Crawl of Fame Read online

  JULIE MOSS

  and Robert Yehling

  Foreword by Armen Keteyian

  Happy fortieth anniversary, Ironman. . . . We’ve grown up together.

  Your warm waters, windy lava fields, and searing marathon challenged me to dig down and glimpse the depths of who I could be.

  Your ohana, the athletes who have battled for their finish lines, is the best in sport. It’s been a beautiful relationship that will never end.

  —Love and Mahalo, Julie

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  A long distance triathlon race that consists of a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run. It is often referred to as the ironman distance. The IRONMAN® race that consists of this distance is the formal name of a series of long distance triathlons that is a registered trademark of the World Triathlon Corporation. For purposes of this narrative, all IRONMAN® races will be referred to as “Ironman,” and references to a long distance triathlon race that is outside the purview of the World Triathlon Corporation is referred to as “ironman distance.”

  CONTENTS

  FROM THE COAUTHOR

  FOREWORD BY ARMEN KETEYIAN

  PROLOGUE: FIFTEEN FEET . . .

  1How Do You Spell T-R-I-A-T-H-L-O-N?

  2Cannon Blast: Here We Go!

  3A Finish Like No Other

  4Going Viral, Circa 1982

  5One Article, Two Careers

  6Training Wheels

  7My Fifteen Minutes

  8Girl Power!

  9Riding the Wave: The Rise of Endurance Sports

  10Gripped: Finding Mark Allen

  111989

  12Passing the Torch

  13Shifting Focus

  14Baby Grip Arrives

  15Out of the Spotlight

  16When Iron Breaks

  17Surfing Tsunamis: Raising Mats

  18A Hard Bottom

  19Can I Go Faster?

  20Mother & Son on the PCT

  21Kathleen

  22Kona 2017: What Contingency Plan?

  23My Iron Twin

  24Be Amazing at Any Age

  EPILOGUE

  A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF JULIE MOSS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FROM THE COAUTHOR

  I first met Julie Moss in 1971, when we were students at Valley Middle School in Carlsbad. She was funny, bouncy, and loved to make friends, the kind of girl with whom uber-shy boys like me could connect. She had plenty of personality but no airs, and didn’t belong to cliques or try to impress others. And could she ever light up a classroom! She was the perfect girl to break a shy boy’s trepidation over talking to girls, as she did mine. This was the first time she significantly touched my life.

  We also attended Carlsbad High School at the same time. I was the athlete, for three years on one of San Diego County’s finest cross-country teams, a strong two-miler in track, and a 1:18 half marathoner, which I ran in the 1976 San Dieguito Half Marathon at age sixteen. After Title IX passed in 1972, her freshman year, Julie took advantage of expanding girls’ opportunities to try a variety of sports. She went out for softball as a freshman, basketball as a sophomore, volleyball as a junior, and tennis as a senior.

  Her reflective comment in the book 30 Years of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship, produced for the 2008 Ironman, speaks to what fueled her high school years: “The underlying theme for me is that this triathlon community is real. It’s familiar, and it’s familial. And always a nice source to tap into.”

  She has always craved community, being part of the scene, adding to it, and enlisting her considerable energy and passion to help others help themselves. She routinely offers up a light or wise moment when they can use either. Or both.

  That’s a good thing, because Julie Moss is responsible for transforming triathlon from a small group of endurance sports fanatics into a global sport. It happened overnight—literally—with her crawl across the finish line at the 1982 Ironman, seen by an estimated twenty million stunned viewers on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Some even called ABC’s switchboards to see if Julie had died.

