This is the seventh of ten untold stories about the incredible moments of personal challenge and the decisions made that led to the 1989 side-by-side eight-hour battle between Dave Scott and Mark Allen. Everyone has seen accounts of the race itself. Neither Dave nor Mark have told this story from each of their perspectives. But, more importantly, no one has ever heard the details of each of their personal journeys during the year leading up to The Greatest Race Ever Run.

In the upcoming stories Dave and Mark will reveal their personal struggles, their daily triumphs, and the seemingly impossible challenges that brought them to this iconic clash.

Both Dave Scott and Mark Allen hit their stride in their Kona preparations as the race marched ever closer. Dave was hidden away in Davis, California. Mark had narrowed his team to a select few. By early September, each was setting new personal standards in training that dissolved any doubt about the kind of race these two great athletes would be capable of putting together in October.

A note about one of the unsung heroes of the sport of triathlon who just happens to be Dave Scott’s father. Back in the days before triathlon had even figured out its distances Verne Scott was the chief cook, dishwasher and the constant voice of reason as the sport grew. Besides being Dave’s chauffeur and number one supporter (or number two if you count Dave’s Mom Dot) as an athlete, he was also a key figure in US Masters Swimming and a member of the USMS Hall of Fame. Verne was one of the rocks upon which the sport stabilized and grew. Every triathlete who has ever towed a start line owes Verne a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid except maybe to say thank you.

Scott Zagarino

Mark Allen

“In the week that followed my passed-out, head-on collision with a rock-hard porcelain urinal my life no longer felt like mine. The dreams of seven years in the sport and the effort and focus I put into them were gone. I no longer wanted to race, train, or do anything that pushed me. I wanted to sink into absolute nothingness. It was like I had just been hit by a speeding car and I was lying in the middle of the road screaming, “Don’t touch me! Just let me lay here.”

The impact had been minor on my body. I had a knot on my forehead for a few days. But the devastation to my mental state was nearly fatal. I couldn’t anchor myself in any purpose, identity, or reason to even get out of bed. It wasn’t like being depressed, but more not knowing how to put my life into gear and slowly step on the gas. 

I had pulled the plug on racing in Kona for the second time in 1989. The first time had been when I started back to training in January after my devastating three-flat, fifth place finish the previous year in Hawaii. Now, with less than two months left to the race, I pulled the plug again. I even stopped thinking about Dave Scott. He could have the race and another victory. I wasn’t willing to pay the price I seemed to be exacting on my body to try to be his worthy opponent and a viable threat to the crown jewel in the sport of triathlon.

I tried going for a few easy runs on the trails near my house in Boulder, Colorado, to try to ground myself in something familiar—something that for years had brought me so much joy. The runs helped some, and I did feel more engaged with life while I was running. But the second I cleaned up afterward, I floated back into life without purpose and no idea how to find it.” 

Dave Scott

“There are workouts stamped into my long-term memory bank as the key sessions that measured and solidified my fitness. I can recall these specifically for each training year in my annual ramp up to Kona. These “marker” or “test” sets were vital for my assessment of my physical state. Equally important was the short-term stamp of satisfaction derived from these sessions. I relished the opportunity to establish or break my individual time trials as a testament to my readiness for Kona.  

Nearing the end of August and into the first week of September, my short-term goals were to rewrite a few of my marker sets for each discipline as well as in my strength program. All of the standards were done by myself with the exception of my swim and shared with my three close mates—Pat, Mike, and John. I devised the marker sets, but the three of them knew the value of the physical and psychological gains from these test sets. In late August, my incentive was to set new standards for myself. They knew from my success in previous years…

… that achieving my preparatory goals for Kona was paramount for a very fast race. All three buddies would be traveling to Kona in October to support me. 

In fact, throughout all of my Ironman races, the loyal threesome had come to Kona offering their support and insight. John, Mike, and Pat had an internal dial to my brain chemistry, whether it was in regard to maintaining my daily life rhythms or diving deeply into my psyche about racing. If there was time to bring up Mark in a positive but motivational comment, they knew how to plant the emotional seed to heighten my quest to win. In numerous conversations with them throughout 1989, they anticipated a potential close battle with Mark. The premise of their insight was Mark’s subpar performance in the 1988 Ironman and my decision to drop out of that race. They recognized both of us needed the ultimate race to win in 1989.  

