On the off chance that someone reading this forum participated in the Oct. 8, 1983 Berkeley Hills Ironhorse Triathlon and kept their results, I was hoping they could reply to this post.
A couple of years ago, through my local bike club here in Berkeley, CA, I connected with another cyclist who also had a distant triathlon background and we started swimming together twice per week. Just recently, comparing some old tri memories, we realized that we were both competing in the 1983 Berkeley Hills Ironhorse Triathlon forty years ago now and, comparing notes, think that we may have finished very close to each other too.
I’m pretty sure that I had saved the results for some years but can no longer locate them so I thought there’s a chance someone else on this forum still have their results. Searching some old newsprint sources, I came across an ad for the event and in the Berkeley Gazette there was brief recap of the results (which I am attaching). “Michael Garcia, a former Stanford swimmer, captured the Berkeley Ironhorse Triathlon at Tilden Park Saturday in 2:14.28. Scott Miller, Auburn was second in 2:18.41 and Rick Shand, Alameda, third 2:20.14. Karen Chequer, Mountain View, took the women’s event in 2:28.13. The Berkeley Ironhorse course includes a 2-kilometer swim on Lake Anza, a 40-kilometer bicycle ride and a 10-kilometer run.”
From memory, we both recall that a teenage Sean Molina finished 4th after missing a turn on the bike course and passed both of us eventually. I finished second in the age group behind him. I think my current swim buddy and I finished pretty close to each other in that event. If so, strange coincidence. Not sure where else to look for the results other than this forum now 40 years on,.
Thanks in advance for any assistance or other suggested sources!
Wow! Thank you so much! That was such a great “timepiece” article. I actually ended up reading it out loud to my wife and we both chuckled at the dated style of sports reporting. I actually looked at the Oakland Trib and the SF Chron on microfilm at the local public library but I only saw coverage of major “national” sports. Nothing like a local triathlon. I had hoped to find some coverage and results in the Daily Californian since it was a benefit event for Cal Women’s Athletics (as the article notes).
One thing I absolutely did not know or recall at all was that there was 850 entrants! I think I finished 12th or 13th overall as I recall at least but in my memory I assumed that was out of 50-100 participants (that’s really all I remember tbh). I’m fairly sure that I had saved some type of newsprint clipping that included my name in the results (one of the reasons I had been looking at newspapers of the time) but I may have been imagining that. I am fairly sure that the full race results were mailed to the participants and included splits for each event too. If my memory of that is correct, it must have been a wonder of the very early personal computer world back then.
I do remember Dave Hornung quite well. He was such an incredible larger than life personality and character. Today he would have a huge Youtube channel. Kind of a cross between the brash Sam Long and straight takling/zero b.s. Lionel Sanders.The dude trained 200% always and wouldn’t let his relatively bigger frame to many other top triathletes deter him from going for the W!
Thanks to your helpful find in the SF Examiner (a paper I had completely forgotten existed at the time), I searched the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Collections at my university library and found another article about the race results, plus a separately dated top 20 results clipping that I recalled keeping (I finished 13th). Both inserted. I also found an ad for the event in the Examiner that noted the reg fee was $30 at the time (about $90 today).
The guy that I went back and forth with on the run was not my current swim partner Tom after all but turns out to be Roger Marquis a future US pro cyclist in the 90s whom I was also later acquainted with as a bike racer. I still see him in passing on the bike in this area.
The second place woman and the winner the previous year, Cindy Olavarri of Albany was on the USA 1983 women’s cycling world championships team of 3 https://youtu.be/bUeKJ7ztSQk?t=94. She later co-owned a pioneering women owned bike shop in Berkeley https://www.berkeleyside.org/…-goodbye-to-berkeley
This little thread has been really fun for me. I knew Mike Garcia back in the day, he was one of the unsung pros of the very early days of triathlon. Didnt realize he swam at Stanford though, will have to look and see if I can find any results from back then. We raced a lot against each other, and he was in that race in Daytona where I got attacked by a Hammer Head shark. After I swam backwards back into the lead group, it then attacked him too, and we both kissed the ground once we finished the swim. Had a hard time continuing on with the race, but there we were on the bike and run together too…
And I knew Karen, she has never really stopped competing, thus her longevity in the sport. And Dave Horning and I would often come out of the water together in races, but he was just too big to ever be able to finish them off in the front. He was built to be a cold open water swimmer. He went on to produce 100’s of events in the Bay Area, think he still has a few he does up there.
