The boggy shores of San Diego’s Mission Bay are littered with half-naked bodies. A few beach lifeguards with sunburned lips and summer-colored hair swing their arms as rail-thin runners look warily toward the water at a scheduled 300-yard swim that will soon be underway in chest deep waters. An exercise physiologist, P.E. teachers, a retired tradesman are there, jacks of all trades, masters of none—and trustafarian fitness bums rounding out the field for this mid-70s triathlon.
But nothing validates this event as athletic, let alone competitive in nature until the military arrives. The competitors watch the battleship-gray trucks laden with Navy SEALs making their fashionably late arrival across the cove. They legitimate this eclectic band of multisport pot pourri. With the U.S. Navy represented, even a ramshackle group of pseudo-jocks and semi-tough ones gathered after work on a Tuesday can claim to be entered in an RAC–a Real Athletic Contest.

The fluid relationship between the U.S. military and multisport competition has always been an interesting intersection of ideologies. Early triathletes were cast as unique individuals but not quite matchless athletic marvels. They marched to drums of their own making and were described as freaks bordering on insanity. The 1979 Ironman winner, Tom Warren, had long hair, owned a saloon and lived in a quirky 5,000-square-foot one bedroom house. Howard Moody, a fixture at the mid-70s events, purportedly had been a member of the Hell’s Angels and was rumored to have gone to prison for killing a man in self-defense.

Many of these folks could not be found in the society columns of local papers.

But then there was the quiet storm of the military presence, something rational, structured and focused on the horizon. While the SEALs rarely broke the top ranks in those local gatherings, John Collins, a Navy commander, took what he’d seen as a competitor in San Diego and somehow morphed that vision into the Ironman. And while California swim coach Dave Scott blistered the 1980 Ironman, winning by more than an hour, second place went to the former Navy SEAL Chuck Neumann, who gave perhaps the most telling post-race interview in the history of “ABC Wide World of Sports” by literally falling asleep with the microphone in his face. No one could ever doubt that military personnel had given their all to the young sport.

Thirty years later, it is a different sport, a different world and a different military that fights a new kind of war. Triathlon race bikes have 20 gears and onboard computers and the enemy can look like your little sister. Nothing is simple in sport or in battle.

In the mid-80s, triathlon was neon disco, creative and exploding in its anti-status-quo image. The U.S. was winning the Cold War one calculated capitalism conversion at a time. But now, 20-plus years hence, triathlon has grown more conservative and structured while the U.S. military has widened its thought processes in determining the ways and means to protect our rights and freedoms. Less than 10 years into this millennium, endurance sport and military preparedness have perhaps not been as intersected since the cult of manliness under-pinned the build up in forces before WWII.

Inner-city guerilla warfare and harsh environmental theaters of operation require a postmodern fitness, a way of adapting and thinking, of using one’s thoughtfully trained body. Temperatures and tolerances in Kona or Phoenix can mimic Basra and Kandahar. Wars and races don’t end when you think they are over. But if you commit yourself to an endurance sport event and service to your country, regardless of the personal motive or political ideology, you finish what you started. That mutual perseverance defines both.

Not since Gordon Haller, winner of the first Ironman in 1978 and a former Navy communications specialist, has a top triathlete served in the U.S. armed forces. While the Big Four might’ve trained like Spartans, I doubt we’d fight other men like them.

Recognizing the connections between new kinds of war and new kinds of endurance sport, the U.S. military is now fishing for new enlistees in the growing pool of endurance athletes while multisport events find new ways of attracting men and women in uniform to their events. Stranger bedfellows have slept together.

Sport cannot prepare you for war any more than war can prepare you for sport. But there is a unique and fascinating cultural overlap between the military—in particularly the Navy—and the sport of triathlon. It is historical, functional and fascinating.

Plato reportedly said that “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Regardless of the accuracy of this claim, the ways and means if not the motives for why nations advance on each other define that society. The same can be said about sport—the way we play our games tells us who we are.

Many are the pundits who claim that perhaps commercial sport’s greatest gift to modern society is that it has replaced war. Of course, the answer offered by the defensive back for the Tennessee Titans would be different than the gunnery sergeant sitting in a foxhole outside Tora Bora.