African Dust – Rally du Moroc – part 3

Day 4 of this trip and the race still hadn’t started yet.  The waiting…ughh.  Ted and I tried to get acclimated to the time zone.  We slept until 8:30 am, ate breakfast at the lavish resort breakfast buffet, and went back to bed and slept another three hours.  I did an interview with Ted on camera for potential movie footage. 

We went to registration and tech inspection at 5:30 pm.  Smooth.  The media knew who I was and was glad I was there.  They knew about my Into the Dust movies on YouTube and were hoping we’d feature this race in a movie.  They knew it would be great publicity.  We do have 5 million views on Into the Dust on YouTube after all.  They gave us a deal on helicopter and drone footage.  Drones are not allowed to be brought into Morocco for some reason.  We were lucky we got all the lithium-ion batteries for the cameras in.  They hand-searched us at every airport.  Ted pushed up to the rules, but didn’t exceed them.

That night there was a drivers meeting and a rookie briefing – mostly in French.  But they did have translator gadgets for the Anglophones like me.  Whenever you’re in a crowd of people who know what they are doing, and you don’t, you feel like an imposter of sorts – like you don’t belong.  But that is just how you come to expand – you intentionally put yourself in that position. Then you listen, ask questions, and listen some more.  You are out of your comfort zone – literally uncomfortable.  That’s what growth feels like.  When you do it a lot, you know you’ll be ok.

I was anxious to get racing. 

Patience…

African Dust – Rally du Moroc – part 2

This year I had raced three big races by September.  I was tired and beat up after soloing the Baja 400 on a motorcycle.  Just two weeks after I got back we had our annual convention – CN Live!  For that I needed energy.  I decided to rest for those two weeks and heal up. The four-day event takes a lot of energy for me. It went great and I needed some rest. But 36 hours later I’d be heading to JFK airport in New York with Ted for a 9:30 pm red eye Air France flight.  We’d arrive at 10:30 am in Paris with a five hour time difference. 

Jet lag sucks.  You are falling asleep midday, and then even though you are tired, you have trouble falling asleep when it’s time. 

We catch a connection to Marrakesh.  When we crossed the water and land appeared again, it was parched hues of brown. No green anywhere.  The fringes of the great Sahara.

We catch our ground transport and it drops us off at an all-inclusive resort.  Wonderful rooms, giant buffet for every meal, big pool with Europeans speaking various languages sunbathing all day long. “I like Morocco so far Ted!”

So far…

It was Wednesday.  The race didn’t start until Sunday.  We rested and tried to catch up on sleep.  Thursday we met Bruno.  We hit it off right away.  It was a 15 minute ride to the “Service Area” – the pits where all the race vehicle and teams set up in the parking lot of a soccer stadium. There were 260 vehicles in the race and they were all there. South Racing had eight UTV’s lined up under pop up tents with two mechanics per vehicle.  here were engineers, electrical mechanics, logistic people, giant supply trucks…it was impressive.  It seemed like the big leagues.  South Racing had it down.

There was plenty of seating areas under tents where you could talk and have cold drinks and snacks, and there was a coffee machine!   They named it Maria. 

South Racing gave me a giant gear bag filled with Janesky Racing gear and clothing.  Bruno and I had custom race suits saying Janesky Racing and Contractor Nation. “Shake and bake baby!”

Today we had to shake down the race car.  It was a Can Am Maverick – custom built by South Racing.  Essentially it was my rent-a-car for the six day rally.  This car was a turbo.  It had 230 horsepower compared to the 105 horsepower my non-turbo car in Baja had.  It was a different class.  It was all dolled up with my graphics. 

I met my mechanics – Braulio and Tomas.  Great guys.  I walked around the car observing.  I got in to get familiar.  There was a windshield.  That’s different.  It allowed me to wear an open faced helmet.  The windshield would protect my face from rock projectiles if a vehicle passed us.  It became clear this car was high tech.  South Racing had built 131 of these over the years and they had it dialed in for Rally.

