New Parts Up and Running, Ironman Puts His Mind to It

Everyone should have a creed. “Give me liberty or give me death” was a pretty good one, as was JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you.”

Andrew Durham also lives by a creed. “It’s that you can never be too thin at the waist, or too broad at the shoulders or able to utilize too much oxygen,” he says.

OK, so it’s not Founding Father’s stuff. It works for Durham. His measure of adherence to that creed is what he calls “the Terminator index.”

“It’s named for Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said. “You take your jacket measurement and subtract your waist measurement, and the larger the result the better. I’ve gone from a 7, which is fairly wimp-like, to a 12, which is respectable: a 30-inch waist and a Size 42 jacket.”

Not many people know their resting pulse, content just to have one. Durham clocks his at 60 beats a minute, up from his prime of 53, but a good sight better than the average adult resting pulse of 72.

He looks a bit like a young, innocent Peter Sellers. He may not have the chiseled, bulked-out appearance of a mirror-worshiping bodybuilder, but he’s got credentials.

A weighty iron medal hangs on a wall in his Irvine condo, a hard-won memento from his participation in the 1982 Ironman triathlon, the world’s premier hard-guy contest held each year in Hawaii. He swam 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles and raced 26.2 miles on foot to finish 453rd in a field of 780.

Now 38, he’s steadily gearing up to tackle the Ironman again someday. It isn’t age that’s slowing his approach to the event. Rather, it is because this Ironman might more aptly be called Titanium Man. Durham is the sort of guy who drives metal detectors nuts.

He used to log 20,000 miles a year on his custom-made bike, often spending a Saturday riding to San Diego and back. One day in 1987, while riding in Santiago Canyon, a car hit him, and, as he puts it, “the car won.” The bike was totaled, and Durham was scarcely in any better shape.

He spent the next three years and two months hospitalized, the first eight weeks of that in a coma. “I was in several different hospitals, in various states of consciousness. I was functionally dead for a long time. My life was ruled by doctors. It was not a fun time, though given the alternative you really can’t complain too much,” he said.

When he finally got out of the hospital in May of 1990, it was in a wheelchair, with a titanium tube where his left femur (the long bone of the thigh) had been. “The doctor said it wasn’t even worth saving the pieces as a souvenir,” Durham recalled of his original femur.

He progressed to crutches and then a cane, which he abandoned two years ago. His gait now is uncomfortable even to watch, yet he walks more than 40 miles a week, most of that to and from the gym, for which he departs at 4:30 a.m. every 48 hours. He makes a point of swimming twice a week, even though he loathes the water, likening it to sensory deprivation.

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Prior to his accident, Durham had already had several surgeries for bad shoulder joints and knees. He prefers to take a lighthearted attitude to his situation.

“Everybody has certain jobs in life, and one of mine is to keep orthopedic surgeons employed,” he says.

He was born without a section of shoulder joint that keeps the arm from popping out, hence his did. He had his first surgery while an undergrad at Yale. “My right arm got so loose in its socket that I’d raise my hand in class and my arm would pop out. My professors thought I was being rude by not putting my hand down. And I couldn’t! So there’s piece of metal in there now that holds it.”

There’s a symmetrical scar on his left shoulder where he underwent surgery on that joint two years later, followed by microsurgeries on his knees for conditions worsened by his running. “You’d think I’d qualify for a quantity discount by now,” he quipped. He is considering yet another major surgery, to replace his new femur, because when he attempts anew to run with it every day, he loses his balance.

His dining-room table is covered with neat piles of stuffed Manila folders, his files for a doctoral dissertation he expects to soon be undertaking. He holds an MBA from Stanford. Prior to retiring as a result of his accident, he’d been project manager with a general contracting firm that built a number of country tracts, including the one in which he lives. He’s now planning a career jump, to marketing professor.

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Is he perhaps driving to have such physical and mental control of himself to make up for the lack of control he had over his life following the accident?

“No, that’s just my general nature. I’m an incredible A-type personality. I have this notion of showing up for my first day of class with my dissertation already written. I’m very driven, and I like to live life just the way I want to live. That has been screwed with for a while, but now it’s just back on track. You’d have to kill me before I’d give up.

“And as certain friends of mine would point out, I drive myself so hard that--and this is a fault of which I’m absolutely guilty--I tend to be incredibly self-centered.”

He’s not the sort to hang out at the gym and gab. He used to play soccer and tennis, “but it’s not much of an opportunity to push yourself. It’s fun, but I’m not that big on fun. I want a workout, to get stronger and thinner,” he said.

His lifestyle isn’t heavy on fun. He rarely reads fiction. Shelves have titles on economics and sports medicine. He wears a 10-year-old $25 Casio sports watch and drives Volkswagens until they expire. “I had 330,000 miles on the one I had before my present one and was mad at my parents for selling it when I was in the hospital,” he said.

He’d ballooned from a 30-inch waist to a 38 when he was in the hospital, but it didn’t take long to get back to his old form. This, by the way, is almost entirely due to his calorie-burning activities, as he hardly limits his intake.

“I’m a junk-food junkie of the worst type, a connoisseur of fast-food places,” he admits. Lunch “almost invariably” is two slices and a diet Coke at Z Pizza. His regimen also includes fish tacos and Parmesan sourdough burgers.

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Though he goes the budget route in other areas, “the only consumer good I care about is a bicycle,” he says. As soon as he’s comfortable with his balance running, he intends to fork over about $3,500 for a state-of-the-art bike, made--as is some of the leg that will power it--of titanium.

The last time he did the Ironman, it took him more than 13 hours, and he says it’s the 12-hour mark that really separates the men from the boys. He’s convinced he can shave five minutes from his previous swim time and gain a half-hour on the bike course with this strength. The marathon would be his biggest hurdle, as it was when he had undamaged legs.

“I can swim it, and I can ride forever, but that was the only marathon I’ve ever done. The most I’d ever run is 12 miles. And in the Ironman I was tired from the other two events when I started running.”

Though he can’t run without toppling, he’s determined he will be able to. He’s set no timetable, but he has no doubt he’ll get there. He has a similar confidence about his doctoral degree. He’s not as secure in all areas, though.

“Life for me breaks down into three different games: intellectual, physical and the emotional. Quite frankly, there aren’t many people better than me at the first two. There aren’t many people more smart than I am or more athletic, but I can count the times I’ve been in love on two fingers.

“I think about that a lot. I’m not the most outgoing person in the world. I’m certainly missing out on a portion of life, but that’s because the first two parts are so important to me that they take up most of my time. And as has been said to me by a former boss, I do not suffer fools easily.”

Does that mean he needs someone brighter than he?

“There’s an assumption in your question,” he said.

That there is someone brighter?

“There are people brighter than me for sure, but locating them isn’t easy,” he said with a laugh. In the meantime, he’s still not gotten over the most recent of his loves, he said.

There is Salli, however, his black and white dog acquired from “the discount dog store,” as Durham refers to the pound. He found Salli in with the sixth-day dogs, meaning she was one day away from being put to sleep.

“Frankly, I’m not the best guy in the world, but given the choice between me and death, hey . . . “ he said.

It is Salli who dutifully gets him up at 4:30 every morning as the newspaper truck goes by, and he starts his training day.

Why does Durham care so much about reaching an optimum?

“There’s no reason behind it, except why not?” he said. “It’s trying to find the limit. How smart can I be? How fast can I be? If you are in fact capable of doing more with yourself, why let it go to waste?”