Salute To An Amazing Ironman

In the marathon leg of the 1989 Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii, Jim MacLaren, a 27-year-old professional triathlete and a former linebacker for Yale, fell in step with 41-year-old Ken Mitchell, who played the same position for the Atlanta Falcons from 1972 to '75. Given the demands of the race (a 2.4-mile swim, a marathon run and a 112-mile bike ride), conversation had to be minimal, but the two did talk a bit about Mitchell's 11 knee operations, the result of his football career. After about a mile MacLaren decided to pull ahead. "I'm saying a little prayer for you, Jimmy," Mitchell called out as he dropped farther and farther behind. MacLaren, you see, was running with a prosthesis on his left leg.

For the past two years MacLaren has been clocking triathlon times that are benchmarks for most able-bodied athletes. He runs a sub-3:30 marathon and has a 2:10 for a shorter-course (.9-mile swim, 6.2-mile run, 24.8-mile bike ride) triathlon to his credit. He qualified for the U.S. Triathlon Series (USTS) Nationals in November by finishing third in the 25-29 age group at the Alpena, Mich., race last June. Bud Light has made MacLaren a member of its four-member triathlon team, along with Dave Scott, Scott Tinley and Harold Robinson. In the '89 Ironman, MacLaren finished with a time of 12:13:50, shaving almost two hours off the amputee record.

The challenges in that event are "enormous," he says. "To do well, you need some sense of humor and some sense of your own mortality." MacLaren qualifies on both counts—especially the latter. MacLaren, who is also an actor, lost his leg in a traffic accident on Oct. 20, 1985. He was riding his motorcycle down Fifth Avenue in New York City at 9:30 p.m. after completing an assignment as a member of the Circle in the Square Theatre School. He stopped for a red light at 34th Street, and when the light turned green, MacLaren opened the throttle of his Honda V65 Sabre and gunned it forward. At that moment, a westbound city bus weighing 40,000 pounds roared into the intersection and hit MacLaren. According to the police report, the bus threw MacLaren, who was still at his football weight of 290 pounds, 89 feet.

The force of the impact sent MacLaren's helmet flying. His unprotected head hit the pavement first, and his skull split open across the forehead. A lung was punctured, his spleen was ruptured, his kidneys were lacerated, and all his ribs were broken. He was bleeding profusely, both externally and internally. His left leg, which the bus had mashed into the engine of his bike, was burned and crushed.

MacLaren was pronounced dead on arrival at Bellevue Hospital, but doctors were able to restart his heart—twice. They then had to restrain him when he tried to get off the operating table.

MacLaren was in surgery for 18 hours as the hospital staff tried to keep him alive. "They didn't want to give us much hope," says his mother, Hillary Milum. "The internal bleeding was so bad. For a long time, we didn't even know that there was a problem with the leg."

MacLaren awoke from a coma six days later to the sound of a respirator pumping air into his lungs. His left leg had been amputated just below the knee. "I don't remember anything, really," he says. "But all the time I was unconscious, my mother kept a journal of people who called or came by, which I read after I woke up. It was like going to your own funeral. Only, I got the chance to come back. My leg was gone, but I felt extremely lucky to be around."

Since the crash MacLaren's biggest challenge has been fighting stereotyping, something he has been doing since college. At Yale he had to prove himself as an actor: "I was the size of a building, so people didn't think I could possibly be a good actor, but I was." And because he was a football player, he had to prove that he was indeed a serious drama student: "The dumb-jock-in-class thing." In his sophomore year he took a class with Nikos Psacharopoulos, renowned director of the Williamstown Theater Festival until his death in January 1989. "Nikos wanted me to drop out of the class," MacLaren says. "I knew I wasn't very good, but I stood up to him and said I wanted to stay. To learn. Very untypical of me." MacLaren did stay, and Psacharopoulos took him under his wing.

In June 1985, MacLaren graduated from Yale with a degree in fine arts. In September he was accepted by the Circle in the Square School. Just three weeks later he lost his leg. Doctors told him that he should expect to be hospitalized for at least four months. But after 11 days at Bellevue, he was released to the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, N.J. By January 1986, he was back at Circle in the Square.

That summer Psacharopoulos accepted MacLaren as an actor at the Williamstown Festival. While he was there, MacLaren met Marcus Giamatti, son of the late baseball commissioner, and the two became fast friends. "That summer Jim really got into taking care of his body," Giamatti says. Giamatti, a former member of the Bowdoin swim team, taught MacLaren the rudiments of swimming.