Chapter Eighteen – Man against himself

“Everyone winds up somewhere in life.  Wind up somewhere on purpose.  You are the only one who can determine where that is.”

I had two more stops at my chase truck.  The next one was 737 at Santo Tomas.  The course wound up another section of mountainous terrain above the ocean for 15 miles or so, where I could look down and see the Pacific.  Down to the coastline again – so beautiful but, I couldn’t look; I had to focus on the course. 

Turn back inland with switchbacks to get to elevation again, then sweeping dirt roads.  When I crossed mile 707, the math was easy.  100 miles to go.  It sounded like nothing.  But it was something.

When I pre-ran I came around a switchback at speed and had to drift to the left side of the road.  Around the corner, a pick-up truck was coming.  I couldn’t make the turn tighter without crashing, so I drifted all the way to the edge of the cliff figuring the driver could go by with me on his right.  His brain didn’t figure that out and he came right at me with his brakes locked up on the dirt.  We both stopped, my front wheel 12” in front of his bumper.  I was looking right through the windshield.  He had a choice look for me.  Of course, I would have lost the contest.

I kept my encounter in mind as these roads were open to the public during the race.  I descended into Santo Tomas and onto Route 1 – the paved road on the Pacific side of Baja.  I turned left and saw my truck.  Race mile 731.

731.  That’s a big number.  I was 30 hours in and unexpectedly, I felt good.   

I was riding for my life.

Chapter Seventeen – Born Again

“Practice until you get it right.  Then practice until you can’t get it wrong.”

Sometimes you have to be mad enough or fed up enough to push through and do what it takes.  To see my 3 ½ hour time cushion evaporating was enough.  I rode as fast as I could.  The terrain here was smooth along the ocean.  The course was on the beach at one point. 

A crowd was gathered around a spot where a giant washout had you going down into a gulley and back up.  I spied a natural jump that I hit when we pre-ran.  I thought I’d give the crowd a thrill and I launched about eight feet in the air off of it, employing my motocross skills.  It felt great.

The morning breeze came in off the ocean, but there was no fog.  I put miles behind me.  I felt great.  I couldn’t make a new beginning, but I could make a new ending.

I saw my crew at 7:47AM.  They were thrilled to see me in great spirits.  I was not losing time anymore, but gaining some.  They had a warm breakfast burrito and a coffee for me.  It was so good!  I gulped the coffee and was gone again.  I had somewhere to go.

If I was a night watchman and had to stay awake for 36 hours or more, I could not do it.  But, when you are on a dirt bike with your life and safety threatened, your survival mind wakes up and pays attention.  When there is a conveyor belt of fast moving hazards coming at you, and you are exerting yourself physically, you aren’t going to fall asleep that way.  Just don’t stop.

I pressed on.  I knew there was a huge wide silt field coming up.  In the riders meeting I overheard some drivers saying there was a way to go around it to the left.  When it came, I went left and found it!  Before the next turn I went back to the corner of the course to catch the Virtual Check Point.  Such is the value of sharing information.

I pulled into the chase truck stop at mile 673 in Colonet.  Always glorious to see my team.  Late in the race, teams who chase other race vehicles look for bikes that begin with a 7.  They know we are Ironmen, and to have made it this far…they wave with a different kind of respect.  As I pulled out a team of 12 crew members waiting for a buggy cheered me on along with my own team. 

A quarter mile later a steep long hill climb, but gravity did not exist for me.

 

"Gasolina?"

The course was chewed up and slower than in pre-running.  I had tape on my front fender with all my stops written on it.  I was looking for the Baja gas pit at race mile 591.  Mile 591 came – no pit.  I pressed forward to 592.  No pit, just desolation.  593 – nothing.  Now I was seriously worried.  I was having flashbacks of last year.  Did I miss the pit?  I was in the desert and had not seen a person or structure or vehicle in many miles. 

I see a weathered old man with a walking stick in the middle of nowhere.  I was desperate.  “Gasolina?” I yelled to him.  He shook his head.  I was looking for some knowledge (or gas) from anyone I could get it from.  I pressed forward.  The course went up a mountain.  I knew the pit would not be up here.  594 – nothing.  Did they move the pit?  595.  Oh my God. 

A downhill followed by a very steep hill climb was in front of me.  I was great at hill climbs and I crushed it.  It was starting to get light.  I saw about ten people watching the hill.  I stopped and yelled.  “Gasolina?”  They pointed up the course and yelled “Baja Pit”.   Thank God.  A little higher in elevation and I could see orange signs and a pop-up awning in the distance. 

