DUAL EXHAUSTION : Anna and Dave Scott Have Found Success Combining Both a Personal Life and a Rigorous Training Schedule

If Anna Pettis-Scott qualifies for the U.S. Olympic swim team, she and her husband, Dave Scott, will spend September in Seoul, South Korea. If she doesn’t, they will spend that time in Nice, France, where he will compete in a triathlon.

Two good options. But, this time around, the hope and emphasis is on her success.

As Anna arrived at his office one cold and rainy day last week, bundled in her U.S. team parka and lugging her bag of workout gear, the two clients Dave was counseling wished her luck.

Through clenched teeth Dave said: “She’s going to make the Olympic team, or I’m going to beat her. We have rules at our house.”

Anna didn’t flinch. The rest of the world may know Dave as a man possessed, a fitness fanatic, an “agonist” who works out at least eight hours a day for the joy of the pain, but Anna knows him better.

In fact, since she has been working out in preparation for the U.S. swim team’s competition in East and West Germany this week, and he’s been spending so much time in the office, she has taken to calling him a couch potato.

She holds her own with the guy, even if she hasn’t dominated her sport the way he has dominated his.

As he teasingly explained: “Anna is getting old. This is probably her one shot at the Olympics. I’ve had my Olympics, and I’ve won the gold six times.”

That’s stretching it, but not too much.

The premier triathlon event is the Ironman held in Hawaii every year. It’s a 2.4-mile ocean swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride around the island, followed by a full 26-mile 385-yard marathon through the hot and windy lava fields of the Kona Coast.

The first time he competed in Hawaii, he won by more than an hour. Since then, he has won five more times.

Scott first heard about the Ironman race in September of 1978 when he was in Hawaii for a nine-mile ocean swim, Lanai to Maui. He liked to call it a suntan day. He was sitting in a hotel lobby when he was handed a flier about this triathlon that was held for the first time the previous January and would be held again in a couple of months.

“I read the distances and I thought about it and I said, ‘God Almighty, that’s a long three days.’ Then they told me it was all together, in one day, and I was fascinated,” Scott said.

“I had always been a big workout nut. I would work out three or four hours a day just because it felt good. But I had never done any cycling. I mean, except for riding a bike to school and back. So I went home and bought a new bike and started riding.”

Scott wasn’t really a runner. He was a swimmer.

At the time, he was coaching the Davis Aquatic Masters Swim Club. He was a competitive swimmer, but, by his own judgment, he was never a great swimmer. He was a distance swimmer at UC Davis, a Division II school, where he was also an All-American in water polo. He ran as a part of his daily workout, but he had never run a marathon until he got the idea he wanted to compete in a triathlon. He ran his first marathon in Sacramento in September of 1979 and finished 23rd in a field of 1,850 in 2 hours 45 minutes.

By January of 1980, he was ready for the Ironman.

“Most people go into their first triathlon thinking of it as a survival test and just hoping to finish,” Scott said. “You hear people talking about a triathlon like it’s this crazy thing for crazy people who are sadistic or masochistic or whatever. I wasn’t thinking like that. I went into it thinking of it as a race.”

Because his daily routine had expanded to seven- or eight-hour stints, the question was not whether he could finish, but how fast he could finish. He even thought he could beat the record of 11 hours 15 minutes on his first try.

Dave Scott started building his legend when he finished his first Ironman Triathlon in 9 hours 24 minutes--not just an hour ahead of the field but also almost two hours better than the record.

But that was before he started perfecting his art.

He missed the ’81 Ironman because of injuries incurred when he skipped an aid station toward the end of a 137-mile bike race, became hypoglycemic and dehydrated and went off the road at 20 miles an hour, ending up with 60 stitches in his head. He was still learning.

In the first of two Ironman contests in ‘82, he finished second to Scott Tinley of San Diego. It was in ’82 that the race was moved from January to October, and that year it was held twice. In October of ’82 he won again, lowering the record to 9:08.00. And in ’83 he won it again, with Tinley pushing him. He finished in 9:05.52, with Tinley just 36 seconds behind him.

