The Pioneer Ultra-Athletes : In The World of Personal Endurance Sports, Three Californians Were Among the First to Push Beyond the Outer Limits

THE SPORTING mind has always been seduced by athletic speed, racing, getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Human against human, human against the clock, we are a species of racing and records.

A few years ago, a New Zealand biophysicist plotted the progression of the men’s mile record over a 70-year period. Extrapolation then led him to predict that on Aug. 1, 2528, the mile will be run in no time, “a feat,” he remarked, “which would presumably ruin athletics as a spectator sport.” Within the humor of that comment lies an implacable truth: All speed records are moving toward finite limits.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that if we can’t go faster, we can always go longer. Speed doesn’t become irrelevant--we still race, still keep records--but the sheer distance of the race becomes so great that merely finishing is a formidable challenge. Such is the domain of ultra-sport--beyond long, beyond endurance and, some would say, beyond reason.

Ultra-sport pioneers Tom Warren, Gordon Ainsleigh and John Marino, all of California, have redefined notions of what is possible in the realm of human endurance. Warren’s event, the 140.6-mile Hawaii Ironman Triathlon, will be conducted for the 10th time this October. The race was virtually unheard of when Warren won it in 1979. Now there are annual Ironman contests modeled after the Hawaii event in Japan, West Germany, New Zealand and Canada, and the sport in general has erupted: Some 2,000 triathlons will be staged in the United States this year, most consisting of a 1.4-kilometer swim, a 40K cycling leg and a 10K run. The Ironman is considered an “ultra” triathlon, an event in which competitors swim at least 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles and run 26.2 miles. Other competitions that fall under the ultra label include cycling events of 200 miles (“double century” rides) or more and running races longer than a standard 26.2-mile marathon.

Ainsleigh ran 100 miles through the Sierra Nevada in 1974, and now hundreds of people want to do it. The organizers of next Saturday’s 12th Western States Endurance Run have, as usual, had to stave off would-be participants with an entry lottery. The rejected applicants needn’t sit home; they now have four other annual 100-mile trail races to choose from, to say nothing of about 300 other ultra-distance races in the United States this year.

For his part, Marino rode a bicycle across the United States faster than anyone had ever done it and then challenged others to do the same. This morning’s start in San Francisco of the 3,100-mile Race Across America marks the seventh staging of the annual ultra-cycling event Marino created in 1982 and has directed ever since. Though the race, which ends at the Washington Monument, is widely regarded as one of the most god-awful crucibles ever devised for purposes other than punishment, a record 320 cyclists vied in grueling 600-mile qualifying races for a spot in this year’s field. Forty-four made it.

In following their own passions, Warren, Ainsleigh and Marino have altered the face of participatory sports. in America. Here’s how they did it--and why.

GORDON AINSLEIGH WHEN Gordon Ainsleigh competed in the 1974 Western States 100-Mile Ride, a popular horse-and-rider event in California’s rugged Sierra Nevada backcountry, he lacked a vital piece of equipment. His prized mare had come up lame six weeks before, and his efforts to find a worthy replacement had proved futile.

The inconvenience of traversing 100 miles of an equestrian mountain route without benefit of a horse wasn’t lost on the man. “The hardest thing was when I got out about 15 or 20 miles and realized I was approaching exhaustion,” he recalls. A normal fellow would have quit, but then a normal fellow wouldn’t have been out there in the first place. It’s just that the novelty and challenge appealed to the then-27-year-old woodcutter and juvenile counselor. He plodded on, occasionally telling himself: “Well, I don’t have to quit right now. I can still take another few steps, so let’s see what happens.”

What happened is this: Ainsleigh finished the race and started an era. His seminal run with the horses spawned the annual Western States Endurance Run (a.k.a. the Western States 100), which in turn spawned at least six similar races, four of which are staged annually: the Old Dominion 100-Mile Endurance Run in Virginia; the Leadville Trail 100-Mile Run in Colorado; the Wasatch Front 100-Mile Endurance Run in Utah, and, locally, the Angeles Crest 100-Mile Endurance Run from Wrightwood to the Rose Bowl.