Bruno and I drove the car 15 minutes away to an area where we could run around a 10 kilometer course following the road book to make sure everything about the car was good.  I smashed the gas pedal down and all four wheels spun, kicking up rocks and dirt.  That’s different.  I can’t spin the wheels of my Baja car.  It was fun. 

We did seven laps, made some adjustments and practiced the navigation.  I was getting used to metric.  I like kilometers.  They are “baby miles”. 

The new helmet I had was round and my head was oval.  The helmet dug into my forehead and it was unbearable.  The mechanics told me they could shave some foam off the inside of the helmet, but they wanted to wait until after tech inspection so they didn’t flag us for modifying the helmet.

While I was happy the car was good, I just wasn’t quite comfortable yet….

African Dust – Rally du Moroc – part 1

Note – I have made it a custom to tell stories about my racing on Think Daily.  I think there are lessons there.  Many people say they like my accounts.  If you find you aren’t interested in my race stories, please don’t unsubscribe.  We’ll be back to our regular format soon enough.

When I wrote about my adventures racing the Baja 1000 in Mexico, I referred to it as the “longest non-stop off road race in the world”.  It’s true.  It is.  But one cynical commenter said “Dakar is longer.” 

That’s all it took I suppose.

I investigated.  I knew a little.  I had to know more.  “Dakar” is a 13-day rally race.  In a rally, you race the designated section each day, and they add your daily times together to determine who was in what place.  If you finish faster, you have more time to work on your machine and rest.  If you break your machine out there, you have less time to rest.

Originally the race was “Paris to Dakar”.  It started in Paris and ended in Dakar Senegal, in northwest Africa.  That’s far.  But at some point, the gangs in northern Africa were robbing people.  Even the guys laying out the course.  I heard one motorcycle rider say they took everything from him, stripped him naked, and left him there.  He was really scared they’d kill him. 

So the race promoter moved the race to South America for a handful of years.  Bolivia, Argentina, Peru.  Then they moved the race to Saudi Arabia a number of years ago.  That’s where it is this year.  All 6000 kilometers of it.

I thought….I need to do this before I die.  And there is no better time than now.  Let’s go.

I investigated.  I couldn’t just enter the race.  I had to qualify.  It makes sense.  They don’t want clueless people who don’t know what they are doing showing up and messing things up.

How do I qualify?  I had to race another FIA rally race.  Where can I do that?  Morocco. Ok, when is it?  October.  Ok, how do I do that?  Do I ship my UTV?  Where do you stay?  How does the race go?  I know the navigation is different than the GPS navigation they use in Baja, but how do you load it, read it, and follow it?  How do the pits work?  Food?  Flights?  How soon do you have to go beforehand?

So many questions.  This is how it is when you do something way out of your box.

“Morocco” – sounds cool.  Casablanca.  Marrakesh.  Rally in the desert.  Sand dunes.  Sounded like it would be worth the effort – especially if it got me a ticket to Dakar.

I started excavating some hard-to-find answers to my questions.

I employed a key question I use in business.  Instead of asking “How do I do this?”, I asked, “Who can help me?”  If I get the right who, they’d have the answers to how.

I found one race support company called South Racing.  They had an arrive-and-drive program.  You write the check and show up.  They take care of the rest (mostly).  You have to drive the race car.

There was one problem.  I needed a codriver.  The codriver sits in the passenger seat and looks at two screens in front of him for hours and calls the turns to me.  In Baja the codriver was important to make sure I don’t miss a turn, and give me the confidence to go faster.  As I would learn, in Morocco and Dakar, the codriver would be able to read to complex “road book” symbols and prevent you from getting lost. 

In Baja, you are on well-worn paths that are very rough and wavy.  In Morocco, you are in open desert a lot where there are no tracks, or lots of intersecting dirt roads.  It would be very easy to get lost.

