Adventure and injury

I pulled up alongside him. Tanner was catching his breath after he stuck his foot out in a rutted uphill turn and it hit a rock. This pushed his toe upward, while the footpeg with the full weight of the forward moving bike comes behind the same foot and smashes him in the Achilles tendon, wedging his foot between said rock and footpeg.

We waited ten minutes for him to assess the damage. We were only ten miles into a 1134-mile course and Tanner was already hurt. Santana told him to ride if he could. One thing Santana had learned many times over countless tours, and many people being injured, is you can’t stop out here. There is nobody to help you. No regular vehicle can get here. You needing to be transported out would be a big problem.

Tanner soldiered on, albeit slower. I stopped to wait for Tanner to catch up and checked in with him. Was it something you could shake off or was it worse than that? He thought the latter. Oh boy.

We had to make San Felipe tonight. That was a long way. Could he make it?

I lead, following the GPS and the course markers – orange signs that were placed about every mile or at each turn. I tried not to get too far ahead of Tanner, which was difficult because when you pre-run you stay back, often way back, from the guy ahead of you to avoid the dust. Rick followed, and Santana pulled up the rear like a good guide would, to make sure nobody has an incident and is left behind.

Tanner said his boot was getting tighter. Not good. It was getting dark. Tanner and I have been riding together his whole life. Now that I think of it, I don’t think he’s been riding too much when I wasn’t around. I knew he was hurting by the way he was riding. 

It was getting dark now and the course dumped us into a sandy wash that became a rhythmic whoops section. Up and down and up and down – thousands of times. Tanner fell further and further back. I slowed to wait for him and Rick and Santana went ahead to San Felipe where we’d spend the night. Tanner waved at me in frustration to go ahead. The pain was too much.

Mercifully for him, the whoops gave way to a graded road. Five miles of that and we gathered up to navigate the streets of San Felipe and follow Santana to the hotel. In our room, Tanner took his boot off. We both looked with great anticipation. What would we see?

“Uh-oh. That’s not good.” Not good at all. His ankle and foot were one big balloon. He couldn’t walk. We had to assist him to get around the corner to eat. He couldn’t put any weight on his foot at all. It turns out that the injuries we would both sustain so close to the race were not over.

We iced it down and hoped he could ride in the morning…

Great passions…

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” 

                                                                                 – Denis Diderot

Just past the checkpoint we parked and unpacked our gear bags looking for what we’d need for the afternoon of riding – the first half-day of a week of pre-running the third longest course in the Baja 1000’s 50-year history. You need to get it right. Once you leave the truck and head out into the desert, you’ve got what you’ve got. No second chances. At the same time, you don’t want to carry too much unnecessary weight in your pack. 

We offloaded the pre-run bikes from the trailer. The pre-run bikes are not the ones we’d race. The pre-run bikes had huge gas tanks, because when you are pre-running there are no gas pits set up every 50 miles along the course (usually in the middle of nowhere), like there are in the race. 

Our bikes were 2009 Honda 450X models. They are carbureted, not like today’s fuel injected models. Even my race bike is a 2009. Why? Because with the way Chris Haines’ shop (our race support team) builds these things, they are awesome! Overall, the race bikes are a step up in performance from the pre-run bikes when it comes to horsepower, suspension and weight.

Both Tanner and I had fitted our bikes with higher handlebars this year. I did it because I could stand up straighter and bend my neck less. Tanner did it because he is 6’3” tall. Experience. As you do new things, you get smarter.

We headed out. It felt good to straddle a bike again – in Baja. First, a high speed graded road, and then turn into the desert. Baja is the off-road racing capital of the world. If you went there, you’d see why. There’s an abundance of beautiful open desert terrain with countless miles of established dirt paths cut in. They’ve been riding here for decades. 

