Ironman triathlon inspires couple to stay in the race despite life's setbacks

TEMPE, Ariz. — Beth Fong paces in her wetsuit around the grassy park, contemplating the grueling daylong race ahead.

She has trained for months to swim, bike and run the nearly 141-mile Ironman triathlon. Her father, standing behind her, tightens the zipper on her suit so it hugs her slight 5-foot-2-inch frame. At 29, Fong is in the best shape of her life.

She scans the crowd of 2,400 wearing black wetsuits and red-and-white swim caps. She is looking for her coach, her husband, in his wheelchair. Lawrence Fong, 36, had promised to see her off before the race.

Barefoot in the 50-degree November morning, Beth tucks her brown bob into her swim cap, the one with, "I hate swimming" scrawled across the top. Her face is grim. She grew up near here and knows the water is salty and cold enough to turn fingers, toes and lips blue.

The triathletes have started filtering down to the lake. It's just minutes before the 7 a.m. start, and she can't wait for her husband any longer. She will have to go on without him.

Party girl

He proposed as she crossed the finish line of her first triathlon in April 2007.

Beth Kallok had been a Hollywood party girl who joined a triathlon program for fun, more interested in meeting new friends than becoming a serious athlete.

Lawrence Fong, a buff athlete and sports chiropractor, coached the group. Beth thought he was arrogant. She ignored his strict training rules and stayed out all night. On one of their first runs, she was so hung over she had to stop to dry heave.

But during the next few weeks, she realized she had misjudged him. He was strong, not arrogant. He knew what he wanted and was willing to sacrifice for it. So was she.

A year and a half after they met, Lawrence and Beth were married on April 19, 2008. Under his tuxedo, he wore a triathlon singlet. She scrawled her age on her calf with a marker, a triathlon tradition, and flashed it during the garter toss.

On their honeymoon in Hawaii, they kept training. One day, they ran 16 miles. That fall they planned to run their first Ironman together.

Obstacles encountered

Lawrence arrives about 10 minutes before the start of his wife's race. In a nearby garage, his mother-in-law, Cathy Kallok, helps him from the car only to discover the elevator is broken. By the time they get to the course, Beth has disappeared.

On a bridge overlooking the lake, he scans the water but can't pinpoint her. Already, his morning had been full of frustrations. Beth had helped him dress the night before and packed a bag of supplies. But it was up to him to get out of bed and into his wheelchair, to brush his teeth and lift himself from his wheelchair into the family car.

With the race under way, his mother-in-law wheels him up to a fenced-off holding area near his wife's cycling supplies. He is excited for her but also frustrated. He wants to be competing.

After an hour and a half, Beth emerges from the lake shivering and bruised.

Swept up in the stream of bodies, she was unable to break free. Other swimmers pushed her underwater. Just as she managed to find a pocket of space, someone's elbow clocked her in the temple. By the time she completed the 2.4-mile swim, her goggles had been knocked off four times.

He sees her jog up. They had not been out of contact for this long since his accident a year earlier.

She grabs shorts, shoes that clip to her pedals and other supplies for the bike ride ahead. Volunteers stand ready beside vats of sunblock to slather her up.

She leans over the barrier to give him a kiss.

"I still hate swimming," she grumbles.

His face next to hers, he tells her to get back in the race. She rushes off.

Change in plans

They were supposed to enter this race together last year. But two weeks before the competition, Lawrence collapsed in the restroom of a Los Angeles-area restaurant. Triathlon Club friends he had been meeting found him on the floor, bleeding. He said he had hit his head but didn't know how. The friends called 911 and Beth.

She rushed to the hospital where her husband of six months was on a gurney, apologizing to nurses for bleeding and vomiting. He did not recognize her.

Doctors told her the accident had triggered a series of strokes. A CT scan revealed a blood clot pressing his brainstem. Surgeons operated that night to remove the clot and he slipped into a coma.

The next day, as Beth waited outside the intensive-care unit, a doctor approached. He said her husband was brain-dead and she should consider taking him off life support.

"I was scared, but deep down I always knew that this was not how our story would end," Beth said.

He is in there, she thought. I just have to reach him.

Checking the time

Beth speeds past Tempe's red-rock mountains and into the desert in the heat of the afternoon, the start of her 112-mile ride. Her racing bike is balanced on carbon tubular racing wheels borrowed from her husband.

When she passes her husband, he is looking at his watch, checking her time. He had warned her not to sprint at the beginning, to save her energy. He smiles. She is doing well.

The desert winds pick up. They beat her face, dry from the saltwater and stinging from the sun. Rounding a curve, she hits a head wind that makes the flat course feel as if she is riding uphill.

This is what Lawrence trained her for.

She is a fast cyclist, usually doing about 18 mph. Now she is moving about 11 mph. After this, she has to run a marathon. She remembers facing a similar head wind during a 90-mile ride with Lawrence in San Diego before he was injured.

"You can't fight the wind," he told her then. "Go with it."

Pressure intense

In the days after her husband's accident, doctors said the pressure inside his head was so intense, it threatened to squeeze his brain out through the base of his skull like toothpaste.

To ease the swelling, Dr. Nestor Gonzalez removed two large pieces of skull from the back and right side of Lawrence's head. He stored them in a refrigerator to be reattached if Lawrence recovered.

The surgeon was not optimistic.

After the surgery, Lawrence remained in a coma, hooked to a ventilator and feeding tube. Beth stayed by his side, watching his heart and temperature monitors and talking to him as if he could hear her.

By Christmas Eve, he was breathing on his own, tracking her with his eyes. That night he kicked off his blankets. She asked him if he was cold. He nodded. Surprised, she asked again. Again he nodded.

He was in there.

As they holed up in hospitals to focus on his recovery, the couple lost everything: their savings, jobs and town house, which was foreclosed.

Beth tried to stay positive. When Lawrence's ring finger became too swollen to wear his wedding band, she bought him a new one and wore the old ring around her neck.

By spring, Gonzalez was able to reattach the pieces of skull he had removed.

A fellow triathlete hired Beth, who had worked as a veterinary assistant before her husband's accident, as the live-in manager of an apartment complex. When Lawrence was released from the hospital in July, they moved into their new home, a one-bedroom apartment she had filled with photographs from their racing days.

He encouraged her to train for the Ironman. They made a deal: She would race if he would coach her.

As he coached her, she began to see glimpses of the old Lawrence, the man she loved who knew all her weaknesses and challenged her to overcome them.

"He got to come back in the world we met in and we both thrived in," she said.

"Team Fong"

She is running as the sun sets over the mountains and stars blanket the sky. The temperature dips, and the muscles in her thighs and calves constrict. She is doing 11-minute miles, slow but steady.

On a grassy bend in the road, Lawrence waits with friends, hoisting handmade signs proclaiming "Team Fong" and "We Love You Beth." He watches her loop past, reading her fading smile as a sign that she is tiring. He is tired, too. Staying alert all day has exhausted him. He naps in his wheelchair as his mother-in-law drapes a quilt over his lap.

Shortly before 9 p.m., Beth closes in on the finish line. Brushing aside her weariness, she grins and sprints the final 100 yards. Blinded by floodlights along the final stretch, she doesn't see Lawrence at first.

She crosses the finish line at 14 hours, 7 minutes and 13 seconds, and the crowd parts. What matters, though, is that he is there — for her — beaming the way he used to when he finished a race. As the crowd cheers and cameras flash, she kneels and gives him a triumphant kiss.