The Western States 100 is ultra-running’s crown jewel. Every year on a weekend in late June or early July, several hundred bold runners follow in Ainsleigh’s footsteps, essentially the same 100 miles he did from the Squaw Valley ski resort, near Lake Tahoe, to the foothill province of Auburn, 35 miles east of Sacramento. For some it’s 20 or 30 miles of High Sierra splendor followed by searing regret, but more than half finish what they start. Owing to logistical and environmental-impact considerations, the field is winnowed by lottery to a manageable horde. Nearly half of this year’s record 865 applicants were turned away.

Seven times the event’s redoubtable founding father has entered the contest he launched 14 years ago, and seven times he has finished. Ainsleigh is 40 now, a confirmed bachelor residing in the Sierra foothills near Colfax, where he lived as a youth. A chiropractor by profession, by avocation and temperament he is a rock climber and karate black belt still possessed of some of his youthful hellfire. Once, as teen-agers, he and a friend grabbed a couple of sledgehammers, hopped into an old car the friend owned, and headed out a back road. Every quarter mile or so they stopped, jumped out, whaled on the car with the sledgehammers for a few seconds, hopped back in and drove on. It just seemed like a good idea. That was Ainsleigh.

Faculty and staff at Portland’s Western States Chiropractic College might never forget the man. Frustrated one day by a dull saw while trying to dismember a cadaver in anatomy lab, Ainsleigh cast the ineffectual tool aside and went at the corpse with a chain saw And it was Ainsleigh who formed the school’s infamous Carnivore Club, which he remembers fondly as a cadre of rabble-rousers serving as “a necessary first line of defense against the forces of militant vegetarianism.”

Easy to understand, then, that a man of Ainsleigh’s bent might have felt called to run where other men would ride. He had ridden in the contest and others like it a number of times, but at 6-foot-3 and more than 200 pounds he had always taken pains to spare his horse. “When I came to an uphill, I would get off and hold onto the horse’s tail,” he explains, “and when I came to a downhill I would usually pile off and run ahead of the horse. Since the Western States is more up and down than it is flat, I spent more time off the horse than I did on the horse.” People who knew Ainsleigh figured it was just a matter of time before he left the horse in the barn.

The Western States trail, even in summer, is no meadowland stroll, rising and falling like a blacksmith’s hammer, freezing in the high country, broiling on the canyon floors, remote, rugged and unrelenting. Ainsleigh remembers exactly how he felt on the eve of his pioneering run: “I was afraid.”

The high temperature that August day was 109. For so avid an outdoorsman, Ainsleigh was remarkably unprepared for the elements, taking none of the precautions routine among today’s Western States runners. He didn’t wet his shirt, didn’t carry a water bottle, wore no hat. “My brain was just baking,” he recounts. As he approached the course’s midpoint he encountered a rider whose horse had collapsed at the bottom of a hot, stagnant river canyon. “Up to that point it had never even occurred to me that I might be risking my life,” he reflects. “But it was clear to me that that horse was dying, and I thought, ‘My God, if the horses are dying. . . .’ ”

The stricken animal never regained its feet, but Ainsleigh persevered and reached the finish in 23 hours, 42 minutes. Though his run was later deemed several miles shy of 100 (the Western States 100 course has been measured and appropriately lengthened since), the 24-hour mark remains the standard to shoot for. By 1977, Ainsleigh’s solitary folly had become a race with 15 entrants; in 1978, it expanded to 60 runners. The silver belt buckle reserved for those who finish the race is considered by many the most prestigious cachet in ultra-running. Ainsleigh owns seven of them.

If the 1974 run has evolved as the meridian of Ainsleigh’s life, his legacy transcends the annual race he created. In the mid-’70s, ultra-distance races were few and far between, the exclusive domain of a handful of gaunt enthusiasts generally regarded as obsessive oddballs. Fourteen years later they are still regarded as obsessive oddballs, but there are more of them--hundreds instead of dozens--and more races. Some 300 ultra-distance races will be held in this country this year. In the Southwest about three-quarters of them will be staged on trails, old logging roads and the like. The Western States 100 wasn’t the first such event, but it was the most visible and undoubtedly had the most impact on the evolution of ultra-distance running. Ainsleigh is most proud of that influence. “I got people off the roads and onto the trails,” he says.

