If I had been walking past a newsstand in May 1970 and spotted this magazine cover, I would have quickly fished 60 cents out of my pocket to buy it. What could be so interesting about the guy with the handlebar mustache that SI chose to feature him on the cover in the middle of the NBA and NHL’s championship series? A lot, actually.

The guy on the cover is David Miln Smith, whose “Peace Pentathlon” was the subject of a 5,800-word story inside the magazine by Robert F. Jones. The pentathlon itself (skydiving, swimming, scuba diving, running and motorcycling) is the hook for Jones’s story, but the article is really more about Smith’s laid-back approach to extreme athletic challenges. Smith had excelled at golf, swimming and skeet shooting as a kid but grew to loathe competition.

“To compete is to try to put someone else down,” he told Jones. “In a Christian sense, if we’re good enough to beat someone, we should also be good enough not to want to put him down. Even in pro games, where the execution is often so superb that it overrides the put-down aspect, you get a sense that it’s all programmed, all artificially narrow and not quite human. Whole cities get caught up in the put-down philosophy—the Jets have got to humiliate the Giants or else half the town will be unhappy. Or look at Baltimore—everywhere you look there’s a loser—Colts, Orioles, Bullets, Spiro T. Agnew.”

That doesn’t mean that Smith’s passion for athletics waned, though. After spending time at nine different colleges in his home state of California, Smith started traveling the world and undertaking grand athletic challenges just for the heck of it. He became the first person to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar from the African side to the European side (against the prevailing currents). He swam across the Hellespont (aka the Dardanelles) in Turkey, the Suez Canal and other enormous stretches of water. He walked 300 miles through Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and ran over a 9,000-foot mountain in Haiti.

His biggest undertaking to date was the Peace Pentathlon in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Here’s how he explained it to a group of curious locals:

“Peace, man. Five groovy events that people do for fun, not for war. Events that aren’t designed to beat other people, but to test what the athlete himself is capable of doing. If we can only get past the idea that we have to be better than the next cat, and concentrate on being better today than we were within ourselves yesterday, then the world will be a better place.”

Far out, man.

Smith completed his self-designed one-man competition in six hours and 17 minutes. Is that an impressive time? Who knows? Who cares? That isn’t the point.