else,” Davey said. “It’s refreshing to whip these young kids who’ve just turned 60.”

“I’M WOMAN.”

She was divorced, had to raise the kids and had no high school diploma. So she went back to school and, at age 40, began marathons and then triathlons.

“They were going to college, and I was 40 and alone and I needed something in my life,” said Millie Brown of Norwalk, Conn. “I was such a worrier. I’d worry how I’d get by, and then I’d think I was sick all the time. I was almost in a rut. You see all these single people around you and you think you’re getting fat. I needed something positive.”

She couldn’t swim or bike.

“But I’d seen it on TV,” she said.

She trained and competed and sent out resumes for sponsorship. One day, Norelco decided it wanted to get involved. It asked its public relations firm for a name, and they said: “How about Millie Brown?” They decided to do a trial sponsorship, and when Brown was at a neighbor’s cocktail party, she met a friend of the mother of an ABC producer. One thing led to another and another, and ABC decided to follow Brown with a camera in the upcoming Ironman race.

So she raced, and she got sick and collapsed, and the camera showed it all, and since the ABC show wouldn’t be broadcast until later that year, Norelco kept her on. When it did air, there was reaction much like the Julie Moss episode.

Norelco got the publicity it wanted.

Brown got the job she wanted.

Still, others in the triathlon community called her “Falldown Millie Brown,” convinced she had fabricated her pain to impress the cameras and her bosses. Apparently, she had finished the race easily the year before.

“Well if I’m sick, I’ll quit,” Brown said in response. “I’m not one to puke and run. . . . Maybe people are jealous. But my life was hard before, and now it’s not. I’m thankful.”

“I’M FAT.”

When she stopped smoking, she got bigger. Her doctor pleaded with her to get active, soon. That was 50 pounds ago.

“I’d been overweight my whole life,” said Libby Fox of Lake Jackson, Tex. “Never obese, but I had an image of myself as overweight even if I wasn’t. It took more than just running to combat the weight problem. I needed the triathlon. Compulsive eating is an addiction. You can’t stop even though you want to. You’d like to look normal but you can’t. You wake up and say, ‘Today will be different,’ and it isn’t. It was something for me over which I had no control.”

“I saw eating as a very important thing in my life, more important than a lot of other things. I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t totally out of control, but even when I was at a normal weight, I’d think about food. It’s real painful to be different from other people, and you can’t control yourself if you want to. It’s depressing. I received addiction treatment for my weight problem and will be in treatment my entire life. Like a drug addiction, it will never go away.”

Triathlons were her treatment.

“After smoking and being overweight and not knowing how to use myself in a physical way, and then to discover running and cycling and swimming. . . . It’s like discovering a part of myself that I’d hid from, and it’s beautiful.

“I’m an athlete and I never dreamed I’d be capable of that. I love to run. Every step is like I’m saying ‘Here I am. Here I am.’ For years, I was incapable of loving myself in a physical way. It’s fantastic now, like someone gave me a million dollars. To have myself back is great.”

“I’M SPECIAL.”

Jim Curtis is a 65-year-old minister.

“As Socrates once said, well I think it was Socrates, ‘It’s too bad to get old and not know what your body and mind and soul can do,’ ” he said. “Well, I guess, being a minister, I added the soul part. But those runs, bikes and swims are long. I do a lot of praying and meditating. I write a lot of sermons.”

John Skorstad is an L.A. fireman. He was inspired to train when he saw--what else?--”Chariots of Fire.”

Workouts are different since firemen work 24-hour shifts. But they are not on the job two days in a row, which enables Skorstad, 28, to catch up.

“And it looks good for the department if we have good athletes,” he said.

John Orr had to check first with the government before being interviewed for this story. He works for the FBI.

And, at this year’s Ironman, it said “FBI” right there in bright orange letters on his jersey. But, that, too, had to be cleared from above.

“You get different reactions (to the FBI),” Orr said. “Some cheer and some flip you off. Yeah, we talked about whether I should do it. I didn’t want someone to shoot me.”

Pat Bowlen stopped racing in 1984, but only because he went out and found something else he could compete in--the NFL.

He bought the Denver Broncos.

“I was 40 in 1984, and hoping to go back (to the Ironman),” Bowlen said. “But I didn’t go. The race was on a Saturday, and we were playing in Detroit on Sunday. I couldn’t be in both places. I was much more interested in my football team.”

“I’M HURT.”

The guy in the car was drunk, but at least he’d be sober by morning.

The guy on the motorcycle, though, wouldn’t have his leg in the morning.

Pat Griskus, age 19, had one leg and no hope. One day, 15 years later, he had an awakening.

“I can run!” he screamed.

“I was 19 when it happened,” said Griskus of Waterbury, Conn. “You’re a physical being at that point, and you don’t have the brains to fall back on. When the physical part of you is taken away, there’s nothing to fall back on, and you feel sorry for yourself, which I did.

“I drank too much. I went to school and worked, but the tendency is to cry in your beer. I see that as 15 wasted years, but I guess for me to do what I’m doing now, I had to go through it.”

He wears a wooden leg and runs like the wind. He has run to the top of the Empire State building. In triathlons, he will swim with one leg, put his other leg on and ride his bike. He will then run, and, although the leg will inevitably be chafed from the pounding, forcing him to a wheelchair for weeks, he will run again.

The thrill is in the normality of it all.