In the course of a 100-mile ordeal, those trails often lead not only to the finish line but to epiphanies of self-realization. The Western States 100, Ainsleigh philosophized at an awards dinner several years ago, “gives you a chance to face your best friend, which is yourself. You face your worst enemy and deal with him as best you can, and you face your best friend and embrace him.”

JOHN MARINO FIGURE THIS ONE. A college baseball star who is headed for the pros suffers a severe back injury that tragically ends his career. Frustrated and unfulfilled, he eventually looks around for another sport, something his back can tolerate. After a great deal of deliberation and experimentation, he settles on . . .cycling. Now, next to piano moving, cycling looks like the worst thing in the world for a bad back. Bicycle riders assume a position that suggests permanent malformation. But this guy chooses cycling, a sport in which he has virtually no background, and trains with the dedication of a monk for more than two years. Then he goes out and breaks the U.S. transcontinental record, parlays the record into an annual coast-to-coast bike race that captures America’s heart, and parlays the race into a career.

It must be tough living a life that plays like a contrived screenplay, but John Marino, the all-American-boy-turned-entrepreneur, is pulling it off.

The baseball stardom comes at Hollywood High. Two years all-league as a catcher. He is a football hero, too. Quarterback. Two years all-league, L.A. city all-star team. As a graduating senior in 1966, he is named Hollywood High’s athlete of the year.

On to San Diego State, where he is a good enough catcher to catch the eye of Los Angeles Dodgers’ scout Roger Craig. The Dodgers draft him. He elects to stay in school. The Dodgers draft him again. He elects to stay in school.

Every life has certain pivots that change its course, however slightly. . Sometimes, as was the case with John Marino, a turning point is so traumatic it transforms the life entirely. He was lifting weights, trying for a dead lift of 525 pounds. As he describes in “John Marino’s Bicycling Book”: “Suddenly there was a loud crack that sounded as though a gun had gone off in the weight room. My back exploded with pain, an electric shock raced down my spine. My toes curled, my legs shook uncontrollably, and I collapsed to the floor.”

Compression fracture of the lower lumbar vertebrae. The loud crack that resounded in the weight room that day might have been a starter’s pistol signaling the beginning of Marino’s new life. So much for the Dodgers.

Marino stuck it out at San Diego State long enough to get a teaching credential and then flew to Europe on a one-way ticket. He stayed for two years, working odd jobs as he flitted from place to place. He bought a bike in Germany and rode it to Greece. Saddle sores convinced him that was enough cycling for a lifetime.

Shortly after his return to California in 1974, Marino struck another pivot. No longer an athlete, he was going to seed, carrying almost 190 pounds on his 5-foot-9 frame. His back was in constant pain. At the urging of a friend, he visited a chiropractor in San Diego.

“You’re problem is that you’re fat,” the chiropractor scolded. “You’re not giving your body a chance to heal. You should have healed it a long time ago. How much do you weigh?”

“One eighty-five, 190.”

“You should weigh 150. There’s no reason why you should be laid up like this. You should quit eating meat. You should start eating natural foods. You should start paying attention to yourself. You should take vitamins.”

Marino hadn’t come for a lecture, but the chiropractor was warming to his subject. “I’m not even going to touch you--I’m not going to adjust you. Nothing can be done for you. You see that squirrel there? Normally that squirrel sits right on my windowsill and eats right out of the palm of my hand. But the minute you walked in this room he sensed the toxins in your body and he left, and he’s over there now.”

Marino was appropriately outraged, but he was desperate, so he decided to follow the chiropractor’s advice. He cut meat and dairy products out of his diet, took vitamins and read everything about nutrition he could get his hands on. He rode a bike for exercise and got his weight down to 155. His back still hurt but it was definitely better, and he had more stamina. He began thinking of himself as an athlete again.

After returning from Europe, Marino took a teaching job at Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley. He coached football and baseball, but he was unfulfilled. . “I wasn’t ready to sit and tell people what to do and watch them do it,” he says. “I wanted to do it myself. I wasn’t quite finished with that.”

