Visions of glowing women, conversations with Hawaiian spirits, and other everyday training secrets of the world's best triathlete

By John Brant

There is neither tic nor jiggle to Mark Allen, yet there is also nothing clenched. Physical energy forms the one true tool of his withering trade, and he wields it carefully yet forcefully.

Watch him, for instance, on the pier at Kailua, just as the sun lifts over Mauna Loa, a few minutes before the start of the 1990 Hawaii Ironman Triathlon. It will be the most important race of Allen's life; part of the peculiar nature of the Ironman, however, is that it will be the most important race of all the competitors' lives--all 1,386 of them--and just now the pier is awash in equal parts of adrenaline and the light of a tropical dawn. All but a few of the athletes are already in the water, bobbing and paddling, burning off anxiety and exhausting precious glycogen stores. But Allen, the defending champion, the course record holder, the winner of 19 consecutive triathlons over all distances, the man who over the next eight hours will attempt to stamp his mark indelibly upon the sport, holds himself apart.

He's sitting on a bench in the early sun, his limbs relaxed. Other top-flight male triathletes, men such as Dave Scott, Scott Tinley, and Mike Pigg, project a bristling, burly aura just before a big race, but the six-foot-tall, 155-pound Allen-supple, clean-limbed, even-featured-blends into his surroundings like a deer in a meadow. Reporters cluster, cameras click, but Allen wastes no energy trying to oblige or deny them. Wearing black tights, a white T-shirt, and a Mona Lisa smile, he sits still: no nervous chatter, no nibbling lips, no deep breaths. After a few minutes he draws off his tights. After another minute, he works out of his T-shirt, drifts to the edge of the dock, and sits dangling his legs by a wooden piling. At last, with a final adjustment to his goggles, he slips without a splash into the shining Pacific.

Now jump ahead four hours and observe Allen in full sail, in the late-middle reaches of the Ironman's 112-mile bike stage, out along the windiest and wildest and hottest stretch of the Queen Kaahumanu Highway. This is the desolate province of centuries-old lava spills, the backyard of the fire goddess Pele, where ground temperatures often crest above 100 degrees and where only a few squat trees endure against the blasting, blistering mumuku winds.

For more than 50 miles now, Allen has been bull-goosing a lead pack consisting of, besides himself, triathletes Rob Mackle and Wolfgang Dittrich, a clattering network chopper, a sound truck, a timing truck, race marshals on mopeds, and--cutting in and out of the clot of vehicles--the pickups and motorcycles of the media. It is at once the most sapping and most intense moment of the entire day. The cyclists are hurtling back from the Hawi turnaround, all traces of freshness long spent, homing in on Kailua and a 26.2-mile run along much of this same hellish strip of pavement. It's at this point, at the day's first physical and psychological ebb, the the true Ironman begins. Most of what's gone before, amazingly, has been prologue.

Dittrich and Mackle, both strapping, heavily muscled men, are slurping water and chomping bananas, their faces contorted with the effort to keep close to Allen. Ten yards ahead, Allen cycles fluidly, intently, cheeks drawn, seemingly taking energy from the heat and noise and pressure. His thoughts, meanwhile, run on three different planes. He is in the moment, honing his form and monitoring present conditions. He is projecting ahead into the marathon, anticipating what combination of nourishment and tactics taken now will serve him best in the footrace And he is thinking back to the little blue church and the lightness and power he discovered there.

The little blue church--St. Peter by the Sea--sits postcard-pretty on a southern corner of Kailua Bay, at the lip of the coral-laced Pacific. Early missionaries and other Europeans arriving on Hawaii's Big Island chose stunning settings for their churches, often building them on land already held sacred by the natives. The little blue church, for instance, occupies a heiau, a spot where native surfers have often paused to ask a blessing from their ancestors, or aumakuas before committing themselves to the pounding waves. Mark Allen first entered the little blue church in October 1989, a few days before that year's Ironman. At that time, he was riding a seven-year cycle of futility on the Kona Coast. Although he'd been among the world's top triathletes from the day he entered the sport-winning six World Triathlon Championship titles and finishing no lower than second place in more than 90 percent of the races he'd entered-he had never captured triathlon's crown jewel, the Hawaii Ironman, the event by which all triathletes are finally judged.

