NOTE-No Founders cited, incomplete Finshers List, check typos w/newsclipping
Sunday, Feb. 19, 1978 HONOLULU ADVERTISER SPORTS Page H-1
NOTE: 3 DNF’s, Yawata on Bike; Lloyd and King on Run. !5 of 15 finished Swim, 14 finished bike. There was an Advertiser photo of “Haller on the run”
Iron-Man Triathlon:
Haller leads 15
By DICK FISHBACK
Advertiser Sports Writer
If they ever need a stand-in for television’s Bionic Man, the producers should quickly jot down the name of 27-year-old Gordon Haller of Honolulu.
Haller lays no claim to the mechanical man’s title, but he went the fellow one better yesterday while winning the first Iron-Man Triathlon in a total elapsed time of 11:46:58.
It was run in a day marked by driving rain, some breezes; an event launched at 7:19 a.m. and finished by Haller about 7:06 p.m.
For those of you who may have missed the first report on this gut-buster, the events were these in this order: 2.4-mile ocean rough water swim; 112-mile bicycle race around Oahu and the 26-mile, 385-yard marathon run over the regular Honolulu Marathon course.
One of those is enough to do in most mortals. But except for some cramping in the back of his legs and a numbness of his posterior in the bicycle ride, Haller was amazingly fresh.
He finished roughly 33 1/2 minutes in front of John Dunbar (12:20:27), a Chaminade University student who had led the pack by 13 minutes through the first two events.
They were the frontrunners among a field of 15, which had only one dropout early in the day. And the dropout – Ralph Yawata – retired because of his handler’s car failure rather than because of fatigue.
When Haller ran out of the Aloha Tower checkpoint for the
See HALLER on Page H-7
Haller leads 15 ‘Iron-Men”
Swimming, pedaling, running
Continued from Page H-1
start of the marathon a little under 13 minutes behind Dunbar, he felt he had the Triathlon won.
“Since I’m a whole lot faster than he is in the marathon, I should be all right,” Haller said, leaving the tower.
And he was right. Haller had finished eighth in the swim at 80 minutes, 40 seconds, then picked up some steam with the best time in the bike ride at 6:56. But it was his 3:30 clocking in the marathon (ticked off at 3:29 by his Nautilus handlers) that made the difference.
“I caught him at 17, 20 and 21 miles,” Haller said. He had rubdown and rest stops at the 17- and 20-mile marks, allowing Dunbar to stay with him, then finally went ahead to stay at 21.
“I ran the last five miles pretty quick,” he said, still breathing easily. “I started to get a little cramp behind my knee about a mile out (from the finish of the bike race). And I had some trouble there early in the marathon.”
It appeared he might make a runaway of the final event early. He chopped his deficit from 13 minutes to three on the downhill side of Diamond Head going out, but the cramping stopped him just before the corner of Kahala Avenue, where the course turns alongside Waialae Country Club and the deficit went back to eight minutes.
Dunbar, too, was fairly fresh at the finish but his body had been tested.
“Agony and torture, that describes it perfectly,” he said, “but I tried.”
The pain was most severe on the return route alongside Waialae, but Dunbar managed to dig down deeply enough to sprint the final 50 years to the Kapiolani Park’s finish line.
Haller’s victory was not a fluke by any means.
“He’s really been training for this,” said Johnny Faerber, another fine distance runner who didn’t enter the event this time. “He’s a bike rider; I think that’s what it takes.”
Of course, both Haller and Dunbar are pretty fair marathon runners, too. Haller was 10th in the 1976 Honolulu Marathon and ran a 2:27 marathon at Washington, D.C. in November 1977.
“Heck, I’ve been running since I was eight months old, so my mom says,” Haller said while getting a rubdown with Absorbine Jr. and mineral oil minutes after the finish.
“Actually, I got into it competitively in the first grade but I didn’t run my first marathon until my senior year of college,” he said. That was at Pacific University of Forest Grove, Ore. “I did a lot of bike riding, swimming and running one after the other while I was in the Navy out here (1972-1974), but never this long or this fast.”
He’s biked the distance in as little as 5 1/2 hours.
Traffic bothered him most in the bicycle race.
“It was pretty bad out there on the North Shore,” Haller said. “I had to go out on the sand, but I probably had my worst time at the finish, went around the corner a little too fast and almost flipped over.”
John King did, or rather he was forced off the road and into a heap. He wasn’t injured but it took a couple of hours to get his bicycle back in running condition.
“Riding a bike? Hey, that’s my transportation,” Haller said.
But a Triathlon?
“Well, it’s only recently that I’ve really flipped out!” He said.
And that’s the kind of event this was. If ever there was a case of mind over matter, it was tried yesterday.
2.4 – MILE ROUGH WATER SWIM
1. Archie Hapai, 57:35. 2. John Dunbar, 60.15. 3. Ian Emberson, 61:40. 4. Sterling Lewis, 62:30. 5. Harold Irving, 65:30. 6. Ralph Yawata, 65:55. 7. Dave Orlowski, 69:15. 8. Gordon Haller, 80:40. 9. John Collins, 91:15. 10. Dan Hendrickson, 95:35. 11. Henry Forrest, 96:42. 12. John Loyd, 97:15. 13. Frank Day, 1:04:2014. John King, 1:22:20. 15. Tom Knoll, 1:31:05.
112 – MILE BICYCLE RACE
1. Haller, 6:56. 2. Dunbar, 7:04. 3. (tie) Lewis and [Emberson] (“Dunbar”{sic}), 7:47. 5. Orlowski, 7:51. 6. Hapai 90, 8:06. 7. Knoll, 8:19. 8. Day, 8:45. 9. Forrest, 8:47, 10. Lloyd, 9:00. 11. Collins, 9:15. 12. Irving, 11:04. 13. King, 11:13. 14. Hendrickson, 11:39.
26 – MILE, 385-YARD MARATHON
1. Haller, 3:30 2. Dunbar, 4:03. 3. Knoll, 4:13. 4. Orlowski, 4:59. 5. Forrest, 5:06. 6. (tie) Lewis and Emberson, BOTH 5:15.
TOTAL ELAPSED TIME
1. Haller 11:46[:58] 2. Dunbar, 12:20:27. 3. Orlowski 13:59:13. 4. (tie) Lewis and Emberson, 14:04:35. 6. Knoll, 14:45:11. 7. Forrest, 15:30.14.
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