"Be fit to be useful"

Years ago I read this great book called “Natural Born Heroes”.  In it a character called George Sekondakis explains why in his advanced age he stays in shape, which in this case is a matter of life and death as the story takes place on a Greek island during the second world war with Nazis prowling around.

He says -“Be fit to be useful”.  

I like that notion.  At age 59, when I go to the gym, what is my reason?  (I often do hard physical work for hours that I could hire someone to do.)  I’m not going to be a bodybuilder, and I’m not training for any physical endurance contest, (anymore), so what is my motivation? 

I want to be able to do the things I want to do, do my work, and help others as the days, opportunities and events unfold, and not be confined by what I can or cannot do by physical limitations.  And, I want to feel good and live as long as I can as a healthy person.

That’s simple and easy to process.

Be fit to be useful.

The Big Race 2023 – Conclusion

I get out of the car and it starts raining.  Mark gets on the satellite radio.  The stub of the broken axle was half buried in the dirt and rocks.  The was no axle sticking out of the middle where you attach a wheel to.

I get the spare out, jack out, chock the three good wheels since we were on a hill, and jack the car up from the middle.  Mark struggles to get positive radio communication.  We needed a mechanic.  This repair was a bit above my pay grade, though I was determined to attempt it.

What we did not know was that our chase truck with our pre-run vehicle on the trailer had broken down 60 miles away.  This is how they would get to us to help us.  Dustin gets Mark’s message.  He knows the only hope is to get in contact with Javier who does NOT have a satellite radio and is on his way back to the finish line in Ensenada with his truck, pulling a trailer with his UTV that he brought down to prerun some of his sections.  But there is no phone service.  

Dustin stares at his phone, message composed.  He gets one little bar of service and presses send.

I put a big rock under the swing arm and let the jack in the middle of the car down which raises the swing arm.  I move the jack to the rear corner of the car and jack it up again.  Ready for someone to work on it.

Javier gets the message from Dustin 30 miles away.  He pulls over, unloads his UTV, and starts driving back to the dusty town of Ojos.  He meets Victor who jumps in.  They follow the race course towards us.

Every ten minutes or so a race vehicle comes by us and we have to flag them with flashlights so they don’t come around the corner and hit us.  The rain continues.  The tools are in the mud.

We wait for Joe to come by.  Surely he’d be passing us any minute.  We were still in the lead.  Joe’s tracker starts working, but we had no way to see it.  What others saw was the two leaders in our class stopped, 15 miles apart, one being 22 miles from the finish.  

It was a race.  Whoever gets their car fixed first, will likely win the Baja 1000, 1311 mile race.

I walked back down the hill with my cell phone flashlight to look for our missing wheel.  Last race it rolled over the cliff into oblivion and nobody found it.  

I find it.  The lug nuts are still on it, and the hub is still attached.  The brake rotor is bent like a potato chip.  I roll it back up the now muddy road.  We separate the rim from the rest.  I unbolted the spare axle and the spare hub we carried.

A vehicle approaches.  It sure sounds like Joe.  We are screwed.  But no, it’s Javier and Victor!  

Javi kneels down and studies the situation.  He never worked on a Honda.  He asks where Jason is.  Victor speaks to him in Spanish – something like “You can do it!” probably.  Javi goes to work.  I help at every turn I can to get it fixed as fast as we can.  We changed the whole axle, used the old hub, and decided not to put the spare brake rotor on the car to save time.  The caliper was badly bent but we didn’t want to open the brake system – we had no extra fluid.  We will only have three brakes.  Good enough for 22 miles.

The wheel goes on.  We jump in and leave Javi and Victor in the rain to clean up all the tools and spare parts that were in the mud.

Joe has not come by.  We are still in the lead – aren’t we?

The Big Race 2023 – Part 5

Javi was in the car for his last turn, from mile 1015 to mile 1165.  We didn’t know where Joe was.  It was light out again.  A full day of racing, a full night, and now the second day.  Your body wakes up when the sun comes up and you get new energy and new optimism.

We pulled into a spot to wait for Javi to bring the car into me and Mark for our last 150-mile sprint to the finish.  Javi got another flat, and Joe closed the gap some more – but how much?  His tracker still wasn’t working.  The other competitors in our class were 50 and 100 miles back.

Joe’s chase truck pulled into the same spot we were in.  Ut-oh.  He must be close.  Javi reports the brakes are soft and he had to double or triple-pump them.  We debated if we should bleed them or just go and not invest the time.  THe team assures me it won’t take any longer than it will to strap me and Mark in.

Javi comes in.  They take the hood off and open the master cylinder to put brake fluid in.  Javi pumps the brakes while Jason opens the bleeder valves on each wheel to let the air out.  Victor straps Mark in.  Dean fuels the car.  Javi is out.  I get in.  Javi is worried about how hot the shocks are with the whoops (waves in the sand, rough) so we leave the hood off even though we had shock coolers installed on the car recently. 

I step on the gas and go, relieved to be driving.  I can drive.  Waiting to drive seems much harder.