Six times previously Allen had competed at Kona, always arriving in first-rate condition and often leading until very late in the race. Each time, however, something calamitous had happened: In 1982 he was holding a comfortable lead midway through the cycling stage when his derailleur snapped, forcing him out of the race; in '87 he held a commanding lead well into the marathon but was hit with debilitating stomach cramps and internal bleeding, and finished second, in '88 his bike sustained two flat tires--one of them while he was leading the cycling stage. Allen, in short, seemed as hexed in Hawaii as Dave Scott, six-time Ironman champion, seemed blessed.

Or, less politely, you could say that Allen always choked at the Ironman. "There are some places in the world where you feel good and strong, and others where you feel a sense of not belonging, of being out of place," says Allen. "Whenever I looked at Dave Scott on the island, I could see that he was just blossoming, that he truly felt at home there. But when I got to the Big Island, I always felt like a visitor at somebody else's house. I loved the waves, the air, the light, but I couldn't find any part of myself there. On Hawaii, I could never find anything that reminded me of who I was."

Which is what drew him to the little blue church. "I realized I had to bring something to the race that conveyed my own strength and nature," he says. "So I brought some small things from my house. Then as I sat in the church I saw all the healers of the island--the kahunas--appear before me. They told me, yes, I could race the way I hoped, but first I must show courage. When you're out there, racing for so long in all that heat, a lot of thoughts and doubts go through your head. You ask yourself, Do I have the courage to win, or will I just settle for second place? The kahunas were telling me I had to have the courage to go through the race and win. I had to be brave."

Such metaphysical ponderings are probably no less common among athletes than others, but athletes--particularly professional ones--are far less likely to acknowledge them or to spend time probing the riddle of identity. For that reason, skeptics may smirk at Allen's revelations in St. Peter by the Sea. But there can be no smirking at what he went forth and accomplished: His battle with Dave Scott in the 1989 Ironman stands as one of the finest athletic contests ever fought. For 140.6 miles two impeccably trained athletes tore at each other. Scott, bronzed, muscular, supremely confident, set a seemingly superhuman pace, and Allen, fluid, lean, self-contained, stayed perched on his shoulder. Finally, during the last few miles of the marathon, eight hours after the race had started, Mark Allen, vision-seeker and erstwhile choker, passed up Scott and slowly pulled away, shattering Scott's own course record by nearly 20 minutes and winning his first Ironman by a margin of 58 seconds.

Already ascendant, Allen catapulted from his '89 Ironman victory into a state of triathloning grace, fulfilling at last the promise of his two nicknames: "The Grip," which refers to his reputation for staggering workouts, and "Zen Master," a clue to his more ineffable qualities, the ones that set him on the trail of the spiritual mother lode. He extended his winning streak at major triathlons to 19, emerging victorious at all distances in races worldwide. In the past year, the 33-year-old Allen has prevailed over growing numbers of talented triathletes, many of whom are ten years his junior.

"He's become the man to beat, any race or any distance," says Mike Pigg, 1988 Triathlete of the Year and the last man to beat Allen. "Basically, nobody can run with Mark and bike with Mark. On a real good day, you might be able to do one or the other, but nobody can do both."

Mark Allen stretched out on a couch in his airy, freshly renovated house in Cardiff, a small town north of San Diego, taking a breather between workouts and addressing a sudden imbalance in his carefully tended universe. With the 1990 Hawaii Ironman two weeks away, he and his wife, elite triathlete Julie Moss, have just returned from summer training in Boulder, Colorado, to discover that Dave Scott has withdrawn from the race due to a nagging knee injury. Allen is now forced to rethink his strategy, to factor in Scott's absence yet remain unmoved by it.