The wheeled traffic over and over again for decades has carved some epic surfaces to ride on. Ruts, banked turns, and perhaps most noteworthy – the whoops. Whoops are waves in the sand or dirt caused by tires accelerating or braking. The whoops get bigger and bigger over the years and provide interest, challenge, danger and even torture in the Baja 1000. It’s like riding a motorcycle on terrain that is shaped like an angry ocean, with big waves close together. When there are big rocks in these waves, and cacti and other thorny hostile vegetation close on both sides, it gets challenging. And riding whoops for 100 miles when it’s 100 degrees out is draining.

Tanner was ahead of me, and I was second in line. I stayed back so I didn’t have to breathe his dust, which is so fine it leaps into the air when any wheel touches it and is in no hurry to settle again. I come up to a plateau after a rutted right hand uphill turn and there is Tanner, stopped. 

Body language is hard to read when someone has a helmet on, but being his Dad, I knew something was very wrong…

Preparation precedes performance

We flew into San Diego for our pre-run trip and met our driver Andrew Terry – a thirty-something rider and mechanic from Southern California with an enthusiastic personality and great sense of humor. Andrew would be my mechanic during the race. We met another rider who was pre-running with us – Rick Thornton is a Texan who lives in Baja now. The internet allows you to run some businesses from anywhere.

We crossed the border at Tijuana and headed south two hours along the picturesque Pacific coastline. In Ensenada, we picked up Santana, who would be riding with us for the five and a half days of the pre-run. I knew Santana, as he was one of our guides for our first recreational tour in Baja in January of 2014. Santana is 56 years old, rugged and strong, with a big smile and a twinkle in his eye. He has been riding in Baja for 42 years – a great rider, and knows all the places, routes, and people. I was happy to be riding with him. 

Oh yeah, and Santana being Mexican and speaking Spanish is a huge plus for us. Local language is your link to local resources.

We headed to the military checkpoint near the poor dusty little town of Ojos Negros. There aren’t many paved roads running down the Baja Peninsula, and the military had set up checkpoints at various intervals along them. I assume they ask where you were going and they looked in the back of your truck. I always had Spanish speaking crew members handle it. When they realized we were “Baja mil” racers, they’d let you go. We’d give them race team stickers and their stern looks would turn to smiles. Ultimately, they are race fans, like most local people in Baja. 

Santana explained that he’d often give them Gatorade and snacks from the tour supplies. At first, I thought it was a bribe to not hassle us and let us go through with ease. Maybe. But Santana explained that being posted at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere, in the hot sun or cold desert nights, was a lonely job and not easy. These were young men, away from their families. I thought about how there were no stores or entertainment around the checkpoints. Sometimes there were makeshift shacks as barracks, so they could sleep there. Sharing drinks and snacks was simply a nice human thing to do.

I thought about it…

Santana was wise.

You can do more than you think.

Sunday in October. Two weeks before we went to Baja to pre-run the course. “Pre run” means you ride the course one time. It would take five long hard days of riding. Days only; no nights. The idea is to see the whole course. How can you remember thousands of turns and a billion rocks? Amazingly, pre-running helps a lot. You know what you’re getting into. You remember some danger spots and learn what lines are better than others from your mistakes.

I had been working extra hard this year, and hadn’t had a vacation. I was looking forward to the trip, even though this would not be relaxing in any way.

It was Sunday at CrossFit. On Sundays you work as a team with two others. It was the last few seconds of the workout and I was doing “box jumps” where you jump from the floor up onto a 24” high wooden box. I picked up my pace to get more reps in to improve our team score, and I made a mistake. My toe caught the side of the box and my knee came down on the edge, with my full body weight following. I dropped to all fours in pain. A golf ball size bump appeared below my knee in 30 seconds. My race…

Your quadricep muscles run down the front of your leg and terminate to a tendon that runs under your kneecap and becomes the patellar ligament, which then attaches to your tibia. It’s a pulley system. When you contract your quadriceps, it pulls the tendon which is attached to your lower leg, pulling your lower leg up and your knee straight. Right where it attaches is where I smashed it, and I couldn’t bend my knee without using that tendon.

