For the Record

By Paul Kvinta and Andrew Tilin (With John Clarke)

This Won't Hurt a Bit

"I won because of the shots," says Peter Reid, the 31-year-old Canadian who seized the lead in Hawaii's Ironman Triathlon last October two miles into the marathon leg and refused to let go, beating Belgian favorite Luc van Lierde and third-place finisher Lothar Leder by more than seven minutes. Reid, a relative newcomer to the top echelon of the professional ranks (he finished a respectable but unthreatening fourth place in both 1996 and 1997), attributes his surprise victory to 10 iron-filled syringes that were administered to his derriere during the week and a half before the race — a symbolically appropriate and entirely legal prescription designed to counteract his debilitating anemia. Unorthodox? Well, yeah, but no less so than the behavior of his fiancëe, Lori Bowden. Despite finishing the women's race three minutes behind 31-year-old Swiss champion Natascha Badmann, Bowden still managed to usurp the limelight by having appeared on the cover of Triathlete magazine's September issue sporting nothing but a painted-on bodysuit. By the time she crossed the finish line in second place, poster reprints were selling like hotcakes all across Kona. This month, the two intend to formalize their status as the first couple of fitness. "We're getting married," says Bowden. "And we're having a chocolate cake. Which Peter will eat. I mean, it's the off-season."

Surf's Up — and So Is My Lunch
Perhaps last fall's first-ever TransAtlantic Windsurf Race was unprecedented for good reason. Soon after the 13 athletes from six countries arrived in St. John's, Newfoundland, they were dismayed to find that the Russian icebreaker serving as their support ship between three-hour-long racing stages rolled 80 degrees — a drunken list that kept most of the competitors vomiting over the rails. Unfortunately, the 25-foot seas and 40-knot winds didn't make for pleasant boardsailing conditions either. "You wanted to get off the ship until you were in the water," recalls American boarder Jace Panebianco, 22, "and then you wanted to be back on the ship." When the froth finally settled in Weymouth, England, after 1,000-plus miles and eight days at sea, Europe's Liberty Team had snatched first, the Americans had come in last, and the event's organizers had apparently opted for a counterintuitive marketing strategy by announcing that 1999 would herald an even longer, 3,000-mile competition, this time from Brazil to Portugal. "I trust that'll go better," says the U.S. team's Kiran Beyer, 28. "I guess we were there to work out the bugs."

Dial "M" for ... Manure
Jim Edwards, a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Auburn, Alabama, has come up with something that probably has Colonel Sanders and Alexander Graham Bell spinning in their graves. It's an innovative concoction of chicken waste and shredded yellow pages that, Edwards claims, boosts farmers' cotton and corn yields by 50 percent. Word of Edwards's success has traveled far. Tascon, Inc., a recycling company in Houston, is scrambling to place the potent but as-yet-unnamed product onto shelves by the end of this month. "Here in the South we're blessed with a tremendous amount of manure," rhapsodizes Edwards. "And we've got more phone books than we know what to do with. Put those two together and you've really got something!"

Hark! Do I Hear a Chorus of Cascading Pine Cones?
After all the National Park Service has recently done to combat excessive noise pollution — proposing to ban snowmobiles in some areas while mandating the use of stealth-like M-900 helicopters over the Grand Canyon — one might expect that Emmy-Award-winning acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton would lighten up on his 20-year campaign against human-generated noise pollution. Fat chance. Hempton, who also consults for Microsoft, isn't impressed by what he calls the National Park Service's "ad hoc measures that focus on limiting the noise instead of preserving the music." Which is why he's lobbying to conduct the first acoustic survey of the national parks to catalog their natural sounds and create "no-noise" zones in the backcountry. Skeptical park officials will meet this month to consider sending him into Olympic National Park to record a medley of chirps, thuds, grunts, and other mellifluous clangor emitted by such noisome agents as falling pine cones and rustling leaves. Hempton believes there's no time to waste because many areas have already been rendered unsalvageable. "Take Saguaro National Park, near Tucson," he says, noting its proximity to Interstate 10. "Anyone who has a noise-free experience there suffers from some kind of hearing impairment."

Run for the Money
"Ronaldo da Costa wasn't even on anyone's dark-horse list!" exclaims USA Track and Field chief statistician Ryan Lamppa. Thus the endurance world's collective jaw-drop when the wispy, 28-year-old Brazilian with but a single 26.2-miler under his waistband finished last September's Berlin Marathon in 2:06:05, smashing the decade-old mark by 45 seconds and walking away with $115,000 for breaking the record. Impressive and lucrative, to be sure, but if the former welder from an impoverished farming village has his way, it's only the beginning. This winter, da Costa begins banking what he hopes will reach a total of $1 million in winnings and appearance fees from new sponsors and race organizers. (His agent is aggressively lobbying the upcoming New York, Boston, London, and Amsterdam marathons, among others, to pay da Costa hefty sums just for gracing their courses with his presence.) "He's earned it," says one seasoned running coach. "The guy is very hungry."

Helmsman, Take Her to Warp Six
"It looks like it'd swallow you up just sitting there," says harbormaster Eddie Monat, describing a high-speed car ferry that began operating this summer between his wharf in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Judging from its safety record, Monat has good reason to be concerned. In September, the fastest ferry in North America (top speed: 58 mph) collided with a fishing boat near Yarmouth, killing the captain. While a formal investigation is pending, ferry officials continue to hone a unique defense strategy that can only be called Clintonian. "When the wreck occurred," insists spokesman Jack MacAndrew, "was dead in the water."

Photograph by John Chao
Illustrations by Michael Bartalos and John Hersey