"Dave's always been a real reliable guy to key off of over there," says Allen. "This year, I'm going to have to take sole responsibility for setting the pace. You need other people to key off at the Ironman, but not really to race against, because you can only really race for a few hours, a small percentage of the day. Early on, you have to feel like you're simply training through the race. At the end of the bike stage, before the run, you have to feel fresh, like you haven't really gone hard yet."

It is precisely at this point in a long triathlon--when athletes have already swum and biked their hearts out and now must face a marathon--that Allen typically flowers and excels. Dave Scott, in Hawaii, is the only other athlete in the world who can compare with him at this moment. Scott says what sets them apart is a kind of fluidity, an ability to let the muscles loosen when their natural inclination is to tighten and freeze.

"Mark's a unique athlete, a clean machine," says massage therapist Michael Rubano, who has been working with Allen since 1983. "His muscles are more supple than those of other triathletes. When most people picture triathletes, they see muscles like rocks. But the truth is, when the body is properly nourished and when the mind is in the right place, the muscles actually soften."

For all his soft muscles and New Age theories, however, Allen has a surprisingly hardheaded talent for the business end of the sport. His success (particularly in France, where he is frequently stopped for autographs on the street) has earned Allen lucrative corporate sponsorships from athletic gear heavyweights such as Nike, Oakley, and Huffy. His face has appeared on Kellogg's Pro Grain cereal boxes. For the Ironman, he and Moss stay in a secluded seaside condo at one of the Kona Coast's tonier complexes. Allen's yearly income- split about equally between endorsements and prize winnings- is nearly $500,000, far and away the highest in the sport and a somewhat touchy subject with his fellow triathletes.

Allen's status also allows him to race more selectively than his competitors. During the last two years he has competed only ten times per season, about half the appearances typically made by others of his stripe. This is due largely to his financial security, but there are other considerations. "I don't like to race as much as those other guys," Allen says. "I get a great deal of enjoyment out of training-running or riding out in Colorado, for instance, just to look out at that mountain or that valley, to admire it all. If you don't appreciate training, day by day, what good is it? More often than not, people fall short of what they've planned because they're sending their bodies negative reinforcement. If you send the body positive thoughts, it will absorb them so much better. When you're really going hard, you feed on the fact that you're going hard. Your mind empties into your legs or your bike and everything becomes really efficient. It's cleansing." He pauses, then says, "The ultimate aim is to be in a race when that happens."

Allen straightens his legs on the couch, and his lips crease into a thin smile. "Over in Hawaii, almost every mile of the highway is marked. If you've entered that free space in your mind, you don't even notice the markers. But if your mind isn't free," he concludes, his smile flattening, "then you see every one of them."

The first time Mark Allen saw the mile markers was as a teenager, when he and a friend from the Palo Alto High School swimming team toured the Hawaiian islands. The trip contained no symbols, no foreshadowing of future drama. Allen seemed like just any sinewy, six-foot kid from California, a physician's son growing up in the affluent suburbs of the San Francisco peninsula. He did well in school and channeled his abundant but hardly extraordinary physical energy into competitive swimming.

"I swam for years, but there was no real strong reinforcement for it," he recalls. "Maybe I was above average, but I certainly wasn't of national caliber."

After high school, Allen attended the University of California at San Diego, where he had a vague plan to pursue medicine. He brought home good grades and qualified for the Division III national championships in swimming, but neither school nor sports was as important, ultimately, as his summer job lifeguarding on the beaches of San Diego County. Lifeguarding deeply appealed to the part of Allen called The Grip, and he flourished at it-which, on the beaches of Southern California, is no trifling, preening, grabass matter. "Lifeguards really take their jobs seriously," explains Julie Moss, who at one time before she and Allen became involved worked on the beaches with her future husband. "It was an elitist thing. They would have this aloofness on the beach, but among themselves there was a great deal of competition and camaraderie. They had a strong sense of discipline and strict codes of conduct. These guys were the studs of the beach. Mark's nickname was'Animallen,' because he was always so strong at the lifeguard competitions. He had this reputation for being the hot lifeguard."

