Broken bones and bloody needles in the dirt

(First race of the four-race series –  the “SanFelipe 250”, 320 miles, April 2018)

Victor and I executed our plan well on race day.  At dawn the race began on the beachfront main drag of San Felipe.  I rode great but I didn’t override the course.  At about mile 50, number 702x, Tony Gera came past me.  He had won the Baja 1000 Ironman a couple years earlier.  About 30 minutes later I saw a bike down on the left side of the course and a rider laying on the right side.  I stopped and went back.

 “Are you ok?”  I saw his race pants were torn open at his thigh.  Race pants are really hard to tear. 

“My leg is broken,” he said to me.

“Is it your femur?”  I expected him to say yes as that’s where his pants were torn.  Broken femurs can be life-threatening.

“No.  It’s my fib/tib” he said. 

There was nothing I could do.

“I’ll tell them at the next pit” I promised.

*******

Five hours later, a little past midway I pulled into a pit and it was nearly 100 degrees.  I did not expect Chris Haines, the owner of the support team and Baja racing legend to tap me on the shoulder as they were quick fueling my bike.  “Do you want an IV?”  “No” I said.  “Are you sure?”

Last year Chris’s team won the pro motorcycle championship in Baja – a goal he had been chasing for 20 years.  This year, his team would have the #1 number plate.  So at our home base hotel it was 1x and 714x, me.  (A three digit number starting with a 7 means Ironman class, and x means motorcycle, since there are more than twenty classes of four-wheel vehicles in these races).

The pro teams are in it to win it and they have a chase helicopter with radio communications to the rider.  Well, the 1x helicopter never showed; it broke down.  To ride in the chase helicopter, Chris gets a Navy Seal medic from San Diego.  Why?  These Pro riders are hanging it all out there and when they crash, it can be spectacular – and I do not mean that in a good way.  I suggested that Chris hire a helicopter from a race truck crew to at least follow the 1x bike for the first three hours, since the motorcycles get the green flag four hours before the trucks did.  When the helicopter had to drop the 1x team’s medic and go back to follow their own race truck, the medic got in the 1x chase truck.  That’s how they happened to be there at that pit to see me.

I thought about the IV.  It was very hot, but I was drinking a lot from my pack, and at chase truck stops Victor would put a washcloth from the cooler water on my back and saturate my jersey with water before I left.  That would make the next fifteen minutes much cooler from evaporative cooling until I was dry again.  (In a race, I’d sweat, but never get wet during the day because of the fast evaporation rate.) But I did want to see how an IV would make me feel.  Some Baja 1000 riders got IV’s in the middle of the race to rehydrate them and ”wake them up”. 

“Ok!” I yelled over my engine.  Jimmy Holly took the bike from me as I got off it and I followed the Seal Medic behind the truck.  He stuck a needle in my arm and put two bags of saline with a little sugar in me.  It took ten minutes or so, maybe a little more.  When he was done he took the bloody needle out of my arm and threw it in the sand.  It was like a war movie or something.

I hopped back on my bike with a new rear tire the mechanics had put on in the meantime, and I was off.  I didn’t feel anything.  Not worse, not better.  Would I have felt worse later without the IV?  I can’t say for sure.  But I knew now what was involved.

The race took me 12 hours.  There were 12 Ironman starters and seven finishers.  I was seventh.  If I knew how close I was to sixth, I could have skipped the I.V. or one of the last breaks with Victor, but I just wanted to finish.  I was racing my race, not against anyone else.

When I pulled into the finish in San Felipe I realized it was the first finish line I had ever seen in Baja.  In 2015 Tanner had finished the race that I had started.  The next two years of Ironman attempts I never finished.  It was a great feeling and something I wanted more of.

Seeing stars – during the day

San Felipe was a town on the eastern shore of Baja along the Sea of Cortez.  They have been racing around there for many years, and routes they use are never groomed.  What do racing wheels do to the sandy terrain around San Felipe?  They “whoop it out”.  “Whoops” are waves in the sand caused by wheel action.  A wheel under either acceleration or braking hits the face of a bump and digs a little dirt out and throws it backwards.  Keep doing this thousands or tens of thousands of times and you have three-foot troughs and peaks.  A motorcycle going through there works a lot harder and travels a lot slower than on level ground.