I pulled up and told the guys “I was worried!  You are supposed to be five miles back!”  I looked to my left under the tent and see a bike.  722x.  It was Liz’s number.  I raise my gaze and see an unnumbered bike and a rider who didn’t look beat down like a racer would be by this time. Then I see Liz eating a pop tart.  I said, “How are you doing Liz?”  She just waved at me. 

I found out later that her team got her a pace rider in two of the hardest sections to ride with her and make sure she was ok.  Interesting idea.  Some long distance runners have a pacer run with them for ten mile stretches to keep them going.  I never heard of a rule against it.

Just two miles later, I came out to the road to see my crew.  Liz’s truck was in front of ours waiting for her.  I made it to 598 by dawn.  Nearly on my “minimum” goal, but 2 hours and 15 minutes behind my plan.  Nighttime, the silt and fatigue had taken its toll.  The situation was critical.  If I lost another 45 minutes against my plan, I would not finish in time.  I cut the stop very short – just a few minutes.  Liz rolled up and I rolled out.

Race or not, the night is a desperate time, especially when things are not going well.   When the sun comes up we feel new life, hope and energy.  It’s clean and new.  It’s as if the race had started all over again.

I headed toward the Pacific Ocean in high spirits. 

 

Chapter Sixteen – New Life

“It is not the mountain that we conquer, but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary

“No pain no gain is crap.”  When I heard Phil Maffetone, trainer to the world’s greatest long-distance athletes say it, it changed how I was training, and it changed my fitness for this race for the better.  I had been pushing my body to failure too often at the gym.  It was killing my shoulders and knees.  Too often I was injured from my workouts.  I changed up my workouts.  I stopped doing what injured me. 

Phil said that when you finish a workout you should feel like you can do it all over again. I started bicycling instead of running to get my knee better since surgery. His book told me to train in my cardio heart rate zone – 180 minus my age (54).  So, I’d train with my heart rate between 116 and 126.  In a race longer than one hour, 90% of your fuel is fat.  In a race longer than two hours, all you are burning is fat.  This is why energy drinks and sugar are no good for an event like the one I was in.  I’d eat and drink plenty, and still lose 8-10 pounds during the race. 

I trained intelligently.  I recovered just as intelligently.  When you train your muscles break down with little micro tears.  It’s in the recovery day that they mend themselves and make you stronger.  You have to rest in between the right workouts.  Just six weeks before the race I started doing it right.

When you show up to the starting line, the sales call, the presentation, or the performance, it’s too late to prepare.

+++++++++++++

The course wound up mountains, along ridges and back down.  Up, around and down again.   My goal was to get to 600 by daylight.  It was 5AM and I was at mile 573.  There was a steep descent from a high elevation Oscar called “The Snake” for its switchbacks.

In Angela Duckworth’s book “Grit” she lays out a formula.  Talent + Effort = Skill.  Skill + Effort = Achievement.  You will notice that EFFORT factors in twice.  Read that again.

Many people try to be happy by avoiding effort.  But what if effort was the secret to happiness? 

Effort is how we become our best selves, and in that, is true happiness and contentment.

 

Dark Night of the Soul

I was struggling, but I kept my composure.  My abs were burning as I had to hold my knees up to my chest for long periods to keep my feet from dragging in the silt.  It was up to the seat in places.  Thirty-year truck racing veterans would say later that it was the worst silt they have ever seen.  Even some 900 hp racing trucks got stuck in it.

It was 3AM, 23 hours into the race.  When I saw the silt coming I tried to look ahead to see how long it went.  If it went far I’d try to get off the course and pick through the brush if that was possible.  Sometimes, I’d wind up a hundreds yards off the course and lose track of where it was.  If I was on the left side of the course and it turned right, I’d be getting farther away.  My GPS was indispensible.  I’d have to zoom it out to find the course line.

There are some plants that are like groups of 16” balls of spikes.  They are very hard.  If I hit one it would stop my bike.  If my front wheel got on top, my bike would teeter on it as the spikes held up the full weight of my bike and me.  We have a video of these plants stopping a race buggy.