“I come in with representative times, to the point where I’m not noticed,” he said. “People see me and think I have a knee brace on.”

People see Fred Ellis and think he is dying. He is not. He might have had cancer once, but if it is to get him again, it must “run and catch me,” he says.

He had been young once, but that hadn’t been that fun, either. Or perhaps it was too much fun. He’d been an alcoholic.

He got help. He’s been sober 23 years. He became a runner, conquered the 10K and the marathon and eyed the triathlon. But then came cancer. In 1982, he had two operations and 38 radiation treatments.

“You think ‘why me?’ when you’re in that (radiation) machine, it’s so big and powerful, it overpowers you. It was a jolt. It’d last just five minutes, but once a day, you’d be in that machine and know you were being fried from the inside.”

One day, he went to a pool to swim. But he sank. Cancer or no cancer, he decided to enter an Ironman. In 1983, he did enter, but heavy winds near the Hawaiian lava fields knocked him off his bike.

“The bike flew over my head, and I landed on my back,” Ellis said. “I felt paralyzed, and I saw my life pass before me. Was I going to die? Right here? But I felt better, and a dump truck came by, and I hopped on and was taken to a hospital.

“At the time, the cancer was back in my body, and I didn’t know it. I had had pain, which I thought was from training, but the cancer was trying to break through my bones. I was having a bout with bone cancer.”

He return to his running in 1984. However, doctors pleaded with him not to enter the 1984 race. Still, his goal was to finish the 1985 Ironman, held in October.

It was a cloudy, cool, calm day, and that helped. Fred Ellis, age 61, crossed the finish line.

“I came down that street, and I knew I’d break down and cry, too, and that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing it,” Ellis said. “It was such a great joy to do what I’d set out to do. . . . It was so powerful. It was heavy. I did the macho thing, of course, and tried to hide it, but it was one hell of a feeling. I felt it was beyond me to do the thing at first. But so many people were rooting for me.

“So it was awfully hard for me not to do it. But then, I can’t tell you how hard it would’ve been for me if I didn’t do it. . . . I just had to finish. I had to. I had to.”

So why do they win?

Maybe not for the money. The men and women that dominate this sport find most of their income from sponsorships and endorsements. Prize money is puny. The top men, people such as Scott Tinley and Scott Molina, earn in the 70s and 80s, and hope lucrative jobs will come later.

The biggest race, the Ironman, offers no prize money. Instead, you take home a trophy. And, interestingly, that first trophy in 1978 was made partly of nuts.

Prize money is available, however, but in smaller, shorter races. No, not every race has Ironman distances. Standard races have about 1-mile swims, 25-kilometer bike rides and 10K runs. The largest payday has been $10,000.

Still, they train. Marathoners and decathletes don’t train this much. Tinley goes eight hours a day. Molina is close behind. And most of the best live in San Diego, where the weather and the psychological climate is right, much better than Los Angeles.

“In L.A., people bounce beer cans off your back,” Bernstein said. “Their attitude toward bikers and runners is like night and day when compared to San Diego. In L.A., the congestion is so bad, people resent bikers. Guys in Porsches cut me off. A guy in a pick-up truck dropped a full six-pack of beer on my back.”

San Diego is where the sport truly began. Back in the early 1970s, Navy SEALS (an underwater demolition group) would work on Fiesta Island, and they would ride their bikes to and from, and they were excellent swimmers. So it kind of evolved. First triathlons had about 40 or so guys (lifeguards were especially interested), the entry fee was 20 cents and the prize was beer.

Oh, these triathlon types will party. One of the foremost legends is San Diego’s Tom Warren, who at 42 has sold his bar/restaurant (Tugs Tavern) to retire to the beach.

Warren, once on a bet, did 400 sit-ups in a sauna. His prize was a beer. He’d train by sprinting from bar to bar, stopping for a quick drink, but always continuing to do his intervals. He sold Tug’s Tavern in Pacific Beach because, Tinley says, “there are too many Yuppies in PB.

“PB has changed a lot, and Tom says he wants to move to Oceanside, where there are more derelicts. I asked him why PB has changed, and he said people come here from places they can’t stand and then turn it into the place they used to live. He says they’ll hopefully leave so he can open up again.”

Anyway, that’s what most of these top triathlete’s are--beach bums. “Hell yeah, I was a beach bum,” Tinley said. And these are very ordinary athletes.

“I was average at everything as a kid,” said Tinley, who won this year’s race in 8 hours 50 minutes 54.1 seconds. “But that’s why I’ve been successful, because I never specialized in one thing. After college, I played tennis, rowing and always rode bikes. I was a lifeguard. . . . Training was a life style.

“Funny, but now I’m not that excited about those three (triathlon) events. I do it because it’s a job.”

Others will die for the sport.

Literally.

Last year in New England, a man named Leonard Olans, 38, drowned.

“It probably was bound to happen,” said the race director Dave Mcguillivray. “And it probably will happen again, just like race car driving. I don’t think he was trampled because there were only 300 competitors. This person was just in some type of trouble, and he went down unnoticed.”

And isn’t that why people watch on television? Isn’t that why people participate? It’s the danger, the unknown, the attitude that barriers can always be broken.

When McCartney ran by Moss that day in 1982, she was immediately whisked away to an interview, whereupon she was asked how she felt.

“I feel good! I feel great! Maybe I didn’t run fast enough!” she said, nearly falling over with each scream.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.

--Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty