By Timothy Carlson

It was February 1977, at the Primo Beer factory in Honolulu, the site of a modest awards ceremony for an around-the-island relay running race, when Navy Commander John Collins challenged the boisterous group of runners to take the fitness revolution one huge step beyond the marathon.

Collins, a decent but not extraordinary runner, was tired of his swimmer and bicyclist friends arguing with runners who was the better athlete. He threw down the gauntlet: Whoever was the first to complete the equivalent of Oahu's three toughest endurance events--the 2.4 mile Waikiki Rough Water Swim, the 115-mile Around-the-Island Bike Ride (then done in two days), and top it all off with run along the Honolulu Marathon course on the same day--won the right to call himself Ironman.

A year later, 15 assorted lunatics, none of whom was absolutely sure it was even possible, took off in Honolulu. Twelve finished, and all survived. Collins himself whipped up the Ironman trophies, a sculpture which, appropriately, had a hole in its head.

Now, it is no longer just an impromptu sport that arose from a whimsical challenge--it is a religion. From a pool of some 2 million triathletes worldwide, 20,000 acolytes of arduous aerobics from 50 countries and 50 states every year try to qualify for up to 1,490 coveted Ironman slots. The event, covered by NBC in a two-hour show airing in late November, has become a Mecca where the most dedicated fitness fanatics must make a pilgrimage at least once in their lives in the ultimate one-day endurance challenge.

The Gatorade Ironman Triathlon World Championships, held every October in the lava fields that spill onto the Kona coast of the big island of Hawaii, has evolved not just into a world-class sporting event, but into a rite, where the ordinary citizens mix with the elite of the multisport athletes and annually partake of transcendent, out-of-body and near-death experiences on sacred ground of the Kona Coast.

Lest there be scoffers, anthropologist Dr. Jane Granskog of Bakersfield, California, who has finished the Ironman several times herself, wrote in the Winter 1993 issue of The Journal of Ritual Studies: "The Ironman is defined as much as a spiritual event as it is a competitive race. It takes place in a sacred place, at a sacred time of the year" and "is a significant rite of passage that transforms the lives of those who compete in it."

The Ironman is always held during a full moon for practical as well as symbolic reasons--many competitors won't finish until long after the sun goes down and need the lunar orb to light the way, and the Ironman event is the harvest of the thousands of hours each competitor has put into training to complete their own quest, their own Holy Grail. It takes place near the volcanoes of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, sacred to Hawaiians and many competitors who have taken the time to read and understand Hawaiian myth, history, and religion. Many competitors pray to the Hawaiian gods Lono and Pele, as well as the lesser spirits, the kahunas, and all of this occurs in the land where King Kamehameha once ruled.

Indeed, as the final Ironmen and Ironwomen come down the finish chute on Alii Drive just before midnight, a funny thing happens. Women like Sister Madonna Buder, of Spokane, Washington, who remains a threat to break 13 hours at age 65, get booming cheers and lots of hugs at the finish line. Men like James Ward of Seminole, Florida, who was 77 last year, run in a few minutes before the 17-hour cutoff time at the finish that Greg Welch and Paula Newby-Fraser hit at 8 and 9 hours before, get a deafening ovation. Long after the winners come in, the crowds are larger, the cheering louder, more intense, the looks on the faces of the finishers more and more sublime. "With all due respect to Mark Allen--and to the Kentucky Derby, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Olympics--the last hour of this event is the greatest moment in sports," said NBC Sports' Craig Masback in 1993.

In 1992, winner Mark Allen came back to the finish line where the crowds danced to old-time rock music. Allen said he felt honored to be able to anonymously place leis over the heads of the finishers at the end. "The looks on their faces is awesome," says Allen. "The great part is, at that moment they didn't know or care who I was. They were not caught up in the fantasy of some superstar, they were in that point of reality where the only people they saw were their families and the ones they loved who had helped them on the long road to get there."

Because of the heroic, even appalling physical demands it takes just to get to the Ironman, the elite of the sport indeed find it easy to talk to humblest participant and vice-versa. Old champions do not find their ego demands they quit at the top in order to maintain anyone else's idea of their former domination. Take Tom Warren, who at 49 in 1993 finished just 317th overall and fourth in his age group. But his time was an hour and 11 minutes faster than it took to win the whole thing 14 years earlier. "Actually, if I met all my goals, I would stop racing," he says. "But now I have more fun teaching and training with my girlfriend."

Fittingly, Warren's former girlfriend and now wife is also extraordinary: Barbara Alvarez Warren and her twin sister, Angelika Castaneda, both 51, of Mexico, who finish these days in about 12 hours, think of the Ironman as a sprint, since their forte is ultradistance events like the Western States 100-mile foot race and the Death Valley Badwater-to-Mt. Whitney 137-mile ultramarathon.

The sport got its initial big boost when Barry McDermott of Sports Illustrated wrote 4,000 words on the 1979 Ironman and chronicled the whimsical and Promethean training of winner Tom Warren of San Diego, an accountant, tavern owner, and former USC swimmer whose fitness regimen included a 13-day bike ride from Canada to San Diego, winning bar bets by doing 400 sit-ups in a sauna and running the 100 miles from Warren's Tug's Tavern in Pacific Beach to Ensenada.

But Warren's specific preparation for his first Ironman was skimpy--he swam a mile in an unheated pool, biked 20 miles, and ran 6 or 7 miles. "Ignorance is real important," said Warren. "Now I realize that was ludicrous, but confidence is important, and if you believe it, you can do it."

Things got bigger when ABC came to the 1980 Ironman and a former college swimmer and water polo player from Davis, California, Dave Scott, turned the Ironman into a flat-out race and won by an awesome one-hour margin. Scott's time of 9 hours, 24 minutes, 33 seconds beat Warren's 1979 record by 1 hour, 51 minutes, but it was only the beginning of the pursuit of Ironman perfection. Today, World Triathlon Corporation officials have offered a $100,000 bonus to any man who can break the 8-hour barrier or woman who can break 8:45 at Kona.

While Scott gave the sport its first elite-level performance, the eccentric and beloved individualists still came to Kona: In 1979, it was Cowman Ken Shirk, who showed up for the first of more than a dozen Hawaiian Ironman races wearing a Viking-style cowhorn hat, a stylistic contrast to overall contender Navy SEAL John Dunbar, who wore a sleeker Superman outfit to the scheduled start and raged when founder Collins postponed matters for 24 hours due to a storm-tossed sea.

In 1981, legendary San Francisco-area ultradistance runner and swimmer Walt Stack set an unbreakable Ironman record--his official finishing time of 26 hours will never be exceeded because promoters decided to institute a 17-hour cutoff time to keep beleaguered volunteer race officials a break. Stack broke off his finishing run down Alii Drive at dawn with a sit-down breakfast of waffles at the Kona Ranch House, then crossed the line. Stack recently died at age 88, but his legend lives.

But when Wide World of Sports chronicled young San Diego triathlete Julie Moss's courageous crawling to the finish line in February of 1982, the sport exploded in popularity. While Kathleen McCartney passed Moss for the win by 29 seconds, few noticed because the world was mesmerized by the inspiring sight of Moss, her legs unable to hold her and her body shut down with exhaustion, refusing to quit. McCartney had merely won the day, but Julie Moss had given birth to a sport.

The unforgettable heroics of Moss also overshadowed the first Ironman victory of triathlon legend and ageless California golden boy Scott Tinley, who went on to win the 1985 event and will be on the starting line at Kailua Pier this Saturday as well, now the owner of a trend-setting triathlon-clothing empire.

Within two years of the electrifying finish by Moss, Ironman entries had doubled from 580 to near 1,000. Membership in the national sanctioning body rose from 1,200 in 1982 to 35,000 by 1987. By 1995, when over 5,000, the largest field in triathlon history, entered the Mrs. T's Pierogies Chicago Olympic distance event, there were an estimated 175,000 active triathletes in the United States, and a total of two million around the world in more than 50 countries. Now there are a worldwide series of major Ironman distance triathlons in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and Germany, with more in Brazil, and in Florida, Massachusetts, and California.

Notably, eventual five-time Ironman champion Mark Allen was moved by Moss's struggle to start training for triathlons. "When I met her, Julie looked nine feet tall to me because of what I had seen her do on television," said Allen. They started seeing one another in 1985, and married in 1989, shortly after Allen won his first Ironman Hawaii in a stirring epic duel with Dave Scott.

Allen has been foremost in seeing a spiritual side to the sport, as well as being one of the foremost proponents of high-tech bike gear and cutting-edge medical science like heart-rate monitors. In his first seven attempts to capture the Ironman, Allen suffered equipment breakdowns and a series of physical failures due to heat exhaustion and dehydration while trying to beat six-time Ironman champ Dave Scott. In 1989, Allen went three days without food or water on a Vision Quest spiritual retreat in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico with the Huichol Indians. On the scientific front, in 1988 Allen underwent an entire Ironman day simulation at medical labs at Duke University and discovered his rate of salt loss was high, and doctors calculated a formula to compensate adequately.

During that epic 1989 confrontation with Scott, Allen recalls with not a trace of self-consciousness that he saw an ancient Indian shaman and drew strength from him, whereupon he pulled away in the final two miles and won by a minute in record-shattering time. CBS sports announcer John Tesh called Allen The Zenmaster because of his mystical concerns and his intense focus; his competitors also call him The Grip, because when he's got the lead, he'll hold on with the ferocity of Death.

Allen, who enjoys $250,000 or more each year in endorsements from companies like Nike and Gatorade, has said that he prays to the spirits of the Big Island that he may be in tune with the forces of nature for the race. In 1993, he looked haunted after setting a record time of 8 hours 7 minutes 45 seconds, pushed by Jurgen Zack into a killing pace, an average of 25.1 mph, on the bike, "my legs had no energy when I started the run." When foe Pauli Kiuru of Finland pulled out a three-quarters-of-a-mile lead after 8 miles of the run, Allen looked at his pregnant wife, Julie Moss, who since 1982 had remained a kind of patron saint of digging deep. "I was going to tell her I couldn't finish," he said. "But I didn't because I knew she would kick my butt."

Allen made his break with 9 miles to go on a detour fortuitously called the Natural Energy Lab road. Then, his five-year winning streak in Hawaii having tapped out his reserves, he took a year off to replenish his body and spirit and bond more closely with his newborn son, Mats.

This year Allen returns for an encore to see if he can retain his domination at 37, and face the increased challenge from defending champ Greg Welch of Australia and Germans Jurgen Zack and newcomer Thomas Hellriegel, who teamed up this July to make an astounding 16-minute breakaway from Welch and company in 90-degree heat on the bike at Ironman Germany at Roth.

Paula Newby-Fraser is gunning for an unprecedented eighth Ironman victory and fifth straight win. But despite her dominance and records, winning Ironman has never been inevitable for her. The thrill of victory/agony of defeat dichotomy was never better illustrated than in 1993, when she won her sixth Ironman women's title in 8 hours, 58 minutes, 23 seconds, and threw her arms up in pained triumph. But next to her was Marco Damiani of Verona, Italy, who finished a few seconds ahead, and his whole body suddenly clenched in a spasm of agony. It wasn't so easy for Newby-Fraser, either, who went into that year's event after having stopped running for three months to cure an ankle injury. So, for the last eight miles of the marathon, she had used up all of her training base, her glycogen stores, most of what little fat she owned, some of the muscle, and was aching to quit. "I had to tear out some pieces of my heart and my soul to finish this one," she said later. "It leaves an empty place inside of me that might take a year to fill up again."

Lest you think Newby-Fraser was indulging in some melodramatic metaphor, JulieAnne White of Canada, who had finished second to Newby-Fraser a year before, literally lost a piece of her intestine while struggling through a sluggish day in 9 hours, 36 minutes, ninth in the women's division. She was the victim of a previously misdiagnosed intestinal problem which was not thought to be serious. So, despite feeling progressively worse as the run wore on, she proceeded to the finish. "JulieAnne's stomach shut down somewhere in the run," said Ironman Medical Director Dr. Robert Laird. "In extreme heat and exhaustion, the body can shut down blood to the intestinal tract. What happened to her was incredibly painful, but she had such a strong will, she kept going. Afterwards, they had to operate on her and remove part of her intestine." White, who made a remarkable recovery, finished the race a year later and is a contender for a top-five finish this year.

Laird says that the physical toll of the Ironman is the equivalent of running three marathons. He estimates that over the average Ironman time of 12 hours, the competitor will burn at least 6,000 calories and sweat about four to five gallons of fluids. Exercise physiologist Dr. Glenn Town, like Dr. Laird a previous Ironman finisher, estimated his caloric consumption at 8,888. This year, 6-foot, 5-inch, 295-pound former New England Patriot offensive tackle Darryl Haley, 34, will have to cope with the task of finding an estimated 12,000 calories of energy to fuel his Ironman effort. "With all due respect to marathon runners," says Tri-Fed USA Deputy Director Tim Yount, "there is nothing like the Ironman to prove you can pass beyond the limits of what people conceive is possible. The run part of the event takes place in up to 100-degree heat at midday on the lava fields--conditions more extreme than 85 percent of the marathons in the world. Frankly, the Ironman entrant cannot have a normally functioning brain."

Dr. Doug Hiller, a Honolulu orthopedist who is also part of the Ironman medical staff, says, "We pray every year that no one will die during the event. No one has. But because everyone who gets here is so fit, the people with physical flaws have been pretty well winnowed out."

In the 18 editions of the event (they ran it twice in 1982), 16,865 people have started and 15,580 have finished, an astonishing success rate of 92.38 percent. "The truly extraordinary thing is that guys like James Ward, who is 78, are off the charts in arterial and aerobic fitness for a man his age," said Hiller. "Ponce de Leon was just playing with myths, but these people really have found the Fountain of Youth."

Indeed, Ward had a little trouble, but finally finished 1994 in 16:48.04 and won the 75+ age category. After all, he bicycled 181 miles, swam 10,000 yards, and ran 21 miles in the last big week of his training, slightly less than the average Ironman training regimen, which can range up to 1988 Hawaiian Ironman champion Scott Molina's fabled weeks of 600 miles on the bike, more than 25,000 yards in the pool, and 80 miles running in the 120-degree heat of Palm Springs.

Ward, a former WWII Army paratrooper who suffered 22 attacks of malaria while fighting guerrilla battles in the jungles of Burma, says, "Out in the dark, under the moon, with eight miles to go in the run, you start to hurt and wonder why you are putting yourself through this," he says. "I just tell myself I don't have malaria, they aren't shooting at me, I trained for this, and afterward I can have a nice cold beer."

"If all my early training was like the Way of the Cross, finishing the race is like the Resurrection," says Sister Madonna Buder, who won the 60-64 age group in 1994 with a 14:55.40 time, far off her age group standard of 13:19.10 she set in 1992. Buder, who has trained by riding her bike or running to make her rounds at counseling prostitutes, speaks with the nonchalance of a fighter pilot of her earlier training bicycle crashes that cost her a broken jaw, elbow, collarbone, and ribs.

Whether physical resurrection or spiritual transformation, The Ironman has become an unlikely Lourdes, where the lame and the halt and the blind have used the race as a test to mark their ultimate rebirth back into health. In 1987, Ken Campbell of Sacramento, who had suffered near-fatal burns over 50 percent of his body, dared the furnace of the Queen Kaahamanu Highway and finished in 13 hours. In 1989, Dick Hoyt towed, pushed, and pulled his son Ricky, who suffers from cerebral palsy, around the course in 14 hours. In 1990, Gillian Walker, who is blind, completed the event. In 1992, Jim MacLaren, a former Yale football player who lost a leg in a bike crash with a bus, set an amputee record of 10 hours 42 minutes. That same year, Patrick Rummerfield of Wyoming, who had once been a quadriplegic, punctuated his recovery with a 16-hour Ironman finish. Women and men who have recovered from cancer and heart attacks and alcoholism have dared it and one man, actor Jeff Greenman, weighed 350 pounds when he watched on TV as Dave Scott won the Ironman in 1987 and said he wanted to do that. Inspired, Greenman cut his weight in half and finished two Ironmans. In 1994, paraplegic exercise physiologist Dr. Jon Franks of Venice, California, capped a six-year campaign to get Ironman officials to let him in as the Ironman's first wheelchair entrant. He made the swim in 1 hour 34 minutes and made a valiant run in his hand-cranked bicycle on one of the hottest days in Ironman history, but failed by half a mile and a few minutes to make the official cutoff time for the bike leg and retired at 5:45 p.m. This year, survival of the fittest reached the wheelchair division, and Franks lost in a winner-take-all shootout at the Panama City, Florida, Ironman qualifier to young Australian rival John Maclean of Perth.

As Sister Madonna says she does, many offer up the race as a prayer for a loved one. Judith Lee of Honolulu, 38, an Army nurse who lost her husband, Rick, in Desert Storm, said her training for the 1993 Ironman made her feel closer to him. "The thing that attracted him to me was my legs," she wrote on her entry form. "I had been involved in running and triathlons when we met, and he had always been proud of my motivation and performance in these events. He had hopes that at some point he would get to see me compete in the Ironman... [and this year] I had a feeling I was going to get in. Now Rick will get to see me do the Ironman. I have learned to never let an opportunity slip by, as it may never come again." Lee finished in 13 hours, 50 minutes, and 41 seconds.