Everyone knows the San Felipe 250 may be a “short” race at a mere 320 miles this year, but the terrain around San Felipe is the toughest in Baja.  It included the “Borrego Loop”, an 80-mile section of some of the toughest of the tough.  This race was no gimme.

The first day of pre-running went well, but 170 miles after a Connecticut winter of no riding kicked my butt.  Day two felt better, until it didn’t.

I met up with two Mexican riders who were also pre-running.  I decided to ride with them because I was riding alone, and that is dangerous.  If you go down and get hurt, nobody is around.  I was chugging along at 40 mph and hit a rock sticking up I did not see because it was the same color as the sand and the sun was directly overhead with no shadows.  It was as if a grenade had gone off under me and my rear wheel was suddenly above my head as I unicycled on the front wheel at speed. 

With the slow motion that comes before eminent disaster, I thought, “would I save this one?”  Nope.  I went over the bars and hit the ground, head first.  It was one of those crashes where you just lay still for a minute and think “Did that really just happen?”  Then you move one finger at a time.  “Ok, that’s alright.  And this is ok….”.  When I stood up I was seeing stars.  My vision was impaired.  Damn!  A concussion.  I’d had my fair share of those.  

I didn’t have memory loss, thank God.  That would be a big problem out there.  I was 35 miles from Victor and forgetting where I was and where I was going and how to get there in the middle of the desert – well, that’s like a movie that has happy vultures in the end.

My Mexican riding mate asked if I was ok.  After waiting a few minutes, I told him to go on.  There is nothing he could do.  A pre-running race buggy pulled up.  There was nothing they could do either.  I waited fifteen minutes and decided I had to ride with tunnel vision and bright dots tracing across my eyes.  After 15 minutes riding that way the unexpected happened.  My vision cleared up.  Whew.  That was close.

I had a brand new helmet on that we got from a sponsor – an Italian company called Just One.  It was an awesome helmet, but it wasn’t brand new anymore.  I landed in gravely sand.  I thought about how if I landed on a rock like the one that I struck, it could have been far worse.  Head to rock?  Concussion at best.  Leg or arm to rock?  Broken bones.  Ribs or back to rock? 

Well, let’s not think about that.  Ride.  Get back to Victor.

Chapter Two – The race to THE race

Run God’s Risk

“Live.  If you live, God will live with you.  If you refuse to live, he’ll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation.  Everyone knows this but no one takes the first steps, perhaps for fear of being called insane.” – Paulo Coelho

Nine months before the Baja 1000 I had decided I would race the entire four-race desert racing series in Baja.  The experience would be valuable for me to achieve my ultimate goal – to become one of less than 20 riders to ever finish the Baja 1000 Ironman class and be the oldest among them.  The schedule looked like this –

San Felipe 250          April               320 miles

Baja 500                     June               542 miles

Tijuana Challenge     September     128 miles

Baja 1000                  November      806 miles

March in Connecticut is still winter and I can’t ride here.  So to have a 340-mile race on April 3 is a little sudden.  I had been working out at CrossFit a lot and running in the cold. 

Baja, a 1000-mile long peninsula in Mexico that starts just south of San Diego, is the off-road racing capital of the world.  It is a wonderland for off-road racing.  There is no way that the United States, with all its land use regulations, laws, lawyers, and other ideas about how to use seemingly endless tracts of unused desert wilderness would let this happen in their country.  I have come to love Baja and the people there for so many reasons.

When you race in Baja it’s a good idea and pretty much protocol for all serious racers to “pre-run” the racecourse.  Each year’s course is laid out a little different through the Baja desert.  When you pre-run, you only ride during the day so you can see what you are getting into.  You can also make a race plan, deciding where you’d see your chase truck, and learn what and how to strategize each section of the course.

For the San Felipe 250 I had a new driver named Victor Abitia.  Victor had dual citizenship and lived in just south of Tijuana in Rosarito on the Pacific Ocean, but often rode his motorcycle across the border to work.  Victor looks like a gringo, but he spoke perfect Spanish and perfect English.  When locals saw us together they’d talk to us like we were both Americans; sometimes trying to sell something, serving us, or the occasional hustle.  But when Victor opened his mouth, they knew he was one of them.  We had fun with this sometimes, as Victor would wait to reveal himself.  Victor was always smiling and had fantastic people skills.  Restaurants, border crossings, military checkpoints – it didn’t matter, Victor would have everyone smiling.  We became good friends very quickly. 