He kept the streak alive in ‘84, again lowering the record to 8:54. After that race, he announced that he was retiring from competition.

It was time to rest on his laurels. He published his book, which was also produced in the form of a videotape. He was working as a consultant, getting paid to design workout programs for people wanting to participate in triathlons. He endorsed everything from shoes to sunglasses, vitamins to bicycles.

And he did some commentating for ABC’s “Wide World Of Sports” at the 1985 competition.

But retired champions never seem to stay retired. They have this thing about comebacks.

Scott came back to win the Ironman again in ’86 and again in ’87. So now he knows better than to say “never” again.

A funny thing has been happening in this nutty new sport over the last few years, and it’s pretty hard for a reigning star to ignore it.

This thing that started with an argument in a bar in Oahu in 1977 when Navy Cmdr. John Collins wondered who was most fit--swimmers, cyclists or runners--has turned into a booming business.

Dave Scott, who calls himself “not the cream of the crop as a swimmer . . . an OK cyclist . . . and a mediocre runner,” is suddenly a very hot commodity in a sport that seems made in heaven for the kind of athlete he really is, a health and fitness fanatic who understands the science of the human body and who develops a driving tenacity come race day.

Not only has the Ironman grown from a handful of competitors to average fields of more than 1,000, but the sport itself has grown, as Scott puts it, “exponentially.”

As the fitness craze has grown, so has this test of fitness. Now there are thousands of triathlons and thousands upon thousands of triathletes.

Until 1983 the Ironman was run for pride and a souvenir T-shirt. But in order to compete with the triathlon in Nice, the Ironman went to prize money in ‘83, and Scott picked up $18,000 in prize and bonus money for winning.

Scott, certainly one of the top competitors and hands down the dominant force in the most celebrated annual race, also happens to be a handsome guy with a personality needed to make himself quite marketable.

Dave Scott no longer has time to coach masters swimming. He doesn’t even have time to do much consulting.

But, it’s safe to say that he’s doing much better as a star triathlon competitor than he did as a coach. Like all athletes, though, he faces the fact that his career can’t last forever.

Or, as he puts it, “I don’t want to have the mortgage riding on whether I can cross the finish line first.” Especially now that he’s 34.

Among other business ventures, Centurian makes a Dave Scott autographed bicycle that last year was the No. 1 seller, and he gets not only a monthly salary but a royalty on every bicycle sold. That’s the kind of deal he needs.

Later this month, he and Anna will be introducing a line of workout clothing.

Although this sport came along just in time to transform him from an admittedly “frustrated jock” into a top competitor, he figures he’s peaking about 10 years too soon.

“I’m making money now, but not like Magic Johnson is making money now. Believe me, this sport is going to keep growing, and there will be some money to be made maybe 10 years from now,” he said. “The sport is going to be huge. Think about it. It is derived from three different participatory sports.”

Although Dave Scott is known as the man who drives himself to win the Ironman, and although he is known for his obsessive training and equally obsessive diet, and although he does train alone in Davis while others gather in Hawaii and San Diego and other more desirable climates, he objects to an image that he says sometimes makes him seem like a “mindless creature . . . a crazy . . . a loony . . . lock him up.”

Scott said: “I have always been interested in fitness. I’ve always been an athlete. I studied exercise physiology in college. I’ve always been very aware of nutrition and trying to do healthy things. But somehow that starts coming out like I’m some kind of a robot.

“The fact that I work out alone here in Davis was starting to be interpreted that I was some kind of a hermit. But I live here because my family is here and I went to school here and I like it here. There are people in Davis, Calif., you know. I’m not going to move to find better training weather.”

He also objects, a little less vehemently, to the notion that he wins the Ironman because it is one of the longest and toughest triathlons and he’s simply the best-conditioned and most oblivious to pain.