  Like most Carlsbad residents, when I saw the show, I was stunned. Shocked. How did my quirky, fun-loving surfer friend become one of the greatest endurance athletes in the world? When did she get in such great shape? Who anywhere had such drive and determination? When I interviewed her best lifelong friends from Carlsbad, Cindy Conner, Sue Robison, and Jim Watson, we shared our astonishment, which came to us in different ways. At the time, I was the assistant sports editor at the Blade Tribune, a North San Diego County daily newspaper. I wrote the follow-up piece, since I knew her. Sue actually called and, while in tears, warned Julie about the emotional impact of the segment, having watched it in Wyoming an hour before. As for Cindy? “It didn’t register what she did until I saw the show, and then I thought, holy shit! What did she just do?”

  Julie’s crawl was not only an iconic moment in sports history, but the bellwether moment of her life. She took her career further than most, racing professionally for eight years, ranking as high as No. 4 in the world, and winning several major competitions. Then, in an act befitting her selfless nature, she stepped off the very big stage she’d built and switched over to support her husband, the equally legendary Mark Allen, on his record-tying run of six Ironman titles. She returned to Kona in 1997, with Mark then supporting her effort, and then waved farewell to a sport that gave her life purpose, direction, and success. It was time to devote her fullest energies to raising their son, Mats.

  Julie came back to race in 2000 in Oceanside, and in Kona in 2003. However, it was her return to Kona for the 2012 Ironman World Championship that ignited her quest to get into the best shape possible for another shot at racing. She dove headlong into triathlon, and also launched the Iron Icons speaking seminars with Kathleen McCartney, the winner of the 1982 “crawl of fame” race. She competed in races of various lengths, her goals always growing. She stepped up her work to empower women and girls. She took a side trip and, in 2016, nearly became the oldest woman in history to re-qualify as a California State lifeguard (she had been a lifeguard in the early 1980s). She trained with a focus, determination, and discipline exceeding her best professional years.

  Julie became good again. Really good. Then she set a most ambitious goal for a nearly sixty-year-old athlete: to beat her 1982 Kona time, in Kona. In April 2017, she turned the clock back thirty-five years at the Ironman North American Championship, going twenty-three minutes faster than her 1982 Kona result. Granted, the Woodlands course near Houston and elements are less challenging, but how many people in their late fifties can race faster than they did at twenty-three? Earlier in 2018, she matched her 1982 Kona time—11 hours, 10 minutes—in winning her age group at Ironman New Zealand by nearly two hours.

  Crawl of Fame will tell you what happened from there—which makes Julie’s story that much more inspiring and heartwarming.

  During Julie’s halcyon years as the world’s most recognized triathlete, I occasionally ran into her. We mingled at welcoming parties for the Jeep Tri-Prix series and Nike Triterium events, urban short-course triathlons I promoted while working for Julie’s manager, Murphy Reinschreiber, and his business partner, Charlie Graves, both former triathletes. (Charlie later became Mark Allen’s manager.) Whenever Julie turned up at the world surfing tour events I promoted, we invited her to be a guest announcer. She had the gift of gab and ability to entertain, inspire, and bring energy to everyone on the beach with her positive attitude, as contagiously as any you will come across.

  Today, Julie is an iconic Ironman and USA Triathlon Hall of Fame athlete and popular event commentator, and I’m the grateful sidekick in telling the world her story.

  Meanwhile, I’m still engaged in a racing career that resumed in 1998 and i
ncluded five trips to the Boston Marathon and becoming a high school coach. Much of my inspiration to return to racing, after stepping away for twenty years, came from a book I found at a Tampa bookstore in 2000: Workouts for Working People. The authors? Mark Allen and Julie Moss.

  This string of running-related experiences also included Julie writing me two years ago to accept an offer I’d made several times: to write her long-awaited memoir. We’ve had wonderful times, great conversations, and nice runs, as well as a significant run-in visit with an old friend—longtime 60 Minutes correspondent and multiple New York Times bestselling author Armen Keteyian. The coauthor of The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football, Tiger Woods, and other great investigative works of sports journalism, he factors significantly in Julie’s story.