I’m desperately picking through thick brush in the dark and don’t have the option to turn the way I want to turn.  All of a sudden, I feel a sharp pain in the top of my foot.  It is not going away.  I look down and see a stub of something sticking out of the leather on the top of my boot.  I stop and take pliers out of my side pouch, grab it and pull it out – all 2 inches of it.  It was under my skin.  I didn’t take my boot off to inspect my foot – there is nothing I could do.  I put the spike in the side pouch with the pliers and kept moving.  “Obstacle immunity”…

I went down about four times in there.  The last time I bent my shifter and couldn’t shift easily.  I had to slam it with my heel and rode most of the way in the same gear.

Mile 538 was a big milestone for me.  It marked then end of this horrible silt and the beginning of easier terrain.  Of course, easier is a relative term and it was broken by periods of hell – but the worst was over.  I was sure of it.

Finally, I got out to the road and found my van.  I sat in the chair in the dark while they replaced the shifter.  I started the night an hour ahead of my schedule.  Now I was an hour and forty five minutes BEHIND my plan.  If things didn’t improve, I’d be against the 36 hour time limit to finish the race. 

This night was a dark night of the soul.

I had a moment with Bobby.  He asked me how I was doing.  I had been battling the worst race conditions I had ever seen – maybe anyone had ever seen, for the last 9 1/2 hours in the dark.  I told him “I’m fighting for it ”.   I almost broke – but I didn’t.

The team told me that Liz was there a bit before me.  She got to the road and couldn’t find her chase truck.  She saw ours and knew Victor and my crew would help her.  She got in the van and was cold, shaken and delirious.  She was in the silt for ten hours.  My crew video recorded her sitting in the back of the van for nearly an hour.  She was in rough shape, but she was still in the race.  She was tough.

I got myself together, looking forward to a new course ahead.  It was 3:28 AM, and my team cheered again as I disappeared into the night.

 

“Impossible is not a fact, it’s an opinion.  It’s only impossible until someone does it.”

Chapter Fifteen – Fight for it

Less than an hour after I rolled in to mile 480, I rolled out at 11:35 pm.  I put cold weather riding gloves on.  I wish I had put them on 100 miles ago.  They were insulated, but were harder to operate the levers with.

Now I had to face the next section.  It was 58 miles, and I knew there was silt in it.  Again it was not there when we pre-ran, but I could see lots of areas where it would be.  I could recognize silt in it’s baked form.  After a racing season of pulverizing silt into flour, at some point in the year the rains would come and saturate it.  Then it would dry into a hard crust.  I pre-run three weeks before the race and it’s mostly hard still.  Everyone else pre-runs it after me and come race time again, it was back to flour.  Every race truck or buggy that goes past me makes it even worse by the time I get there.

I had no idea it would take me three hours and forty-five minutes to go 58 miles.  It was unexpected hell.  I am glad I didn’t know how bad it would be.  If I had, I’d have had a hard time not worrying about it.  Ignorance is bliss.

I came around a turn and saw lights ahead.  There were three race buggies stuck in the silt in a row.  Even they could not turn out of the deep ruts to avoid it.  The navigators were out and jacking the back of the two wheel drive buggies up and putting boards they carried under the tires.  But they’d go three feet and get stuck again. After a race the locals would walk sections of the track to look for things left behind.  They’d find dozens of these special made boards in the silt.

I managed to get off the course and go around the stuck buggies.  Jose Carrasco was not as lucky.  He was a Baja racing champion and won in the Ironman class one year.  He had a brand new bike this year, but it got stuck in the silt.  Jose is a local guy who rides and races there all the time.  His dot wasn’t moving on the tracking map so they sent a medic in on another motorcycle to see if he was ok.  Jose had a choice – ride out with the medic or sleep in the desert.  He left his bike stuck there and it took them hours to ride out.

Kevin Daniels is a great rider.  He has done well in the Baja 500 and San Felipe 250.  But he is 0 for 3 in the Baja 1000.  Would I be 0 for 3 too?  Sections like this would determine if that was my fate.

Boe Huckins won the Baja 1000 Ironman a few years ago.  He also did not finish another year.  He wouldn’t finish this year either.  No matter how fast or skilled you are, Baja is an equal opportunity punisher.

This hell had beat me the last two years. 

I was still fighting.

Frozen

“Life is easy when you live it the hard way.  And hard when you live it the easy way.”

 

Being the end of a 100 mile stretch of wilderness, every chase team was here at mile 480 to meet their race vehicle.  We called the place “Pit City”.  It looked completely different at night.  I spied the Baja Pit and pulled in to fuel up.  Javier and Victor appeared from the dark and told me what direction the chase trucks were.  I rolled in and they took the bike from me.  I was frozen.

