Posted: January 15, 2006

Triathlon: Still The Man 10 years after his last Ironman

The competitive fires still burn bright for Dave Scott, a six-time world champion who is giving tips for endurance athletes

By Mark Sutcliffe , The Ottawa Citizen

Dave Scott, Ironman Legend

It's reassuring to know there's something Dave Scott isn't good at. When he visits Ottawa next week, the legendary triathlete plans to try out the ski trails of Gatineau Park. Still, just because he's in better shape than people half his age, don't expect him to burn up the course.

"I'm terrible at cross-country skiing," he says. "I've got the worst form alive."

It's hard to imagine how Scott would struggle with anything. In the 1980s, he won six Ironman world championships in eight years and was the first person inducted in the Ironman hall of fame. Then in 1994, five years after he stopped competing, he came back at the age of 40 and finished second in the world, almost beating 29-year-old Greg Welch, and just wait until you hear what he did in November, at the age of 51.

Next weekend, Scott returns to Ottawa to share his wealth of knowledge in a soldout iron-distance clinic and triathlon talk, for which tickets are still available (TriathlonOttawa.com).

Scott just turned 52 and is almost 10 years removed from his last full Ironman race. The fierce competitor that triathletes know as The Man now jokingly refers to himself as an old man, but hearing his voice over the phone from Boulder, Colorado, you have no illusions about whether the competitive fires still burn.

He trains, on average, more than two hours a day, even when he's traveling for speaking engagements. He has been known to duck into an airport washroom, change into exercise gear and run through the terminal while waiting for a flight. "I'm an exercise guy, don't coop me up all the time," he tells organizers if they start to over-schedule him.

Scott finds his motivation from trying to keep up with younger athletes, some of them world-class competitors who are his coaching clients. "It's still a game for me," he says. "I like working out with other people and I don't mind that they're faster than me. I try to hang with them or try to prevent them from lapping me."

Don't let all this humility fool you into thinking Dave Scott is slipping into the ranks of mere mortals in his 50s.

Last year, he agreed to participate in an iron-distance relay race in Las Vegas with two other athletes. The plan was for Scott to compete in the 3.9-km swim portion and then hand off to his teammates. He ended up doing almost the entire race.

After completing the swim, he decided to do a portion of the cycling leg of the race alongside his teammate. He asked organizers to send a van to pick him up halfway through the 180-kilometre leg and drive him back to the transition area. The van never showed up.

"They never came out there, so I ended up riding up the whole 112 miles and so that was kind of a shock. It was 9,600 feet of climbing. It was by far the most difficult iron-distance bike course."

Scott didn't stop there, though. He decided to do one-half of the run portion as well.

How many people do you know who are in good enough shape to do all, but the last 21-kilometre of an Ironman without planning to? How many of them are in their 50s?

"I didn't do the whole Ironman," he says. "I probably wouldn't have been able to walk for about a month. But I said, 'Well maybe I could do one of these all the way in the future. So, we'll see.'"

If anyone could do it, Scott could, and he now knows more about training than he did when he was triathlon's biggest star in the early 1980s. "Back then, I kind of understood how the body worked," he says. "But, when it came to training, we didn't know much. It was, 'Let's do this for a while, it seems like it's working.'"

Now, as a coach, Scott has expertise in technique, strength training and nutrition. His clinic next weekend will include videotaping of swimmers to study stroke mechanics, practical sessions on running and cycling, detailed information on fuelling for exercise and advice on developing a progressive training program.

While he's in town, he'll also shoot a new video on strength training for triathletes.

"A lot of the strength exercises you see in the gym are not terribly helpful for endurance athletes," he says.

For the new triathlete, Scott has basic advice. "Get a coach," he says, pointing out that there is a great deal of science to multi-sport training and that it's easy to hit a plateau if you repeat the same program week after week.

Also, as much as you can, train in pairs or in groups. In his prime, Scott had to do most of his training by himself.

"I was the only triathlete in town for a long time, and then the only professional one. I did thousands of workouts by myself." However, when you train with others, he says, you push yourself harder.

For the elite athlete, Scott believes deeply that the defining quality of a champion is not physical, but mental. On the strength of their training and physique, many athletes can perform at a high level and even win races, but Scott sees only a handful of athletes who can overcome injuries and setbacks and race at their best even when conditions aren't perfect.

"It's being hungry, knowing you can extract that extra little bit," he says. "There's only a few people in the world who really know how to win and that are really hungry."

There's no doubt that, even at 52 years of age, Dave Scott is one of them.

To read the story of Dave Scott's November race in his own words, see the Runner Up blog at www.ottawacitizen.com. Mark Sutcliffe writes about running and triathlon training every Sunday.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2005

This story originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen and is reprinted with permission

Dave Scott's website is at: DaveScottInc.com.

[Editor's Note: The Runner's Web is the presenting sponsor of the Dave Scott Clinic]