John had traveled with me to the Gold Coast earlier in the year and had witnessed Mark’s victory. He recognized Mark’s brilliance in that race and also how close he came in our 1987 Ironman race. I had passed Mark at mile 22 on the marathon (which is 26.2 miles/42 kilometers). Having fallen behind by five minutes during the marathon run, John knew I had to dig deeply to beat him. 

Mike was also brutally honest, and he recognized my training had to reach new levels not just to break my record, but also physically and psychologically beat Mark. The Ironman is not just about the physical tools each athlete brings to the event. The professionals are keenly aware of their competitors’ race results throughout the year, but for the World Championships the mindset to extract your highest probability of success is engrained in the buildup to the race. I always felt Mark was vulnerable in Kona. He spoke freely about having difficulty with the island of Hawaii and battling the elements. He seemed to have a worry that engulfed him when racing me in Kona. I could feel this weakness and it heightened my belief that I could beat him in this upcoming race. 

Despite the inner confidence based on my previous six victories, there was always a subtle cloud that reminded me—Mark will be ready to race.” 

Mark Allen

“I had already committed to doing the crazy, epic-sounding, 150-mile ride to Wiggins with my close friend Ken Souza. It was scheduled for exactly one week after my pool incident. I knew I had to do that ride to support his training. He was counting on me being there, and for me to not just show up but to be ready to pull my share of the load during the ride. 

And so Ken  and I met for the Wiggins ride. Even though in my mind I was already a retired triathlete who a week earlier had felt completely burned out and done with the sport, surprisingly, I was really excited for the ride! Maybe a week of a few easy runs was what I had needed more than anything. Could it be that I shouldn’t have been in such a rush to move on from racing? Souza and I headed out, our jersey pockets jammed with food and extra water bottles.

I’d never ridden over about 115 miles in my life. And I’d never ridden east through the farmlands outside of Boulder. We were going on a road where neither of us knew exactly what it would bring. 

Our course turned out to be almost a carbon copy of the undulations in Kona. There were extended rolling hills that seemed flat but weren’t. It was hot and exposed. It was lonely with little changing in the landscape from one hour to the next. Yes, Ken had been right—it was the perfect Kona prep ride.

Wait a minute—I was comparing the Wiggins ride to the Kona course. I found myself plotting, planning, and executing the endless miles on that Wiggins ride with the same droning attention it took to stay with it mentally in the Ironman.” 

Dave Scott

“In an effort to refine my psychological status over the final month of preparation, I included key workouts or what I call “marker sets.” These are simply test sets that hopefully indicated I was ready. They were measurable and designed by me. During the sets, which were punishing, I would see and feel myself racing in Kona. 

The driving motivation during my triathlon years had been embedded during my college swim career. I had timed a 3,000-yard session every Tuesday during my entire four years of swimming. I had hated the psychological torment of this grueling session, but after college I recognized the elevated level of perseverance and tenacity I gained from annihilating myself on those swims. I had raced the clock as determined by my swim coach, and this solo application had now been implemented into my final approach for the 1989 race. 

Kona was longer than my college sessions, with a 2.4-mile (3,800-meter) swim. The marker set needed to exceed my collegiate effort, so I decided to swim a one-hour time trial.

Fortunately, on this marker swim set, I had Wendy to race. She was and is a close friend and former collegiate-distance swimmer. She had a punishing mentality and was the perfect training partner for this swim. We set the date and had our times recorded. At 5,000 yards (4500m) I was able to slightly break Wendy and continued to put on a small margin over the final ten minutes. Maintaining a pace that was considerably faster than any previous Kona swim, I felt capable of going under 50 minutes for the upcoming Ironman. In previous years, my time had been 50-minutes plus. My goal in 1989 was to eclipse the 50-minute barrier. Equally important, when I pulled away from Wendy, I visualized myself gapping Mark in the race.  

After completing the swim, I felt fatigued but refreshed by my performance. I suggested to Wendy that we do it again exactly one week later. She agreed. The next week, our pace per 100 yards was slightly faster. Similar to the previous week, around the 5000-yard mark I was able to gap Wendy—simultaneously, the visual of Mark falling off the pace was deeply cast into my stream of confidence.   

These training games always came back to the two simple questions. “What is Mark doing for his test sets?” “Is he lagging behind my new standards or is he superseding them?” The unknown answers to these questions provided me with motivation and a determination to be relentless with my training.   