Tanner had assembled an eight-person team for a “Ragnar Relay” that was to start five days later. It’s a running race in the woods in New Jersey. There are three loops of four, five and seven miles each. Each team member would have to run each loop once, for a total of 16 miles per runner. Only two of our team members have ever run that far in a day. I wasn’t one of them. I did complete a half marathon twice that year, and each time I was spent, with legs like concrete at the end.

In this Ragnar Relay race, the team sets up a camp, and one team member goes out for their first loop while the others wait.  When runner one finishes their first loop, runner two takes off. You keep doing that through the day on a Friday, and all through the night, running in the woods with a headlamp. The team keeps running on Saturday until all eight members finish their three loops. 

I was looking forward to this race, but with the knee injury I could hardly walk, never mind run. I had to cancel and try to get it better for the Baja pre-run trip in two weeks. 

The team scrambled to replace me. Nobody stepped up. In fact, two other team members also had to cancel. Now down to five runners, they decided to split the missing three runners 48 miles up between them to whoever could run them. Really? That means the five of them would have to run about the equivalent of a marathon – in the woods, half at night! 

It was an epic display of determination. To make it even harder, after running two of her loops, Sydney fell downhill in the rocks and was out with a knee injury. Mike Lane, who never ran anything close to that distance, ran 16 miles! Colleen Brown ran 26 miles! Tom Matthews ran 32 miles! And team captain Tanner ran 46 miles! Astonishingly, they finished in 30^th place out of 146 teams – and they had only five team members instead of eight!

Friends…teammates…people counting on us or watching us. That’s how we can get motivated. We do it for them, and they do it for us. It’s a synergistic relationship where all parties go beyond where they would have if they were by themselves. Would Tom have been out there in the woods with a headlamp on, running his 32^nd mile if he wasn’t part of a team? “No way!” he says. 

 We want to do more and do better for our team. At work, at home, anywhere – other people make us better.

 I was so bummed I wasn’t there to participate or even see them push themselves beyond their limits.

What can you do? You never know until you try.

Mind strong, body strong.

“If each of us could have the tally of his future years set before him, as we have the tally of our past years, how alarmed would be those who only saw a few years ahead, and how carefully would they use them.” – Seneca

Tanner joined a CrossFit gym this year. Based on the stories he told me about the workouts, most of me didn’t want anything to do with it. On July 1st, I had a strong moment and some time and I went to check it out. I had the race at the end of the year and I was hoping this would help me.

At first, it was awkward. I didn’t feel like I belonged at a gym with all those people who did. I was out of my comfort zone. There were certain movements that my body type didn’t like at all. But that’s how it is when we try something new, isn’t it? I pushed myself to go until it became a habit. While it hurt each time, I grew to like it much faster than I thought I would. I really liked what it was doing to me. Stronger; more confident.

                                      +++++++++++

 I was on the homestretch of another Spartan race in August. Spartan races are running/obstacle course races. Around here they are usually at ski areas or mountains so they can take you up and down steep terrain and include rocks, mud, and the woods. Spartan races are in four distances. A “Sprint” is 3-5 miles and the logo on the finisher shirts is red. A “Super” is 9-10 miles and the logo is blue. A “Beast” is 13-14 miles and has a green logo. For the best of the best, an “Ultra Beast” is two laps of a beast course – 28-30 miles! Tanner has completed a number of “Ultra Beast” races. 

This was a “Super” race – about 10 miles. I felt good. Three years ago I didn’t know what a Spartan race was, and hadn’t run more than a block since I was in my twenties. I didn’t think I could run much anymore. Kinda scary. What’s a guy to do – never run again because he’s too old and thinks he can’t do it? That would be giving up part of your human capacity voluntarily. You start doing that and what’s next? It’s probably not a good idea to get started saying you can’t do things because you won’t.

Then we ran a 5K as a family. I didn’t even have running shoes. Then a few years ago my friend Mike Lane asked if Tanner and I wanted to run a five-mile road race. Five miles? That’s a lot more than 5K (which is 3.2 miles)! But I figured if Mike was doing it, I could too. 

It’s like back in 2008 when Mike asked me to race motocross. I figured if he was doing it, I could too. Or when my brother Rick got me to jump a metal freestyle ramp with my motorcycle. It’s good to have friends introduce you to new things and pull you out of your comfort zone. Of course, it has to be the right things that are positive and stretch you.

Now I crossed the finish line at the Spartan Super obstacle course race in the top 6% of all 5000 runners that day. I felt good. Real good. All the work, running, pain – on some days it seemed to pay off well. If I gave an accurate account, I’d say on all days I felt stronger and my energy lasted until the end of the day than it would have otherwise. I could bound up stairs easier, stood up straighter, and felt better. When the body is strong, the mind is more confident.

But in the forefront of my mind was the biggest challenge of all – the Baja 1000. I had to be in peak physical condition on November 15th at midnight. That’s when the race starts this year – midnight.

With a 48-hour time limit, we’d line up in staging at 10:30 pm, and get the green flag at 1:00 am. We’d race through the night to dawn. We’d race all day to dark. We’d race all night again. We’d race all day again. Then we’d race through the third night until we finish before the 1:00 a.m. deadline.

I wondered if it was possible to fall asleep while riding a motorcycle…

We have to be careful how we use our minds. That’s what I teach and that’s what I kept telling myself. We construct walls and demons and manufactured fears. I tried not to do that. I tried to be positive. But I had to be real too. Sometimes I’d be going about my day and remember what was coming, and a shot of adrenaline would fill my blood. 

Calm down. That’s not useful. What is right now? Keep working…

Big goals seem scary…

I hobbled around on my foot for a few months, but it slowly got better as September became October, and the race neared. After last year’s race, my friend Bobby Miles wanted to buy the bike I raced. I almost said yes. After racing the Baja 1000 Ironman class, you never want to see Baja again. But I told him he could keep the bike at his place in Loveland, Ohio and if I ever needed it again, I’d let him know. Well, now I needed it.

We had it shipped back to California where we went through the 714x (my race number) and the 775x (Tanner’s number) to rebuild and freshen the bikes up for this year’s race. In the Baja 1000, a bike number beginning with a 7 means Ironman class, and ending with an x means motorcycle. Besides motorcycles, there are over a dozen classes of four-wheeled vehicles in the race.

This year’s course would be different than the last two years which started and ended in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico.  Those races were 822 and 855 miles respectively. This year it would start in Ensenada (two hours south of San Diego) and end in La Paz, Baja California Sur – a different state and different time zone. La Paz is two hours north of Cabo San Lucas. A one way trip of 1134.4 miles – 279 miles longer than last year. 

The distance haunted me. 1134.4 miles. I live in Connecticut. It’s like from my house to Miami Beach, Florida…on a dirt bike…in rocks and sand and mountains…

When we set any big goal, it seems so far away. So impossible. So scary. Being afraid means it’s a big stretch. The outcome is unknown. But if the outcome of your endeavor is known, then it’s not an adventure, it’s just going through the motions.  

When we read history books, if we really put ourselves in the shoes of the heroic figures we are reading about, we can understand how they must have felt. Big goal – outcome unknown. Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King.

How about the guy who puts it all on the line to start a business with his new idea? The single mom who moves her kids to a new place in search of a better life? The immigrant who can’t speak English yet and has to work? The person who has the guts to quit a lousy job with an abusive boss when they don’t have another job yet?

Outcome unknown. Adventure begins.

"You can do better"

I had trained all year. I thought about it day and night – every day and every night. Sometimes I was optimistic, but most of the time it scared the hell out of me. I’d lie in bed sweating, my heart racing thinking about it.