Marino picked cycling out of the “Guinness Book of Records” as though he were picking a flannel shirt out of an L. L. Bean catalogue. He was looking for a sport, and he had two criteria: It had to be something that wouldn’t aggravate his back injury, and he wanted to have a shot at breaking a world record. Originally he picked marathon running, but after 30 days of training he found himself thumbing through the Guinness book again. His back couldn’t take running.

According to Guinness, the fastest crossing of the United States by bicycle was done in 13 days, 5 hours, 20 minutes.

Marino resigned his position at Poly High and made cycling his full-time occupation. Preoccupation is more like it. He raised sacrifice to an art form. For more than two years he cycled up to seven hours a day, 800 miles a week. By night he financed his obsession. He sold encyclopedias, he sold vacuum cleaners, he delivered newspapers, he worked as a custodian. No job was beneath him as long as it didn’t interfere with his training.

In retrospect, this has worked out nicely for all parties concerned. Mike Scioscia is doing a terrific job behind the plate for the Dodgers; John Marino, two-time holder of the U.S. transcontinental cycling record, is doing a terrific job as director of the annual Race Across America.

Marino, who now lives in Irvine, set his first record in August, 1978, pedaling 2,960 miles from Santa Monica to New York City in 13 days, 1 hour, 20 minutes (an average of 228 miles a day), eclipsing the previous mark by four hours. Two years later he lowered that mark by almost a full day. (Pete Penseyres holds the current record of 8 days, 9 hours, 47 minutes.) The 39-year-old’s real legacy, though, is the Race Across America, the annual transcontinental bike race he created in 1982 and has since nurtured into one of the premier ultra-sporting events in the country. In 1975, when Marino began preparing for his first record attempt, there were only two organized double-century bike rides in California. Today there are about 35 races of 200 miles or longer in California, and there are about 250 such competitions nationwide. The Ultra-Marathon Cycling Assn., which he founded in 1980 and still runs, boasts more than 1,100 members.

Just as every life has its turning points every life has its ironies. “If I hadn’t hurt my back, I probably never would have gotten into cycling,” Marino says. And then there is this irony: So consumed is Marino with a wife, two young children, and his administrative leadership in ultra-marathon cycling his own bicycle never sees pavement anymore. “I don’t have the time to get into exercise, and I haven’t been following a good diet,” he laments. “It’s just the pressures of the job.”

TOM WARREN HE IS 45 now. Nearly a decade has passed since he laid out $1,000 for a trip to Oahu so he could measure himself against 14 other loose cannons. The lure was an unheralded, daylong, swim-cycle-run endurance monstrosity called the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon. “Some people would take the $1,000 and buy furniture,” he observed at the time, “but this is something you’ll have with you for the rest of your life.”

When Tom Warren uttered those words he couldn’t possibly have imagined how prophetic they would prove. The line was an offhand remark that landed in a Sports Illustrated chronicle of the novel event. The magazine story catapulted a low-key, provincial contest to immediate fame and established Warren as a celebrity. He hadn’t created the event--that distinction belongs to retired Navy Capt. John F. Collins--but the event had created him. It was a stroke of fortuitous timing, for anybody who won that race would likely have become a legend. The idea and its time had intersected.

Warren didn’t just win the Ironman, he was the Ironman, the personified quintessence of the event. He chatted with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” Admirers sought him out at Tug’s Tavern, his sports bar and restaurant in San Diego’s Pacific Beach. People on the street addressed him with titular reverence: “Hey, Ironman, how’z it goin’?”

The best heroes lend their best efforts an air of effortlessness, an axiom Warren elevated to high art in Hawaii. After swimming 2.4 miles of rough seas, pedaling 112 miles on his bike and then running a standard 26.2-mile marathon--a concatenation that required more than 11 hours--he waited 48 minutes at the finish for his nearest rival to arrive. A young man finally staggered in, dazed and wobbly (and soon to be afflicted by an alarming episode of paralysis in his legs). He gawked disbelievingly at Warren, who appeared to have fully recovered. The Ironman returned the stricken athlete’s gaze and inquired blithely: “Ready to go bar-hopping?”