I know the whole way home very well.  Big whoops, past the windmills, through San Matais wash, past Mike Road, up the famous goat trail….the sun is getting low for the second time.  The sky turned purple and orange – beautiful.  We were confident that with just a 15-mile lead he couldn’t catch us now.  Could he?  We had a 15 mile lead, didn’t we? (We didn’t, we just didn’t know it.)

Our GoPro gets ripped off the car.  Too bad, that was great footage.

We are going fast, but don’t want to take chances of breaking the car now and feel like he can’t be making up much time.  It gets dark.  We get up into the technical hills – really rough from years of racing there.

Lights behind us.  “It can’t be him!  Is it?”  He tries to take an alternate line up and to our left.  We can see the side of his car.  It’s him!  S$%&!  He’s on a mission.  The course turns left and he falls in behind us.  What seemed like just seconds later, he rams us!

In Baja racing, it’s ok to hit a guy in front of you to let him know you are there and you want to pass.  With all the noise and dust and no rear view mirror, sometimes you’d never know.  It’s called nerfing.  But today we have the push-to-pass buttons and sirens.  Not that pulling over for my competitor to take the lead on me 40 miles from the finish of a 1311-mile race was the first thing on my mind…

When nerfing you have to be smart.  You don’t want to hit the guy hard, because you may take yourself out or cause an accident.  And you should wait until the course smooths out a bit because in the big bumps, the rear end of his car and the front of yours are going up and down wildly.  You could get under his car or over it.

But the #1957 had a new driver in the car; a Baja veteran, who was bent on showing his team he could get the lead back at the end and win.  He was amped up and not using his head – not patient enough.  He just hit us and hit us hard.  The back end of our car jumped up and to the side.  He got by us, and we used a flurry of expletives to mark the occasion.  Then we took a wrong fork in the dust and excitement and lost another minute when we were off course and had to turn around.  

We saw his lights bouncing in the dark distance – he was gone.  Dang! 

I did my best to keep up.  The course dumped us out of the hills and onto a graded road.  He should be faster than us here and extend his lead.  Then the road straightened out as it flowed into a small dusty town.  We see a car pulled over ahead in the darkness.  OMG!  It’s him!  We go by!  Were in the lead again!

We assumed he had a flat tire, as that is the most common reason to pull over.  But many other things can break.  We had 4 miles of 37 mph speed zone and then it was back in the dirt for 25 miles – his last chance to pass us.  I was determined to drive as fast as I could once we got back in the hills after the speed zone, and that is what I did.  I didn’t want him to come by me and break my heart with a couple miles to go again.  Either we were going to win, or I’m going to break the car trying, but I’m not getting passed again!  

15 miles later we were sliding around a flat turn in the switchbacks in the hills, and BANG!  The left rear of the car went down.  Dang!  A flat!  We practiced changing flats.  We talked about what we would do.  Mark changes the flat, I stay in the car.  We leave the jack in the dirt because it takes a minute to put it back in the dark.  Mark jumps in, I go while he bounces around trying to get strapped in.  That would be the fastest.

Mark gets the impact wrench out from his door pocket and climbs out the window.  He yells – “There’s no tire!”  “I yell back “You mean the spare fell off?”  “NO, There no wheel on the car!”

We were 22 miles from the finish and broke an axle.  Oh no.  It seemed there was no way to win this race now.  Joe would be coming by any minute.  The roller coaster of emotions continued. 

We worked so hard, and, in the pitch black dark, we were at a low now…

The Big Race 2023 – part 4

To give you a scale of how long this race is, consider this.  After our first turn where we gave the car to Victor and Dustin at mile 202, to drive on the paved road to the place where we take the car for our second turn, it was a 7 1/2 hour drive in the chase truck! 

Javier pulled into mile 525 two minutes after Joe went by in the dark.  It takes about 2-3 minutes to get new drivers in the car and all harnessed up, air supply hose connected to your helmet, communication wire plugged in, and to fuel the car and check it over for damage to the wheels and suspension.  That makes us 5 minutes behind Joe. 

This stage would be 240 miles for Mark and me – about 7 hours in the car.  About 40 miles in we see a race vehicle pulled over in the dark ahead.  Is it Joe?  Is it Joe?  It was!  

We blew past him and celebrated.  “Bro we are leading the Baja 1000 at mile 565!”  Fist bump!  We raced ahead to put a gap on him.  Later we would learn that he stopped again at the next road crossing to change the front differential and some suspension component. 

We put a 50-mile gap on him.  We thought it would be enough.

Each vehicle has a tracker and with WiFi you can log in and see where everyone is.  Well, Joe’s tracked stopped working, and we did not know where he was.

Mark notices the gas gauge glowing at him in the dark.  It’s on E.  Oh carp!  Did we make some error in the calculations?  We had been in the car for 6 hours.  We get on the satellite radio to tell our team.  We want them to drive back closer to us so we can meet them sooner and we don’t run out of gas.  Joe is back there and we don’t feel like giving him gifts right now.  I’d run out of gas in the middle of nowhere in 2017 and waited seven hours for gas.

After some negotiating and mild arguing, we are told that the gauge is only approximate and that when it’s on E we still have gas.  We prayed they were right.  Everything on the car is custom aftermarket stuff.  The oversized gas tank did not come with a gauge – it was added later.