He argues that he has won lots of other triathlons, at many different distances. And he points out that he’s on record with the opinion that the Ironman is too long and too physically taxing.

At one time, Scott finished the race and collapsed, needing intravenous fluids to bring him back to strength. After the ’87 Ironman, a brutal competition in which he came from behind to pass Mark Allen, the 1987 Triathlete of the Year, Allen needed three units of blood to replace what he lost due to internal bleeding.

“Actually, I’m working out about 60% less than I used to,” Scott said.

He warns his clients about the pitfalls of overtraining. He has started to get his training into a reasonable perspective--and a lot of that has to do with his relationship with Anna.

Scott started dating Anna in 1983, but it was an on-again off-again thing as she balked, first because he was eight years older and because she was leaving UC Davis to swim for the University of Hawaii.

Also in ‘83, Scott had two bike wrecks--first when he skidded on a pile of crushed olive pits and then when he hit a dead possum and went flying over the handle bars.

“I call my ’83 Ironman victory my Miracle Victory,” Scott said. “That was when I beat Tinley by 36 seconds. My mind was so screwed up then.”

Anna wasn’t with him that day. But she’s been with him for the rest.

They lift weights together. Sometimes they swim together, although workouts are very different for a 50-minute ocean swim and for a 26-second sprint. And Anna broke her collarbone once while she was cycling with him, helping him train. She wasn’t well-versed in the art of drafting and she ran into his wheel. That cost her some pool time, but she resumed workouts with one arm tied down.

The one thing she shouldn’t have tried to do with him is eat.

“He eats for as many hours a day as he trains,” Anna said. “That first year or so, I was trying to keep up with him and I turned into a real porker.”

Scott believes in a vegetarian diet, high in complex carbohydrates and low in protein and fat. But in order to fuel his workouts, he needs 4,600 to 4,800 calories a day. It takes a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, brown-rice cakes, rinsed cottage cheese, baked potatoes and bean curds to equal 4,800 calories.

Anna had to cut back, even though her workouts were picking up.

Like Dave, Anna was a good, but not great, athlete during her days at Riverside North High School and then at UC Davis. Her time has come later.

She is the oldest member of the U.S. team currently competing in Germany, and she would probably be the oldest member of the U.S. Olympic team if she makes the team his August.

Anna was 24 and married to Dave for two years when she made her first national team by finishing second in the 50-meter freestyle at the national long course meet in Clovis, Calif., last summer. Actually, she tied for second with Dara Torres and had to win a swim-off in order to qualify for the Pan Pacific team.

“That was the race that was the eye-opener for U.S. Swimming,” Dave said. “I was standing behind her when she was on the blocks for that swim-off. I was so nervous. But she was cool.”

Anna said: “If I won, I went to the Pan Pacifics. If I didn’t, I went to the Pan Am Games. For me, for someone who had never made any national team, I was already happy.”

She’s working out every afternoon with Coach Rick Henderson at the Woodlands Swim Team, training for a goal that would make her even happier.

Her chances are good because she’s keeping her times competitive with world bests. But, in a race always decided at the touch, there are no guarantees. At the U.S. Open meet last December, the 50 was won by Tamara Costache of Romania in 25.68, followed by Torres in 25.69, followed by Anna, in 26.01.

That 26-second race makes Dave nervous. He wins triathlons by keeping himself relaxed and patient.

He’s a consummate tortoise, married to a hare.

But the bottom line is the same. The challenge, the months of training, the pressure.

Anna said: “I don’t think I’d fit in if I weren’t athletic. . . . I understand what motivates him, and I want a lot of the same things he wants.”

Her husband encouraged her to get back into competition because he had the feeling she never reached her potential. He wanted her to go for it.

“People have been flabbergasted to find out that Anna is such a talented swimmer,” Dave said. “She’s world-ranked (fifth now). I tell people about that every chance I get.

“I’m proud of her. She just better make that Olymic team.”