Our plan was to pre-run 170 miles on Monday, 170 miles on Tuesday, and race the 320 mile San Felipe race on Friday.  I had raced 831 miles five months earlier.  Surely 320 miles was a piece of cake – right? 

It wasn’t.

Chapter one – Unfinished Business

 “What one can be, one must be” – Abraham Maslow

I woke up at 2:10 am, 20 minutes before my alarm went off.  Who can sleep well before riding a dirt bike solo in the longest non-stop cross country race in the world? 

I ate what I had planned to eat even though I didn’t want to this early – chicken, an apple, an orange, and a banana.  All my gear was laid out in perfect order.  There was a checklist, a backpack with a hydration bladder and exact items in it, and a “race bag” to go in the chase truck with all that months of thought could determine should be in there.

I had done this exact routine three times before.  Each time my son Tanner was in my hotel room with me.  Now I was alone.  I had unfinished business with 806 miles of beautiful yet hostile desert. 

After another year of thinking about it nearly every day, and training my 54-year-old body to perform and take abuse, the moment of reckoning was finally here.  It was serious.  Either I was going to finish this race on this dirt bike, or something bad was going to happen.  Maybe both.

I explained it many times, and I was tired of telling the story this way.  The short version was –

–       I went on a recreational dirk bike tour in Baja Mexico with my son and friends in Jan 2015.

–       We learned about the Baja 1000, the longest non-stop cross-country race in the world and my son Tanner decided we should enter it.

–       As a two-man team against teams of 4, 5 and 6, we won the race by 60 seconds in 25 ½ hours in November of 2015.  It was quite a story and we made a movie about it called “Into the Dust” on YouTube – the most popular movie about motorcycle racing in Baja ever made.

–       Tanner decided he wanted to race in the “Ironman Class” in 2016.  It’s solo – no teammates.  You do all the riding yourself and you are on the bike for 24-48 hours.  You have to be crazy, stupid or a superhero – maybe all three.  Only about ten people had finished this race as solo riders so far. Really Tanner???  Ughhhh.  Okay, I lost my teammate, so I’ll race Ironman too.

–       The first year my 21-year-old son Tanner used all the energy he could muster but finished in 27 ½ hours.  I hurt my neck at mile 200 and got to mile 600 in the 855-mile race.  I could not finish.

–       The next year the course designers went nuts for the 50^th anniversary of the race – it was 1134 miles.  Tanner was leading the Ironman class for 200 miles but tapped out of the race at mile 607.  I ran out of gas at mile 643 and wasted 7 hours waiting for gas in the night.  I got going again and made it to mile 831 in 37 ½ hours and could not go on due to exhaustion.  I did not finish – again.

–        I couldn’t live to old age and keep telling everyone the same damn sad story, let alone myself.  I do not quit.  So, here I was.

I got my gear on, paying attention to every detail.  I had tested everything.  Different socks, neck braces, knee braces, helmets, goggles, boots, undergarments, and dozens of other things.  In a race as long as this, little problems become big ones and cause stress to the body, as if there wasn’t enough already. 

For example, the second little toe knuckle on my left foot sticks up a little higher than the rest.  It was something I had never noticed until I put a motocross boot on and rode for 30 hours.  Then the skin rubs off it from rubbing against the top of the inside of my boot – so I wrap it with medical tape.  Such detail would make the next two days of my life more “comfortable”.

I went through my checklist – nothing more to do than to walk out to the parking lot across the street from the San Nicolas Hotel and see my team.  They would be my lifeline – keeping me going and who knows – maybe keeping me alive.

It was waiting for me again under the orangey lights.  A willing fire-breathing Honda 450X hot rod.  It was built just for me and just for this.  We would be one for the next 30 plus who knows how many hours.  I put my helmet on, checked the GPS, and headed for the starting line.