Glad you finally got some closure on that race, and I’m not surprised you misstated your friend as the one you battled that day. I often talk to folks from the old days about this or that race or workout, and often we have two different memories of the same event that happened. Pre internet we had nothing to look up and confirm(or not) what our memories committed to our hard drives…Thanks
Wow! Thanks for the great stories and memories, Monty! The perils of being the lead swimmer! I was never in that position personally (thankfully, I now realize). So happy you guys made it out in one piece. What an amazing story to live to tell! Thanks for sharing. To combine shark stories and Escape from Alcatraz, don’t know if you ever saw this video from 2015? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmEeFGVhMEM
Yeah, Dave Horning was really built ideally for an event like Escape from Alcatraz which (I think) he won several times in its early days and even when he didn’t win was perpetually first out of the water and leading the event for a good chunk of it. He later went on to stage Escape from Alcatraz as you noted. If memory serves me correctly, he was on the Cal Water Polo team in college (kind of an enforcer/defensive presence).
I’m still holding out the faint hope that I will dig up or someone will find their complete results from the 1983 Ironhorse race to see if my swim buddy was actually in that race too (we have some absolutely parallel memories of it) or if he was in a later year maybe. We had a “fun bet” going of who finished ahead of other.
Thanks for chiming in! Most appreciated. I haven’t been a competitive triathlete for many years now (I segued into bike racing from triathlon) so I am not conversant with this forum aside from pulling up some old threads via internet searches. So, I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in a 40 year old race that was relatively minor/obscure. Thank you for your interest and comments. Most appreciated.
I was pretty surprised at how many articles and top 20 results from this race made it into the SF Examiner back in the day. Do general interest local newspapers ever cover local triathlons like this anymore or even in the past 20 years, including top 20 results? Maybe you’ll get a few paragraphs about Kona but that’s about it?
I can only suspect that one of the sports reporters at the Examiner was probably an early participant in triathlons. I am next going to see if I can track down any newspaper coverage/results of the Rapp Shoe sprint triathlon near the Stanford campus in the same time period. In 1984, I did the relay event with two high school classmates, one of whom was on the cross country team and the other was on the swim team. The runner’s dad later founded GU and he’s now the chief endurance officer at GU. I did the bike leg. It was all very short/sprint. I led at the end of the bike but we ended up 2nd overall in the relay. It was run-bike-swim order.
I would be pretty surprised if the three laps even amounted to 1 mi total honestly. Back in the early 1980s, Lake Anza was quite full like it is this year. But the past three super drought years, it was a small, shallow swamp filled with green toxic algae bloom (cyanobacteria) and was closed to swimming for multiple years.
The 21 mi/2,250 ft seems more plausible than an actual 40k. I remember my bike split as being around 1h5m which would be 19.4 avg which is possibly believable given the climbing and the equipment of the time.
I mapped out the run course on the Nimitz Way to an o/b turnaround as if it was actually 10km but I strongly recall that the turnaround point was much earlier than the mapped point here.
In the unlikely event that the full results ever turn up, based on the fastest times we might be able to better guesstimate the actual run course distance (bike and swim).
If you were around in those days, you’ll recall that the distances were much more approximate than today, especially on the swim and run portions (particularly if the run was on trails). In the 1982 Sierra Nevada Triathlon in Folsom Lake, the swim felt interminable and was likely way longer than 2 mi.
Spent some time looking at the San Jose Merc in 1984 for results of another triathlon I was involved in. Didn’t find any write up or results but came across this article about triathlete of the time Joanne Ernst which I am attaching here in case anyone ever searches this forum for her name.