Who can be my codriver who knows road book navigation and the Rally format?  I asked and asked.  Nobody was coming up who was available.  This is a small group.  There aren’t many people in the world who have done this.  And if they are doing it, they are committed to a team already.

I persist.  I found one candidate – Andrew Short.  Andrew was a retired pro motocross and supercross racer.  I had watched him on TV for many years.  He was a cool guy that I knew I’d get along with well.  He had raced Dakar a handful of times on a motorcycle and then switched to being a four-wheeled rally navigator.  Perfect!  I called him.  He was available. 

Simultaneously another name came up.  Bruno Jacomy from Argentina.  He was a professional rally navigator.  This is what he did. 

A navigator (co-driver) needs to be a good mechanic.  If the car breaks, they need to fix it.  Bruno was the better mechanic according to Andrew.  I chose Bruno.

Now I had my team together to give me the right advice and answer all my rookie questions. 

I didn’t know what to expect really.  You have visions but know that until you get there, you really won’t know what is coming.  I hoped something exciting would happen – a story worth telling.  So I brought my video specialist – Ted Waldron. We’d collect video and see what story unfolded.  Me and Ted – and Bruno when we got there.

I booked my flights.

Here we go…

Retire the Old You

“A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.” – Maxwell Maltz

You’ll never outperform your own self-image or your own beliefs about yourself.

To level up you have to retire your old concept of who you are and what you are capable of, and give it an upgrade.

You have to see and believe in a new and better you, and just as importantly, let go of the old version of you.

Spend some time right now. 

What do you believe about you? 

What do you have to change about that belief to move forward?

Direction vs Destination

Many people are walking around in a place they wish was better.

You can’t change your destination overnight.  

But you can change your direction.

Direction over time = destination.

Time will pass no matter what.

What direction are you heading?

What is amazing in your life right now?

The ideal life with the perfect situation in all areas is something we strive for that we will never have.  

But that’s ok. It’s not sad or disappointing to the realist.

It’s good to have better situations to strive for.

Think about it, if everything was perfect – what then? We’d do what humans do, and are doing now – find something that we wish could be better and either complain about it or strive to change it.   

**************

Take a moment to think about what is amazing in your life right now.

There is a lot that’s right.  Right?

"I can't" kills

You believe you.

The moment you say “I can’t”, all possibilities for you are destroyed.

What have you been saying “I can’t” to, that you need to reevaluate?

Thoughts on Maturity

“There is no ‘trick’ to being young: it happens to you.  But the process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained.” – Marya Mannes

“Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.” – Sydney J. Harris

“Maturity is the ability to do a job whether you are supervised or not; finish a job once it’s started; carry money without spending it; and the ability to bear an injustice without wanting to get even.” – Abigail Van Buren

“Age is a high price to pay for maturity” – Tom Stoppard

Gratitude, not complaints

No matter what your standard of living, people will always complain about some inconvenience or something they think is “not right”.

Whether you are at the bottom, or driving a Maserati, it’s the nature of most people to find the exceptions to their good luck and focus on it.

It’s a good habit to count your blessings – often.  Gratitude attracts more good into your life.

You were born at this time in human history – you hit the jackpot.  

If you have your health – you are really lucky.

And if you happen to live in a free country, especially the United States, you live in the land of milk and honey.

The rest is up to you.

So what were your grievances again?

Living with Uncertainty

For many, uncertainty means risk and causes fear. 

“What if,” we ask. 

That fear holds many back.

We can’t expect a life without uncertainty.  Nothing is promised.  All we can do is work to craft the life we want.  If ‘surprises’ happen, we deal with it and keep going.

If we want certainty in life, we can only get it by playing very very small.

“If we insist on being as sure as is conceivable, we must be content to creep along the ground, and can never soar.” – John Henry Newman

“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!” – George Meredith

“Uncertainty is the necessary companion of all explorers.” – Marilyn Ferguson