I knew the drill.  I was calm and full of resolve.  I resolved to accept whatever happens.  I resolved that I would come back again and again until I beat the desert and finished.  And I resolved that after this year I definitely did not want to do this again – it was torture.  There was one goal – to cross the finish line in less than the 36 hours time limit for this years’ 806-mile long course. 

That’s it.  Finish in time.  I had staked all I could on achieving it.

"Balance"

To be “balanced” is to be average.  But “balance” is an action word.  A constant reevaluation of what is going on in our life compared to what we want to go on.  We’re off to the left.  Balance.  Off to the right.  Balance.  

What we really want is harmony between who we are on the inside and who we are on the outside.

Make adjustments this year.  Happy New Year everyone!

I had a great 2018, and I will make 2019 another great one – and I hope you do too.  If my work can help you in any way, I would be honored!  Stay tuned – lots of great stuff coming out!

In fact, I think I’ll start my race story in the very next Think Daily for you.  The posts will be a bit longer than usual for a while.  I hope you get something out of it.

Blessings!

Reality is not fixed.

It’s yours for the making.

Do you know this?

You are what you pay attention to

Two people live in the same world.  One pays attention to conflict and what’s wrong and what is shocking.  The other pays attention to what is right and good and what aligns with their higher purpose. 

Do they not live different lives in the same world?  Have they not constructed their own life experience?

To become your best self, you’ll need to control what you place your attention on. 

What do you pay attention to? 

Beware of Socialism

A public opinion poll indicated that the majority of Americans between 18 and 29 view socialism favorably and prefer it to free market capitalism.  This is very dangerous.  The good news is that those young people are often confused about what “socialism” means.  The bad news is that in every country where it was imposed very few people in the public really understood it – but the people who suffered under its terrible consequences found out.

Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in Latin America.  Twenty years ago Hugo Chavez told private property owners there that the land belongs to the nation, not you.  They confiscated property, and agricultural production went down drastically.  They confiscated businesses, buildings and equipment, and there was no longer an incentive for anyone to produce.  Today, the country is in ruins.  3,000,000 people have fled the hunger, chaos and misery. 

The authoritarian government has wiped out any shred of prosperity through confiscations, censorship, price controls, arrests and brute force.  They have printed so much money, it has caused inflation rates projected to reach one million percent in 2018!  A stack of bills two feet high is barely worth ten US dollars.  The richest person in the country is Hugo Chavez’s daughter!

South Africa is on the brink of going that way, and people who have experienced socialism from all over the world showed up to warn them of the danger and destruction that would surely ensue.   

At a rally for Bernie Sanders a young man decried that companies should be owned by the workers as he debated a small businessman who showed up.  The businessman had ten employees, and the young man thought the employees should be able to own the business.  I thought – you can.  Why don’t you get together with ten of your buddies and start a business – you are free to do so in the US. It probably wouldn’t work at all for the young man.  Perhaps he doesn’t want his own business, he wants someone else’s.

Of course, not all young people believe these idealistic and dangerous ideas.  Matt Wilson, co-founder of Under30Experiences says “We have only one shot at leaving a legacy on this planet.  Entrepreneurship gives us the highest probability of effecting change.”

There are exactly zero examples of socialist countries in history who have prosperous societies. They always lead to poverty, ruin, loss of freedom and suffering. We can look at many examples to see plain and clear, that freedom causes prosperity. 

We need property rights, limited government, and free market capitalism. I will speak out and defend it. Will you?

Writing is a good way to learn

Writing, as opposed to typing on a keyboard, engages a different part of your brain.  It forces you to think more clearly and fully process your thinking.  You are more likely to remember what you write than what you type.  Writing gives you the edge in understanding, learning, and remembering.

I use journals to write down what I feel is important and to work through ideas.  And when I am writing I don’t get pop-ups, notifications, or icons tempting me to click other applications.

Yes, computers are awesome, but it may not be wise to let them take over our whole show.

It's okay to say no

Some of us say no too much and we need to say yes more – to experiences, to opportunities, love, happiness, etc.

Some of us say yes too much and we need to say no more – to liberate time, to keep our sanity, to be better at what we do say yes to, to take a stand, etc.

Which are you? Too much yes, or too much no?

Comment with the orange button!  I read them all!