However, even if I was capable of breaking the 50-minute barrier, the swim was less than 10% of the Ironman race. Mike reminded me that the marathon would ultimately decide the race—and I was the fastest runner. At the same time, he cautioned me, “Mark will be ready, and you must ratchet up your level.” Mike was first and foremost a runner. He ended up competing in four Ironman races, but the run was always his best discipline. He recognized my improvement in my overall running ability and knew I had an internal “barometer of discomfort” that was relentless. However, he also knew Mark was a gifted runner. During our training runs he would goad or bait me to push harder knowing Mark may have the race of his life in October. 

We decided my 18-mile (approximately 30km) run training loop in Davis, California, would be my running marker test. The course was flat with the temperature in the low 90 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius), which would be hotter or equal to Kona. I decided to run at what I felt should be my race pace. My goal was to run comfortably at a 6-minute mile (3:45/km).   

After a short warm-up, I was locked into my pace. As I have mentioned, wearing a wristwatch was a new tool for me, but it allowed me to break down those farm roads into exact one-mile increments checking my splits along the way. I held my pace until the last three miles. Running the final three miles back into town, I envisioned myself next to Mark—and I knew it was the moment to accelerate the tempo.   

My final three miles were timed at 5:40, 5:25, and 5:12. By running standards, nothing earth shaking, but I knew from this run the times were doable coming off the 112-mile bike leg in Kona. The goal was accomplished. The session had allowed me to regain my confidence, but there was still a lingering question: “Could Mark hold this pace?” 

Mark Allen

“That my brain so naturally compared the Wiggins ride to the Kona course shocked me. How could I have been completely done with everything about triathlons including Ironman, and then in a matter of miles passing underneath me with my training buddy next to me so easily turn the faucet back on? Was it that I’m hardwired to feel comfortable when I’m focused on an athletic challenge? Was I falling back into something because it was the most familiar way of being for me? 

At the time, I didn’t have the answer. But now looking back I can tell you without question that it was the undeniable force of the Island that was involved in the events of that week. The Island knew I had to be there in full force, but it also knew it would never happen if I didn’t take a break—and I wasn’t going to give myself that luxury. So my break got arranged with the “accident” of passing out. In fact, the last thought I had before I passed out was about Kona and the realization that I needed a break for a few days. Well, that got put in play.

It was also the Island that didn’t let me escape thinking about it for too long. It only took about three hours of riding the endless farmland roads eastward before Kona crept back into my awareness.

Without trying, I realized there was finally no question—I would go back to Hawaii in six weeks. I wasn’t even trying to convince myself to go back. The feeling just enveloped me. I also knew before we were halfway to the turnaround at 75 miles that Ken had come up with a ride that was easily a match for the mind-numbing roads and heat Dave Scott was training on at that exact moment in Davis, California.

This is how it happens in those magic moments during training when something just locks me into a new level without any effort on my part to make it happen. You can’t “plan” for those big leaps. You can’t say, “I want Monday to be the day I become a new me.” No, it’s more a jump that is likely the sum of hundreds of other workouts that seemed to be nothing special, but that added to the foundation that eventually became big enough to support another level. This was one of those days.”

My cycling goal for my marker test was to break the seven-minute mark on Cardiac. Additionally, I wanted to time trial back to Davis with a goal of under one hour for the 27-mile distance. Beating Steve’s standard was my added incentive to the time trial, and I felt that if I accomplished this goal it would be a precursor to a fast bike in Kona. In my mind, achieving this test would be a true statement to my pre-Kona cycling fitness.   

I came in at under 7 minutes on the climb and set a new record at 58 minutes for the 27-mile ride. Knowing Mark was extremely strong on the bike, I felt this time was a critical benchmark for me and a quiet reminder Mark could be beatable on any discipline—I hoped.”

Steve Larsen, probably the only professional who competed and won major races as a mountain biker, road biker and triathlete, died on October 20, 2009 at the age of 39 after collapsing during a running workout. It has been incorrectly reported that he died of a heart attack. Steve left behind his wife Carrie and their five children. Steve will always be remembered by his friends and training partners.

Mark Allen

“The turnaround at Wiggins at the midpoint of our training ride was all it was sold to be by Ken. It was unspectacular. Just a gas station with food and water to buy so we could get back home. And, just as Souza had said, we would be so far east of Boulder we wouldn’t even be able to see the Rockies. He was right. I didn’t know the curve of the earth was that dramatic. 

