The San Francisco Examiner - Saturday, Feb. 8, 1997
Edvins Beitiks of the Examiner Staff

Later that day, fighting off waves of self-pity, Howley found himself talking to a woman in training for a triathlon.

"She told me she ran 10 miles a day and I thought, "Why would you want to run 10 miles a day?" said Howley, who walked away, shaking his head. But for the rest of the day, as he tried to come to grips with the doctor's news, the thought of no-nonsense, daily workouts intrigued him.

"After crying about it for a couple of hours, trying to deal with what the doctor said, I got it into my head that I wanted to do a triathlon,' " Howley said. "And I started training the next day."

By March 1990 Howley, who lives in Santa Barbara, was registered in his first triathlon. He followed that up with his first marathon, and hasn't looked back since.

On Saturday night Howley will be honored for his dedication and inspiration to others at the annual ALS Ironman Awards dinner at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco.

Proceeds go toward amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - Lou Gehrig's disease - and other charities. Past winners of the awards, initiated in 1989 by the San Francisco Giants, include Brent Jones, Dusty Baker, Jerry Rice and Chris Mullin.

This year the Ironman Awards will honor Los Gatos High football coach Charlie Wedemeyer, mountain biker Susan DeMattei and former A's pitcher Dave Stewart as well as Howley, who at one time didn't expect to live past 1990.

Howley, who turned 36 on Dec. 12, said, "When I was 28 I remember telling a friend of mine who was older, "Well, you're going to be older than me forever, because I'm not going to make it to 30.' But here I am.

"The funny thing is, '89 seems like an eternity ago," Howley said. "It feels like everything prior to '89 happened to somebody else. When I meet people I knew before '89, I have no memory of me."

It's not a time he especially wants to remember, said Howley. He was first diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1983, "and for years after that I didn't do anything but party and smoke and do drugs. Everything bad."

It was his way of fighting off what he thought was the inevitable, Howley said. But once he started daily workouts, with special attention to his heart rate, life took a turn for the better. Coming into San Francisco on Thursday, Howley made a beeline to the Bay Club to keep up with those workouts.

Howley has cut back on medication, "dropping from 60 pills a day, some with food, some without, to a couple of pills in the morning, a couple of pills at night." In a growing AIDS drug market - the Food and Drug Administration approves nine drugs to fight HIV - Howley has settled on one: Norvir.

For most people, a healthy count of T-4 cells - the immune cells killed by the AIDS virus - falls between 500-1,500. Before his workouts and new medication took hold, Howley's T-4 count had fallen to three, which left him unable to drink tap water, eat at salad bars or taste any meat that hadn't been burned to a crisp.

Howley became lactose-intolerant, fat-intolerant and vegetable-intolerant, then came down with Karposi's sarcoma and almost went blind in one eye. "I was definitely on my way out, no doubt," he said. "On paper, I was a corpse."

But then Howley's T-4 count started climbing ( "In one day it went from 60 to 260" ), and has stayed between 200 and 300 since. Howley credits his workouts and the frame of mind the workouts left him with for the turnaround.

Being around healthy people "gives me support, an inner strength, something to look forward to," said Howley. "There were days I wasn't feeling too good, when I wouldn't have gone anywhere, but someone would call up to say, "Let's go for a bike ride,' and I'd say, "All right.' "

Nowadays Howley's calendar is completely taken up with workouts and competition. Last year he completed his first Ironman triathlon in Hawaii, followed eight days later by the New York Marathon.

This year he'll take part in his sixth L.A. Marathon, followed by a biking and running tour across country, followed by triathlons in Germany and Hawaii.

The message he'll be spreading on the cross-country tour and in every event he enters, said Howley, is the advantages of working out and the dangers of unsafe sex. He can personally point to the day he got AIDS and the person he got it from, Howley said - "It was a star, a name, and I was this 21-year-old neophyte, kind of star-struck. I knew we should've been using condoms, but I didn't have enough guts to say it."

He learned of his exposure to HIV, Howley said, "When I walked into a 7-11 to buy a pack of cigarettes and saw a newspaper saying that so-and-so had died of AIDS."

Because the biggest growth in AIDS this decade is among women - the rate among black heterosexual women has grown 160 percent while the rate for white gay or bisexual men has dropped 30 percent - Howley is on a personal crusade to warn young women about unsafe sex.

"I want them to do what I didn't have enough guts to do, to say, "Put on a condom. I don't know where you've been.' "

Howley is also warning against the giddy optimism that, with the introduction of new drugs, is starting to surround the AIDS virus. "Kids say, "Well, we've got medicine that can deal with that now, so we don't need condoms, we don't need to be that careful, anymore.' But that's wrong. Very wrong."

In spite of constant workouts Howley, still has his bad days, days "where I'm pretty much stuck in bed, feeling nauseous. On New Year's Eve I was running a temperature of 104.8 and I was so scared it might not be flu. But it was."

Triathlons and marathons have kept him from giving in to AIDS, said Howley, who finished "about 1,000 out of a field of 1,490 at the Hawaii Triathlon . . . I got to mile 18 of the run and started getting dizzy, and I made myself walk the last eight miles. I knew I had enough time to finish, and being able to finish, that's what was most important to me."

Howley has a bagload of memories from that triathlon, including the image of the other runners in front of him, jogging through the night ( "This valley of Glo-sticks wandering through the lava fields" ). And he remembered the taste of hot broth after the sun went down - "You're so dehydrated and this cup of broth is so good. It was like, "More, sir, please.' I felt like Oliver or something."

Howley expects to cut his triathlon time of 14 hours, 44 minutes down to 12 hours next time around, just as he expects to better his personal mark of 4:36 in the New York Marathon. He can think of the future now, at least a few months ahead. He has already exchanged marital vows with his partner of five years, "and I'm looking into buying mutual funds. I never even knew what mutual funds were."

Oh, and last year Howley went back to the doctor in Santa Barbara who told him he had a year and a half to live.

"He looked at me like he was seeing a ghost," Howley said. "I just told him, "Hi.' But, inside, I was laughing a little."
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