This was back in 1980, when the triathlon field was virtually wide-open, its standards and style defined by the "Big Three" of Dave Scott, Scott Tinley, and Scott Molina. At the time, Allen was a recent college graduate who had taken a pass at medical school to keep lifeguarding. For three years he worked the beaches, worked the parties, and went surfing in Hawaii and Mexico. It was a fine arrangement, but time was passing and the greater question loomed: What was he going to do with his life?

For most of us, the answer comes piecemeal, over time, by fits and starts. But for Mark Allen it came swiftly and dramatically. In February 1982 he happened to watch the telecast of the Hawaii Ironman. That was the race in which his then-fellow lifeguard Julie Moss lurched, staggered, and finally crawled across the finish line, providing the fledgling sport with one of its most poignant images. Allen was transfixed, but he was also intrigued when another fellow lifeguard, Reed Gregorson, finished fifth overall. If this guy could do so well, Allen thought, what could he accomplish? He bought his first decent pair of running shoes, blew his savings on a bike, and set off to find out.

Allen's transition from beach stud to member of the "Big Four" took less than two months. At his first race, a United States Triathlon Series short-course event in San Diego, he finished a strong fourth behind Scott, Tinley, and Molina. On his third outing, he claimed his first win, beating Tinley and Molina over a 1.5-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and 13.1-mile run. Allen's fourth triathlon was his first Ironman and his first disappointment (the year of the broken derailleur). His next stop was Nice, France, where he won his first World Triathlon Championship. During this absurdly successful rookie season, Allen landed a spot on the first U.S. professional triathlon team, Team J David (which has since disbanded). In 35 days he had gone from full-time lifeguard to professional athlete.

"I think," says Michael Rubano, "that Mark's success feeds back to the fact that he can see a greater reality outside himself. He has a gift for clearing and quieting his mind. So much of this sport is an egoistic, individual thing--imposing your will, putting out all the time. But you have to be able to receive, too: from the people around you, from other athletes, from the elements. Mark has the ability to contain and absorb energy, to use it when he needs it. To hold it, hold it, hold it, and then to explode."

Allen's first and perhaps most influential guide to inner investigation was his mother, Sharon Allen, who has studied and taught meditation and related subjects in the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 years. "When Mark was growing up, Mom was always weird," she recalls with a smile. "But now we have a very close connection, a mutual respect in having strong feelings about the same things. At some point, people have to realize there's more in the world than just appearances."

"All of this sort of developed as I developed within the sport," says Allen. "I think athletics can reach a very spiritual level. Past a certain point, you're not going to improve unless you see how the mind and body interconnect. Competition is the test that forces you to develop another awareness. It forces you to find energy resources that you never realized were there before."

Of all Allen's competitions, the one that taught him most, he says, was the 1987 Ironman, in which his body rebelled just as it was reaching optimal performance. Vague ill feelings had haunted him the week before the race, feelings that coalesced into an inability to eat or drink, finally culminating in nausea, vomiting, internal bleeding, and an eventual breakdown on the marathon course. It was the athlete's nightmare--total control and order disintegrating into total chaos--but Allen tapped into his reserves of strength enough to finish the race in second place. "I learned something from the '87 Ironman," he says, sitting in his Cardiff living room, stoking up for his next workout on a veggie burger and a fruit smoothie. "I learned how to get the most out of myself under any conditions."

Allen stands and moves from the living room to the kitchen for a drink of water. "If you look around this house," he says, "you'll see a lot of images of the Southwest, the desert. Those are the things that make me feel most powerful and alive. Everywhere I go I find something to remind me of who I am, everywhere except Hawaii--the particular island of Hawaii is just so strong. I would always be afraid at night in Hawaii. I'd have nightmares about somebody breaking in and attacking me. What was it? This island that gave me all these strange feelings was also the place I kept getting drawn back to, where I'd have the most intense experiences of my life."

