Ironman Keeps Insanity Firmly in His Grasp

Duke Davis has grown accustomed to his friend Tom Warren doing things that might be described as somewhere between a little off the wall and downright crazy.

Once in a while, even Davis can be caught off guard. Like the time they were cruising into a Caribbean port. He does not remember exactly when or which port. He does remember what his friend Tom Warren did.

As the ship slowed down, Davis turned to Warren and said: “Geez, it’s gonna take a long time to get in there.”

“It’s not gonna take me long,” Warren said.

Davis laughed.

“He dove overboard,” he said, “and swam ashore before the boat got there.”

Tom Warren does things like that.

He has been known to go out the door of his Soledad Mountain home and run to Ensenada. Or ride a beach cruiser from Vancouver, Canada, to San Diego. Or plant a veritable orchard on a 45-degree slope down the hillside below his house.

Tom Warren does things that don’t occur to other people.

Sane people?

“He’s done some pretty crazy things,” Davis conceded, “but normal people don’t do them because they’re not in the shape he’s in.”

Tom Warren collects wood carvings. He has 800, meaning his four-level house would be a smorgasbord for an enterprising termite. One of the carvings is an elephant that darn near turned over a fork lift when it got here from Thailand.

Things like that.

These are not things that have given him notoriety. These are things his friends know. Of course, he has a lot of friends. You get to know a lot of people when you own a place like Tug’s Tavern in Pacific Beach for 16 years. It’s gone now, but Tug Warren still is chugging along.

Most of Warren’s notoriety comes from athletics. Specifically, it comes from competing in triathlons. More specifically, it comes from competing in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii.

This is not an event for your normal weekend warrior. Those folks might do an occasional 5K or 10K or ride a bicycle for 25 miles through the back country or swim a masters 500 meters. Stress the word normal.

Tom Warren just got back from Hawaii, where he competed in (and finished) his 14th Ironman over the weekend. He finished quite a distance behind winner Mark Allen from Cardiff, but then Warren is 48 now.

He did this one for fun.

Fun?

“I didn’t really train for it,” he said. “I just do what fits in now. I won’t give anything up to get ready for a race. You’ve got to do what’s fun.”

Fun?

The Ironman begins with a 2.4-mile swim, continues with a 110-mile bicycle ride and concludes with a marathon run. Each one of these disciplines is a day of work . . . and weeks of preparation. It might be called the Crazyman rather than the Ironman, and even the participants would likely nod their heads in agreement.

Warren did this one in about 11 hours and 17 minutes. He doesn’t sweat stuff such as the exact minute or how many seconds. When he won it, in 1979, he said he did it in 11 hours and maybe 15 minutes and something.

“I did almost the same time this year I did in my first year,” he said. “Even the splits were almost the same.”

The difference, in terms of placement, is that more and more people are placing more and more emphasis on the Ironman . . . and other triathlons. Warren was among the pioneers. People like Scott Tinley now make a living on just such competitions.

“I won the first 20 times we raced,” Warren said. “Finally, he came to me and said we were even, 20-20. I said, ‘Fine, that’s the end of our rivalry.’ I stopped keeping track.”

Tinley is still keeping track of how many Ironmans each has finished. He is at 12.

“He asked me twice in Hawaii where I was at,” Warren laughed, “and I kept telling him 14. So he asks me why I keep doing them.”

That seems like a reasonable question.

No one, in fact, has finished as many as Warren. An awful lot of well-trained and quite-accomplished runners have never done 14 marathons, much less 14 marathons at the end of 2.4 miles of swimming and 110 miles of cycling.

Tinley should take heart. Tom Warren says he has had enough of all this swimming and bicycling and running. He will spend his time tending his hillside and polishing his wood carvings and dabbling with sensible runs to Rosarito Beach and Oceanside.

“I’m retiring,” he said.

Get out the gold watch.

Maybe not.

Duke Davis shook his head.

“Have I heard that before?” he chuckled. “Only for the last five or six years.”