 

All the teams had fires going.  Oscar told me before the race that if I wanted to finish, I should take a rest here.  It was my plan to take 45 minutes here.  Victor had the van heat on high.  I must have been 85 degrees in there.  Kevin had emptied the back of the van and slung a hammock in the back.  I had never seen such a thing.  He had a pillow and a blanket. 

 

My hands weren’t working.  They took my boots off, which was unexpected but welcomed.  I climbed into the hammock and Kevin put the blanket on me.  I was shaking with cold.  The heat felt good.  I told them to wake me up in 30 minutes.  No more. 

 

For 30 minutes I shook.  I was far colder than I knew.  If I had gone on I would have been in serious trouble. Finally I stopped shaking as the cold left my body. They opened the door. No sleep.  But it was ok.  The value in a few minutes sleep is not the sleep itself, but letting your body just relax and reset.  Everything that was in spasm or cramp mode can release a bit.

 

I felt better being warm and slid to the edge of the van where I put my boots back on with some assistance from Bobby and Kevin.  I walked over to their fire and we shared what I remember as a cherished few minutes.  I ate something they had for me – I can’t remember what it was but it was so good at that moment.  There was a cactus burning in the fire. I wished I could hang out there for a while, but that was not going to happen.

 

The was the Baja 1000 Ironman.  I was 19 hours in.  It was up to me.

Chapter Fourteen – No pressure, no diamond

“You can waste your life drawing lines, or you can live your life crossing them.” – Shonda Rimes

Your mind changes your body, and your body changes your mind.  During the past year when I was sick or injured or sleep deprived, I had trouble believing I could finish this race.  But when I felt good, I thought I could do it easily.  That was my body telling my mind what was possible.  Now my mind was telling my body what was possible, and trying to override it’s protests – successfully for now.

I was at mile 401, 15 hours into the race.  The silt patches were deep.  I tried to go around where I could, but so did everyone else.  The problem is you couldn’t get off the course to go around in most places because of dense fields of cactus, thorny plants, boulders and topography. 

The course improved some and I was going along at about 25 miles per hour now– an improvement.  Race trucks came through every few minutes to refill the air with bits of earth.  I heard there was bad silt at mile 403 – two miles ahead.  They didn’t say anything about the hell I had been through already.   I started to think that maybe they were off on what mile the crap was; that I had been through the “bad silt” already and a few miles ahead I would not find any more deep stuff.

False.  403 was another horror show.  I had to lift my legs up, wearing riding boots mind you,  so my feet didn’t drag in the silt.  In places the ground level on the side of me was up above the seat from years of racing this route and the ruts that developed.  Those ruts had more than a foot of silt in the bottom of them.  It was a slot a motorcycle could not get out of by turning. The only way out was straight through. 

Joe Desena, the founder of Spartan Race talks about “obstacle immunity”.  You push through obstacles that would have stopped you before without much mental anguish.  You see an obstacle, you tackle it with whatever action is required, and you move on.  This is good training for life.  When you have big goals you get big challenges.  Little goals – little challenges.  No goals, no challenges.  So to make any noteworthy progress, obstacle immunity is a valuable attitude to develop.

I see strange lights on the landscape in front of me.  I wonder what is happening.  They come and go. They get more pronounced and brighter.   Of course, it’s a race truck approaching from behind me.  I have time to find a spot to get off the course between a cactus and other obstacles, jumping a rocky berm to accomplish it.  The truck goes by.  I can’t see.  I wait.  I can’t see.  I wait more.  I try to go forward at walking speed with my feet out to feel the ground under me as I can only see five feet with my headlights illuminating the dust.  I stop and wait more. 

Visibility is so slow to improve.  I have to get out of here.  I try to go forward, duck paddling some more, perhaps breaking my own rule of not riding where I can’t see – but I am going two miles an hour – a crash at this speed can’t be very catastrophic.  The course rises uphill, and just like that, I can see again.  In the low areas, there is more silt and no wind.  In the higher areas there are more rocks, less dust and just a hint of a breeze. 

My progress is so slow.  There is nothing I can do.  It’s not a question of courage or physical output.  It’s a lack of visual information to my brain.  All I can do is do the best I can in this moment.  Excellence is the next two minutes – it’s the next 100 yards.  It’s doing my best now, whatever the conditions, that makes the section after that possible. 