Word spread: Warren had once done 400 sit-ups in a sweltering sauna for a bottle of beer. His notion of speed work consisted of sprinting from bar to bar between drinks. (“When you’ve had a few cocktails,” he once said, “you can really work on your form.”) He thought nothing of running from his home in San Diego to Tijuana. He had cycled from Vancouver to San Diego and back and from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas. He had swum between islands in the Bahamas. He had devoted a day of his childhood to swimming 500 laps in the family’s 10-meter back-yard pool.

An annual bike race in Mexico spans 75 miles of hot, windy, hilly terrain between Tecate and Ensenada. In 1976, Warren went down two days early and ran the entire course, a 13-hour workout. The next day he cycled the course. On race day he rode the course again, this time with a friend on a tandem bike. The race’s organizers acknowledged his zeal with an award dubbed the Horse’s Ass trophy.

The sirens still sing. Every year Tom Warren grabs a little furniture money and returns to the Kona Coast to compete in the Hawaii Ironman. He missed the inaugural race in 1978, but only because he hadn’t heard about it. He almost missed the epochal 1979 race, too, getting word of it only a few weeks in advance. His preparation consisted of running a few laps around the Rose Bowl. He had intended to at least put in half a month of decent workouts while tooling around Northern California in a rented motor home. “But the weather was bad,” he recalls, “and all I did was drink beer and watch football in the motor home for two weeks.” Today Warren’s 5-foot-11 body is scrunched up in his RV as he scrutinizes the morning surf at Pacific Beach. The shape looks good; he digs into a closet for his wet suit and ponders over the event he helped popularize: “It’s not how well you can run a marathon,” he muses, “it’s how well you can run a marathon totally fatigued.” The demand for this form of self-flagellation is so great that each fall’s Hawaii Ironman field of well over 1,000 triathletes--1,381 last year--is determined by lottery. Nowadays, Warren says, “the hardest part is getting into the race,” not finishing it. Top competitors train like Olympians for months in advance; the event is no longer a lark, not even for the most casual participants. “I wish it was like it used to be,” Warren laments. “God, it would be neat if the organizers said, ‘OK, you can only train three hours a day.’ And then just see who’s got it in ‘em to do it that way.”

Not that Warren limits his daily physical frolics to three hours. It’s just that the modern triathlete’s methodical, sometimes Sisyphean approach to training and racing lacks a certain spontaneity and elan that Warren has always cherished. When approached for training advice, he invariably prescribes an intelligent, regimented program--and then finds himself thinking: “Gee, I should do that.” But instead he follows his own capricious inner rhythms. If his fitness Muse implores, “Run to Oceanside,” he charts a route and reaches for his running shoes. On several occasions he has cycled from San Diego to Los Angeles--a ride of six or seven hours--then hopped off his bike and joined the USC men’s swim team in a two-hour workout. Warren owned Tug’s Tavern for 17 years before selling it in 1985. Every Thursday night for a dozen years he cooked the restaurant’s taco dinner. One prodigious Thursday night Tug’s served 1,519 tacos. Warren tallied them like he would swimming laps and declared the total a house record. His taco days but a memory, he now owns stocks and bonds and rental properties in Pacific Beach. But his business card indicates he has retired, further advising that he has “no business, no worries, no service, no complaints, no money, no prospects, no phone, no address.” Six mornings a week he makes the short drive from his four-level hillside home in Pacific Beach to a beachfront parking area just south of the pier. The RV is his command post, the beach his workout venue. If the waves look good for body-surfing he heads directly for the water. Otherwise he takes off on a run that might span five miles or 20. Typically, by the time Warren sets foot on the sand he has already lifted weights. After the run, he’ll cycle. Twenty miles, 100 miles--whatever feels right.

Warren emerges from his RV and sniffs the marine breeze like a bear trying to catch a quarry’s scent. The surf is a magnet, and the Ironman heads off in pursuit, his fourth physical activity of a day still young. There might be some genetic predisposition at work here. Warren boasts that his great-grandfather walked 24 miles one fine day at the age of 94. And how does the triathlete regard this impressive ancestral feat? “I want to break his record,” he says.