  In 2016, I invited Julie to assist with cross-country practices at our alma mater, Carlsbad High School. It took all of five minutes for our runners to realize her gift, as Julie went to work on their mental approaches, workouts, and form. At our season-ending banquet, which Julie keynoted, runners and parents got the full picture of this ultra-fit middle-aged woman who had been helping the kids: we played the Wide World of Sports footage from 1982. Gasps, cheers, tears, and disbelief filled the room.

  That’s how much of the world, including myself, reacted in 1982—and why Julie Moss is not only an icon and legend in her sport, but one of the most important sportswomen of our lifetime. She inspires. She motivates. She competes. She excels. She makes you feel better about yourself and the world just by striking up a chat. Most of all, she puts smiles on our faces while reminding us what is truly possible if we never give up, if we never quit.

  Looking back, I feel it was destiny that she experienced the most dramatic moment in triathlon’s forty-year history. She was the perfect ambassador for the sport, much as my good friend and four-time Boston Marathon and New York City Marathon champ Bill Rodgers was for distance running. She connected with ordinary people like herself, a complete unknown in 1982, and gave them inspiration to rise off the couch and improve themselves. Millions have since responded. Imagine touching millions of lives . . .

  Enjoy Crawl of Fame.

  —Robert Yehling

  FOREWORD

  by Armen Keteyian

  I just finished reading an advance copy of Chapter Five of Crawl of Fame, so I apologize upfront if what follows sounds a bit emotional. As expressed in that chapter, a passion for truth and fairness has fueled my journalistic, storytelling life for the better part of five decades. Actually, if one is really counting, six decades, dating back to eighth grade at East Hills Junior High School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I won an award for reading the most books by any boy in my class.

  So it should come as no surprise that I had to stop more than once for a couple of deep breaths while taking a trip down a very personal memory lane. I mean, how many chance encounters change both lives? A father, mother, grandparent, coach, counselor, neighbor, wife, or boss changing one life? I get that. Happens all the time. But two lives? No, that’s some very rare air. Yet in a kismet kind of way, that’s exactly what happened back in the winter of 1982—the beginning of a beautiful friendship that remains to this day.

  If you’re holding this book, odds are you know the Julie Moss Story—or at least the marquee captivating-crawl-across-the-finish-line-at-Kona part of it. You know that back in February 1982, the cosmos shifted, and a bolt of black broke through and sent a 23-year-old triathlete sprawling to the ground just a hundred yards from winning the 140.6-mile torture test known as the Ironman Triathlon. As you’re about to find out (as did I), it would hardly be the last time darkness dropped by for a visit, only to see the divine Ms. M rise, recover, and cross arguably more important finish lines in her life.

  I love Julie. I say that as a married man of thirty-eight years. The fact in 2016 we re-connected after nearly thirty-five years—thanks to our dear, mutual friend and triathlon legend Scott Tinley—brought a level of pure joy and happiness that is hard to express. I dare say she feels the same way.

  Now Julie is training to return to Kona in October. Her goal this time is to run a strong race all the way through—at age sixty. You read that right. Six zero. It’s the stuff of movies, legends, maybe both, especially since she will be joined in the race by her son, Mats. Maybe, just maybe, if all goes well, she will try to best her 1982 finish time . . . a fairy tale ending. Regardless, the 2018 race is coming from Julie’s heart, her personal “thank you” to all who have cheered her on.

  To me, Julie’s greatest gift has always been her ability to inspire. To show others that anything is possible, if you can somehow find the strength and courage to get on your feet and keep moving forward. Crawl, walk, swim, bike, run, it doesn’t matter. An inch or a mile, it doesn’t matter. Just try.

  This book, in so many wonderful ways, tells that inspiring story and so much more—tracing the birth of the triathlon community by a small band of renegade athletes, the gods and goddesses of a movement, and their willingness to test the limits of human endurance.

  But make no mistake: In the end, this is one woman’s story—a wonder woman, if you will, whose heroic display of heart changed countless lives, including mine.