I was going into the mouth of hell on November 15. Even “success,” finishing, meant paying a heavy price. Last year I made an uncharacteristic mistake and got hurt at mile 200. Whiplash forward. I rode 20 more hours. At mile 600, I simply could not go on. I couldn’t hold my head up anymore. I had 255 miles to go on the 855-mile course. I just couldn’t, so after 27 ½ hours, I tapped out. I couldn’t go one more mile. 

The Baja 1000 is the longest non-stop race on the planet. Four years ago I had never even heard of it. Now I’d be entering it for the third time. The first year it was an 822-mile course that my son Tanner and I entered as a two-man team in a class called “Sportsman” – a mixed age class. We were at a big disadvantage to the 4-6 man teams, but we wanted to be a father and son only team. We took six turns on the bike each over the 25 ½ hours it took us to finish.

We made a movie about the race and put it up on YouTube. Today, “Into the Dust” is the most popular movie about racing motorcycles in the Baja 1000 ever made. It quickly became an inspiration to hundreds of thousands who have an interest in desert racing. Of course, there isn’t a desert within 1000 miles of where we live.

The second year we both decided to enter the Ironman class. This is where you do the entire course yourself. You and your motorcycle and 1000 miles, plus or minus, on some of the most hostile terrain you can ride on. Last year Tanner finished in 28 ½ hours, becoming only the 13^th person to ever even finish this class. Most racers that enter do not finish.

I never was a quitter. I needed to go back. I can’t die this way. I could make an excuse. Afterall, who else could blame a 52-year-old from Connecticut for only going a mere 600 miles in the longest desert race in the world? Had I finished, I’d have been the oldest finisher in the Baja 1000 Ironman class ever. 

Something in me was not going to accept that story. We can tell the world about what happened and explain the limits – but we can’t fool ourselves. I knew I could do better, even if it would take significant sacrifice. Great achievement always does. 

One step back…

I screamed from my gut. I thought my leg and foot were both broken. Anyone listening who heard all the cracking would think so too. I had never broken a major bone before. Just a hand (neighborhood football, age 13) and a collarbone, age 47. That’s the most common motocross bone to break because when you fall you often land on your shoulder, and sometimes when your helmet hits the ground the bottom edge rotates into your collarbone.  

It was only 3 months until the biggest race of my life – the biggest race on the planet. That’s the first thing I thought of. My race is over. 

Before I could figure that out, I had to get this tree off my foot. It was Wednesday night – riding night. My trusty 5 friends came over to ride, but today I wouldn’t ride. I’d save my neck and figure out something else to do while they rode. I had cut maybe 500 trees down in my life. The property around the track is nothing but trees. If I cut this big giant hickory down, we could straighten out this awkward turn and make the track flow a bit better.

Nowhere to drop it. Nothing but trees around. I planned on dropping it onto the smallest, sickliest other tree around that would be sacrificed under the weight of this 75-foot tall mature hickory. Here we go…timberrrrr…Ut oh… The head of the tree catches on another, the tree rolls around and winds up falling 90 degrees from the ideal location selected. I’d never do this around a house or power lines – but we were in the middle of the woods. 

The giant slaps down on and settles into three smaller oaks that bend like rainbows under its weight. I knew there were stresses there. A dangerous situation. But I had dealt with this before. Take off a 3-foot section of the trunk.  Make the tree shorter and lighter. And again, and again. I consider myself an expert with a chainsaw. 

Then I cut the next section of the trunk off and the tree did not fall to the ground. It was suspended in the three smaller oaks. I studied the complex situation for clues on where I could safely cut next.  The big hickory leaders were on the left side of this oak, and the right side of that one, with one in the middle…the oaks were bent over and saying “get off of me.” I had cut the trunk of the hickory up to the first big split, which was now suspended 6 feet off the ground. 