It’s cold.  I can only see in black and white, and only what is in front of me.  The terrain to the sides does not reveal itself to me – a mystery.  My choices for when to get off the course and go around silt are a crap shoot. 

415 is coming.  A big steep hill climb with loose rocks and boulders.  The ground will fall very steep down to the left, and nearly vertical to the right.  It’s really “off camber”.  This means it slopes side to side under my wheels and with wheel spin, your rear end will slide downhill.

In the dark, without warning, all of a sudden I’m going sharply up.  This is it.  Call on the Honda horsepower – twist the throttle and don’t stop.  Bounces off rocks change my trajectory but I keep it pointed uphill.  You could easily bounce right off the cliff here. 

I get to the top.  Whoops, that’s not the top, there’s more.  Finally.  That hill climb was a landmark obstacle.  It’s past me now.  Mile 405 in an 806 mile race.  I’m over halfway home.

From my recollection and notes from pre-running I know the course is rocky for another five miles and then improves considerably and turns into a fast sweeping sand road.  But that was before hundreds, maybe thousands of passes from pre-running race vehicles.  Now the easy part I was hoping for was only there in remnants.

At higher elevation, it was notably colder.  Combine that with my faster speed and the 40-degree atmosphere was penetrating me now.  Exposed and open to the wind on a dirt bike, cold can end your race and leave you on the side of the course shaking, unable to function.

My fingers were going numb.  Twenty-five more miles and the worst part of the course would be over.  Wouldn’t it?  This 100 miles in the dust and cold night was the longest stretch of the course without seeing my team.  I could not feel my fingers now.  Every bump caused pain in my hands.

I am very worried about my hands.  It was bad enough that a few minutes trying to warm them wasn’t going to do the trick. 

Lights ahead.  Mercy.

Chapter Thirteen – Hounds

“A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the 100^th.  If I have to fall, may it be from a high place.” – Paulo Coelho

It was silt.  Deep and wide.  It wasn’t there when we pre-ran – not here.  When I came through the fence and saw it I was shocked.  It looked like a minefield; like a scene from a long war.  Race vehicles had tried to avoid it during pre-running so they went to the left or right until those lines were destroyed.  They went wider and wider until it became an ocean of silt.

Picture baby powder a 16” deep.  Under that baby powder are ruts in the harder substrate you can’t see.  Now ride a motorcycle in it.  Your eyes see one surface, but the bottom of your tires see a completely different one. 

My mind and body were counting on going strait, but the bike followed a rut to the right.  Down I went in the silt.  One good thing is landing in it is mostly a soft landing unless you get tangled up with the hard parts of your bike.  You look like a powdered donut getting up.  Hopefully your bike didn’t inhale so much silt and clog your air filter and stall out.

Two locals ran out to help me.  There were big crowds watching this silt field because it was right alongside the road where everyone was pitting and there was good access.  They told me to go left.  I did because staying on course was not an option.  The alternate route was horribly chewed up also.  I picked through bushes and silty mounds and rocks.  Without me noticing the change, it got dark suddenly and my headlights were cutting through pitch black night.  I knew I had 13 hours of darkness to deal with starting now.

I was picking through wondering “if this is what the route around the silt looks like, I can’t imagine how bad the course line was”.  I was going maybe ten miles an hour.  I had to get out of this.  I wondered how far to the right the course was.  I looked at my GPS and whenever I saw an opening between the brush and rocks that went right, I took it.  Eventually I figured I’d find the course again. 

Suddenly a hear a roar to my right.  It was 900 horsepower bombing through the silt and making it ever deeper.  I guess the trucks were not 89 miles behind me after all.  Here they were.  I knew what this meant.  That truck was the leader in a parade of them.  In my experience, in general the first 30 to pass me would be very aggressive.  Then they’d keep coming in a steady stream of violent dusty interruptions to my race plan.

I popped out of the wild onto the course.  It was silty ruts – a bikers least favorite terrain.  It’s not so much you couldn’t twist the throttle and make it through – it was keeping your balance while you were in it that was the problem.  I couldn’t see well.  The dust hanging in the still air illuminated by my headlights was a problem.  And I knew it would be all night.  I prayed for wind, but the wind never came.

I had three headlight switches.  One high beam quad LED cluster which I shut off.   One low beam cluster with a yellow lens – this was the best for the dust.  Finally there was one small LED strip to fill in close. 