  Armen Keteyian

  San Clemente, CA

  PROLOGUE

  Fifteen Feet . . .

  Fifteen feet isn’t very far. When you compare it to, say, 140.6 miles, it is no more than a grain of sand on the beach. A marathon runner can cover it in three strides. You and I can walk it in a couple of seconds.

  But what about crawling fifteen feet after swimming, cycling, and running for eleven hours beforehand? And having your body give out for the whole world to see?

  Those 15 feet led to a final, agonizing thirty-second crawl that changed my life forever. I’ve been told they riveted a Wide World of Sports audience, pushed triathlon into the global spotlight, helped launch today’s endurance sports boom, and in turn told women and men everywhere, “I too can push myself beyond what I thought possible. I can do anything if I give everything I have—and don’t quit.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about any of that as I lay on the ground in Kona, Hawaii, with people and their cameras hovering over me. I just thought to myself, crawl. I thought I could crawl, stay low, and disappear, and everyone would leave me alone so I could get to the finish line.

  The second half of my crawl, something broke open: Wait a minute. What just happened here? You just found yourself.

  I also realized my life would never be the same. I felt like I was in a cartoon where I moved really fast to the finish line, only to have it end slowly and painfully slow. Forget about that, said the voice inside, the voice I never knew existed. What happened here? You just found a way to tap into a source you didn’t know existed. If you can do this, wow, life is going to be really different.

  First, I had to crawl over the finish line . . .

  Many people have written about the 1982 Ironman World Championship. Now, finally, I share my story of what legendary Wide World of Sports host Jim McKay famously called, “the most agonizing moment I’ve ever seen in sports,” and everything that happened before and since. Like my inner voice said, life became really different.

  —Julie Moss

  CHAPTER 1

  How Do You Spell T-R-I-A-T-H-L-O-N?

  I sat in a marine biology class in Palomar College, wondering why I’d chosen the course. It was the hardest class I’d ever taken; there was no screwing around. I’d never worked this hard in high school, why start now? I signed up for an easier ride to a degree, much like the way I envisioned the rest of my life.

  The universe had other plans—but not right away.

  By the time I transferred to Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, I had gotten caught up again in being an independent college girl . . . no curfews, no one to answer to, being my own boss—and a pretty liberal boss at that. I remember a class in statistics. After the third or fourth session, I skipped class to go s
urfing. After falling behind, I went to the tutor’s office and asked, “Could you give me the formulas I’m probably going to have to know to pass the class?” That’s how I passed the class, by going to a couple of tutoring sessions. Then I took the same muscle anatomy class as the premed students, so no punches were pulled. It was tough. After dropping it twice, I took it a third time, the semester before I graduated—and passed with a D. I found it interesting, but rote memory and I didn’t get along too well.

  My approach to school was simple. I did what I needed to do when pushed up the wall and it was crunch time. I was spontaneous, disorganized, and flew by the seat of my pants. My roommate and best friend Lisette and I would leave at 2:00 in the morning to go to Esalen, the mineral baths in Big Sur, when they’d open to the public for massages and you could use the cliff-top pools. We’d get back in time for that morning’s final. If the surf was up, I didn’t bother.

  Ever hit the rewind button on your life—and see answers to how you grew into the person you are today? One advantage of reflecting is that we can hit those rewind and replay buttons, view our experiences from different angles, see a deeper purpose or direction, and grow forward with a broader perspective, a richer story.

  So, for a little sporting fun that morphed into a personal growth saga, and turned me from an unknown, barely-getting-by student and surfer into “the girl who put triathlon on the map,” let’s hit the rewind button:

  February 6, 1982: California Surfer Girl shows up in Kona well over her red head—only she doesn’t know it yet.

  Remember that late-1990s prime-time show Early Edition? Kyle Chandler (who would later star in the TV series Friday Night Lights and Bloodline on Netflix) receives a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper the day before its headline event occurs. With that foreknowledge, he prevents those terrible events from happening.