All this talk about dreams and places of power reminds Allen of a remarkable story, which he tells matter-of-factly, with a straight face, while leaning against the kitchen counter. It happened in 1988, he says, when he and Moss took a surfing vacation in Mexico. He'd been resting in the chop when a wave blindsided him. Afterward he'd felt feverish and giddy for days. The feeling persisted as they flew home. In customs at Tijuana he noticed a Mexican man standing alone across the room. The man kept throwing out his arms, directly at Allen, and a ball of light pulsed from his fingertips. When the man saw that Allen was watching, he stopped.

Later that same night, Allen continues, he awoke at home to hear Moss cough with a force that pinned him to the bed and set off a strange orange glow in the bedroom. And Julie suddenly was no longer Julie. Her light hair and fair skin had darkened; she had been transformed into a Mexican peasant woman. The orange light lingered for several minutes before Moss, who'd never awakened, returned to herself.

In the days before the 1990 Ironman, Mark Allen again entered the little blue church on the Kona Coast. This time, however, instead of imparting messages of strength, the kahunas sent him images of lightness and buoyancy. They counseled him to race lightly--lightly on the water and the road, lightly in judgment of himself. The messages from the church corresponded to his own perceptions of Hawaii on this visit: The atmosphere on the Big Island seemed fresher and brighter than he'd remembered. It was as if the strange oppressiveness that had always dogged his days there had not merely subsided, but had been transmuted. The buoyancy persisted, even as each morning dawned progressively hotter and windier and it became apparent that, by race day, conditions would be as harsh as they'd been clement the year before.

So Allen was dwelling on lightness as he meditated on the pier before slipping into the shining water; visions of lightness drove him as he pedaled down the Queen Kaahumanu Highway during the hottest and windiest stretches of the afternoon. For despite the conditions, despite the fact that his finishing time would be nearly 20 minutes off last year's, Allen was obviously racing as he'd planned. Each move on the course seemed to be for a purpose.

And so the race unfolded, mile after mile, hour after hour, on the withered and baking lava fields that spill down from the heights of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, forming sharp, dark glaciers running to the sea. On these coastal trails the great Makoa once ran. Makoa, an aumakua from the golden era of King Kamehameha I, was so swift that it was said he could take a fish from a pond in Hilo and carry it across the island and over the volcanoes to the ocean before the fish was dead. In those days, warfare and blood sacrifices were suspended when the Pleiades rested on the night horizon, and a festival was held featuring boxing and footraces. Surely it's mere coincidence that the Pleiades sit on the horizon at Ironman time. Just as it's coincidence that, eight years ago, a then-obscure endurance event run in the middle of the Pacific would connect Mark Allen with the woman who would be his wife and the sport that would become his calling. Isn't it?

Such thoughts float and shimmer until Allen has put some time between himself and his flailing pursuers. By the transition point at Keauhou, he has a two-minute lead over Mackle. As Allen sets off on the marathon he is running lightly, his energy pulsing in a series of accurate, chuffing explosions of breath. By the time he has again passed through Kailua, the race is firmly his. But he's been in a similar position before, and he knows to take nothing for granted. He continues to run comfortably reserving ample energy as his lead yawns to six minutes over Scott Tinley who has passed Mackle to take second place.

Allen maintains his lead as he comes down off the highway, looping for the final time along Alii Drive toward the pier and the finish line. He will win his second consecutive Ironman in dominating fashion, smashing any lingering doubts about his supremacy in the sport. Veterans of the race will proclaim 1990 to be one of the legend years, and Mark Allen will leave Hawaii with memories of lightness and buoyancy. "My legs felt great the whole way," he says shortly after finishing the race. Then, as if realizing the gap between the enormity of his feat and his easy acceptance of it, he adds, "When I was a little kid, I used to love watching magic tricks. I would keep asking, 'How do they do it?' When I saw my first Ironman, I had exactly the same feeling. How do they do it? With each Ironman, some of the magic goes away, but a piece of it remains a mystery."

John Brant s a frequent contributor to Outside. His work for the magazine includes profiles of triathlete Mike Pigg and ultra-marathoner Chuck Jones.