The silt yielded to a bit easier going.  Oh wait, no…it’s back.  Damn.  I see headlights coming up behind me.  I try to find a spot to pull over, but I’m in a deep rut and there are berms on both sides.  I scurry ahead looking for a place to get out of the way.  As he passes I’m blinded by dust.  Once the wind of his machine is gone, it just floats there in front of me – designed to frustrate.  I wait.  I proceed very slowly, but prematurely.  I stop and wait another 30 seconds.  I try again.  This would go on most of the night.

When you can’t see, it’s not a matter of “toughing it out” or “digging deep”.  You can’t see!  I had made up my mind not to ride where I cold not see.  I was experienced in this way.  But you can’t finish a race when you are not moving.  I knew that this was the worst race conditions I would see.  To survive “the parade” (of trucks coming through) was the price I must pay for clear air later.  I knew it was coming but did it have to begin just as night did? 

It was a path I had chosen, and I could not complain.

“Action illuminates the next step”

Chapter Twelve – Down

I pulled out of the pit from Gonzaga Bay headed to my next goal – 389 before dark.  The course snaked down from Ensenada along the east coast, and now it would begin to cross over to the west coast and back up the Pacific Ocean side to make a big snaky oblong loop back to the starting line, which would now be the finish line.  I only hoped I could see it.

The desert landscape is a wonder to behold.  There is no greater way to see more of it than this.  At unpredictable intervals the sand would change, the rocks would change, the vegetation would change.  And so would the course. 

You’d be dodging coconut size rocks scattered in deep sand for a few minutes, and then be on a wash-boarded hard dirt road.  Then you’d be in sweeping rutted turns for a few minutes and then hit a patch of silt – like riding through flour of various depths.  There were a few stretches of dry lake beds – smooth as a tabletop.  I’d twist the throttle open but not quite all the way lest I take a chance of blowing up the engine.  Then the course would likely punish you with technical whoops where 20 mph would take great effort and skill.  Such is the way of Baja.

The sun was getting very low and I needed to make it to mile 389 by the time it disappeared.  I rode through a mining area with giant earth moving equipment strewn about.  The course was such a pleasure here when I pre-ran it.  No more.  Now the dirt was pulverized off the course by high speed tire traffic, leaving the convex tops of all the rocks to produce chop and vibration though my handlebars.  Preserving my hands was always a priority.  I loosened my fingers around my foam handgrips.

I rolled in through a physical checkpoint where you come to a complete stop.  They write your race number down and give you the green flag.  I came out to the pavement, took a left and looked for a big yellow sign saying 714x among the hundreds of chase teams meeting their race vehicle here.  They had to rendezvous here – the racers had to endure the next section of 100 miles of crap and hell before they could see their chase truck again.

I had not seen any race trucks yet, but I knew they should be getting closer.  They released them onto the course five hours after the motorcycles.  Truck chase teams had eighteen wheeler support vehicles and sometimes 80 men on their teams.  This was serious business.

I saw my sign and they directed me to the truck just past where the course turned back into the desert.  It was a happy time for me.  I made my goal of 389 before dark.   To be honest, I made a miscalculation and thought dark was at 6:00 pm.  Well, it got dark at five.  A happy mistake – I was one hour ahead of my plan.

There was a lot to do.  Get me ready for dark and cold, and check the bike over.  We put a new tire on the rear.  The team was encouraged to see me and I was encouraged to see them.  They said that they were all expecting me to break down and be half dead at some point.  But I’d come into the pit with energy and in good spirits, and this was such good news to them.  Thirteen hours into the race now, they fed off my good condition and I was bolstered by them.

They told me there was an accident on the starting line and they had to hold up the start of the race trucks.  Apparently, a Monster Energy girl – a model hired for the fanfare of the start, got tangled up in the 40″ wheel of a race truck.  She was in critical condition. I only found this out later.

Each year they make more and more rules to make the race safer.  I am sure they will have this one covered next year.

My team told me the lead truck was 89 miles behind me.  I thought I’d have a chance to get through a bunch of silt and to the hill climb at 415 before I had to deal with pulling over for them and waiting for their dust to clear.  This was very good news for me.

It was “hurry up offense”.  I drank Chia and crammed down some food.  I knew this next section would be my test – a long test.  My team filled me with encouragement.  I remounted and rolled back out to the course.  I  accelerated strong through the gap in the fence and onto the course. 

I couldn’t believe what I saw.  In 30 seconds I was down.

“Whatever you do, do not doubt my presence.”