Just under seven hours after we started, Ken and I completed our first Wiggins ride. And something had fundamentally changed in me in the same way training in New Zealand had changed me. I was tired and exhausted, but I’d managed and completed a ride that even weeks before I would have said was impossible to do more than just survive. But we worked it all the way to the end—and it was custom tailored to get me ready for the 112-miles in Kona.

I knew I still needed more pieces to fall in place for Kona to be a success, though, especially when it came to my run. Although it was my strength in every other race in which I competed, the run was my consistent downfall in Hawaii. The run there is not flat, but there is only one real hill. It’s the climb out of the town of Kona on Palani Road, before you take the left turn onto the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway.

Every other year I had prepared for Kona, I had done all my runs on flat to rolling trails and roads. I figured Dave had to be running on pancake-flat, mind-numbing roads in Davis and it worked for him. He was like a steam engine without brakes on the marathon segment in Kona. But I had learned over the years that even though it was not a classic hilly course, Kona still beat up my legs to the point where the muscle breakdown was intense. The pain in my quads in the second half of the marathon was always excruciating. And when it got intense, I had to have a big fight with the survival part of my brain that tried to slow me down. In all my previous years in Kona, the survival part had always won out—and I knew I needed to do something different this time around.

So, I did completely the opposite of my run training the previous six years. I did a fifteen-mile loop in the mountains west of Boulder that was so hilly and demanding that if I ran it hard, my legs would feel very close to how they felt near the end of the marathon in Kona. I didn’t have to race for eight hours to get to that point. I could do it in about an hour and a half on a route called the Switzerland Trail.

The muscle breakdown that happened on the downhill parts of the Switzerland Trail was punishing. It was pounding and pounding and pounding to the point that by the end of the run it was tough to even consider doing it again in the future: kind of like racing Kona!

I had done this route many times in the past, but never close to the Ironman in October. It seemed unnecessary. Why run an intense, hilly loop to get ready for a course that was more or less flat? But now it made perfect sense. We get stronger when we recover from hard training that breaks down muscle. I didn’t know what Dave Scott did to prepare his legs for the beating they always took in Hawaii, but I knew he had nothing like this run to toughen them up.

I recruited my training buddies once again. This one was my plan. We did the loop only twice in the final six weeks before Hawaii. That would be enough. The first time we went hard. The second time, we basically sprinted the downhills to maximize the impact. It was secret training that only a handful of us did. Even when I told others about it later, they didn’t get why it would work to get me ready for Kona. But sometimes you have to experience something to grasp how potent it is. This was one of those things that needed to be experienced.

I was getting ready. Two Wiggins rides and two times over the Switzerland Trail made me physically and mentally stronger than I had ever been before. Yet, there was still one piece missing to put me in a place where I knew without a doubt I could race start to finish in Hawaii. 

I didn’t even know I was missing this piece, though. It would take until my return to San Diego three weeks prior the race in Kona before I found out what that piece was.”

Dave Scott

“When I watched video coverage of my Ironman wins, I saw that my running form was unsightly. I wasn’t fluid, my chest was high, my feet were slightly everted, and my low back compensated for my tight hip flexors. What allowed me to run fast was my core and gluteal strength. I had been crazy about strength training since high school, and I had continued that obsession through college and into my triathlon career.  

Throughout every season, I had several marker strength tests I used to measure my strength gains. As a carryover from my teens to twenties, maintaining my strength as an endurance athlete was a prerequisite. I had the belief and a bit of science knowledge that the added strength training could and would compensate for faulty biomechanics. My awkward running style could be overcome by having strength above and beyond any other triathlete. My strength was going to take me to victory. 

Nearing every Ironman race, I wanted my strength to be within 90% of my peak strength periods from early season. And, as unsightly as my form looked, there had been previous Ironman races, including my sixth win over Mark, where I felt like a gliding gazelle! As such, I savored and pressed all of my strength workouts with the same zeal as my swim, bike, and run sessions.   

The exercises didn’t replicate muscle-specific movement patterns nor were they functional but merely a combination of Olympic and powerlifting exercises. I implemented strength training four times per week, including a whole heap of core work, upper-body exercises, and my mainstay of doing over a 100 bar dips. Again, my driving force was creating dominance in this arena. When you don’t know what your competitors are doing, the validity of your training could also never be known. I just had to believe my strength training was a vital fourth ingredient to win in Kona.  

This year, having the added strength would be paramount for the battle with Mark. I had to be stronger in every element of preparation—because Mark would be ready.”