Oh crap. I reach my Husqvarna up and start to cut a bit to feel where the stresses might lie, looking and feeling for clues with every inch the blade advanced. Suddenly the big hickory split like a wishbone and released from the oaks, with a lot of their help. The 20” round freshly sawn trunk came at me to avenge its killer. I stepped back…and back again. Thinking I’d outsmart the tree chasing me to terra firma, I sidestepped, to let it go right by me. As if it had eyes, it followed.

The tree plowed horizontally into my shin until gravity took over and it dropped onto my foot and plunged it into the earth.  That’s when I screamed. I was pinned, like a mouse with his leg in a trap. I could not move my foot or pull it out. There was maybe a thousand pounds of tree on the bottom edge of that log, and my foot was under it. Lucky I was wearing safety toe boots, which I seldom do. The other guys came running. I yelled for them to get the tractor, but in the few minutes it took them to get there with it, I realized if we touched the tree it would slide farther towards me and break my leg.

My foot and toes were so squished inside my boot, that my foot was going numb. Mike Lane and the other guys dug a hole alongside my foot to take some pressure off, and then cut the back of my boot vertically with a knife, and then along the sole to make a flap. I was barely able to pull my foot out. Slow wiggle. Slow painful wiggle. No broken bones. A miracle. But there was plenty of damage.

I thought, “my race”…

Two steps forward…

The body and the mind are connected. You know this. The mind can make the body do things, and the body can make the mind feel like doing things. The body is a chemistry lab and the mind responds. 

When we keep the body healthy with what we eat and how we move and sleep, we’ll have more energy for an active life. Some of us run. Some hit the gym. Some have fallen in love with a sport. Sometimes when you are active to make things better, you get hurt and make things worse for a little while. Of course, a sedentary lifestyle has not-so-temporary negative effects.

I ride motocross. It’s been important to me for 22 years. Twice a week usually and most often on the same technical track. 23 jumps per lap, 40’, 55’, 85’, 35’, etc.

Every time I rode my bike this year, I’d pay the price. My neck would hurt for days or a week afterward. Not a sharp pain, but a discomfort; like I had a ball in my throat. The whiplash from last year’s Baja 1000 race at mile 200 had my neck out to the left according to an x-ray taken ten days later. I had battled this injury all year. I had been to the chiropractor so many times and he did a great job. But still, it persisted. 

One day when I had not been riding for a month, and my neck seemed to be getting a bit better, I jumped on a used bulldozer I bought to see how it pushed. It was 15 minutes. That’s all. But that’s all it took. My neck…ughhh. That’s when it hit me. The turning! All the brush hogging; all the track grooming on the dozer…and the tractor with the box blade on the back – I was turning my neck like an owl to the right to look behind the machine. On days I wanted to go easy with the riding, I’d spend much more time grooming the track for the other guys. It was the grooming that was killing my neck much more than the riding.

Figuring this out was important. The race was coming around again. The biggest race of them all…

Go. And do it.

The death rate is hovering around 100%. I have decided I’m not going out sitting down, without a fight. This is one thing I have to do…

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

 The following multi-part story is true…

They didn’t want to tell me, but now that I knew, they were all looking at me. I felt like I was their hope to finish this thing. I had to finish it for him, for me, for us. I was Dad again. I was over halfway there. I felt good. Energized.There was nothing more to say. Go. Go and do it.

I turned into the cold night. Paved road. San Ignacio. The 20 miles before this little town was hell. I was glad to put it behind me. Two blurry blocks to a right turn. Things are lit up. Fans three deep at the curbs. Bright colors contrasting the night. Cheering. I am full of resolve and a dimension has just been added to my purpose. I fist pump the crowd to the left. I fist pump them to the right. One block and a left turn in front of the 230-year-old mission church. More cheering fans. 

I fist pump them back – they respond. Inside my helmet I think “I will do this. I can do this.” Suddenly the last masonry and stucco structure disappears. Any lights give way to the black desert. My eyes go from colored vision to black and white. The course pulls me out into oblivion again.

I didn’t know it, but I have just made a simple but critical mistake, the consequences of which I will begin to feel soon enough…