We gave the car to Victor and Dustin again.  We drove ahead to Gonzaga Bay near the only gas station and little store in town.  That’s all there is there.  We waited.

Over the satellite phone came a faint voice.  It was Victor.  “No brakes!”   Oh no!  He limped it into us 90 minutes later.  He was going very slow and when he got near the chase truck where we were set up to fix the car, four of the team had to grab the car and stop it with manpower.  No brakes is right.  None!  

The right rear wheel was wobbling.  The sway bar was broken off, and there was no brake fluid left.  Victor had hit something that caused this damage.  The mechanics went to work while Javi and Richard got in the car and waited.  It took 30 minutes.  Joe never came by, but we knew we were consuming our cushion.

Javi sped off.  

Where’s Joe?  

The Big Race 2023 – Part 3

There were 325 vehicles in this race.  In the beginning, there is lots of dust and drama as there always seems to be someone in front of you that you have to pass, or, if you are slower, someone behind you that wants to pass you.

Passing in the dust is not easy.  As you get closer to another vehicle the dust gets thicker.  You can’t see well.  Wind is your friend, especially a crosswind. 

We made passes. The first overturned race vehicle we saw came at mile 17.  There were a half dozen more in the first 200 miles.  You can’t just step on the gas and drive crazy here.  You have to read the course and be smart.  Being a Baja veteran helped.   Being a motorcycle rider, where your life depends on not making a mistake at high speed, helps a LOT.  Both Victor and Javier were motorcycle-riding veterans too.

At mile 83 there was a well worn hard right turn and a straight.  “Which way Mark, which way?!!”  “Straight, straight!”  I wondered why many went right.  Two hundred yards later I found out.

We came upon a big mudhole.  My eyes scanned for a way to avoid it.  There was no way.  “Hold on Mark, were going in!”  It was 18″ deep of dark brown earth juice.  The splash wave came over the roof.  There is no windshield on these cars, because it would get dusty and muddy and block your vision.  We got soaked, and our vision was completely blocked.  I knew what to do – stay on the gas.  It’s a weird feeling to stay on the gas when you can’t see, but you don’t want to get stuck in this.  

Our beautiful race car had one color now – brown.  Inside and out, top and bottom, including us.  All dark brown.

Not to worry.  The Baja air is dry and it would all dry to a light brown/gray.  We wiped our helmet shields with clean cloths we had for the purpose.  I didn’t slow down, I didn’t know how far Joe was behind us.  The dirt water ran from the top of my helmet and down the INSIDE of my shield too.  Oh boy.  I got it clean and the wind blew more mud off the hood onto us for miles.

Welcome to Baja Mark!

I gave the car to Victor and Dustin at Mile 202, with a six-mile lead on Joe. A throng of enthusiastic fans was there.  They applauded us with genuine excitement.  That’s another thing that makes this race so cool.  They say more people watch the Baja 1000 live than watch the Super Bowl live.  They declared a National Holiday in the south and closed the schools and businesses.  People camped along the course.  You can follow their campfires in the night.

When Victor took off, I started dusting the mud off myself.  Little kids came out from the crowd and started helping me.  I’m sure Victor warmed them up before we got there.  Victor has great people skills.  He speaks fluent English and Spanish.

Victor and Dustin managed to maintain the six-mile lead over their 100-mile section.  They gave the car to Javier and his codriver Richard.  The two of them have been friends since they were kids and they have raced a lot together.  

Javi had a very bad silt section that everyone was very worried about getting stuck in.  Silt is fine dust, like baby powder, that leaps into the air and is in no hurry to get back down.  It can be over 18″ deep.  If a motorcycle goes down in the silt, it can be 100% buried.

Javi got a flat, changed it, and got passed by Joe.  

Dang.  

Before the race, I studied the points chart.  If Joe finished, it didn’t matter what place, and it didn’t even matter if we beat him, we could not win the points championship.  We’d be just a few points short.  If we finished and Joe didn’t, we’d win the season.

The only chance for glory was to go for a win.  Joe having bad luck and not finishing was out of our control.  We had to go for a win.  I/we had never won a race in a UTV.  We were the underdogs.  Now it might seem that going for a win is obvious – doesn’t everybody?  But you have to drive as fast or faster than your best competitor, who has won a lot.  And driving the car hard risks breaking it.  UTVs are fragile.  Against the rocks, and big g-out bumps, any vehicle has its limits.  Touching up against them without finding them is risky business and can take you out of the race in a split second.

Mark and I waited at mile 525.  Joe came by.  Dang!

No Javier….

The Big Race 2023 – Part 2

Thursday morning, 8 am.  Mark and I were taking the beginning, middle, and end of the race.  Victor would take a section after us and then Javi.  Two turns each for them.  1311 miles.  Divide and conquer.

Mark and I lined up in staging.  A trophy truck caught fire behind us.  Fully customized race machines of various sizes, types, horsepower and shapes assemble around us.  Impressive machines made for what we were about to do.

Our key competitor was Joe Bolton, #1957.  He was the only other guy in our class who had finished all three races in the season.  We had more mechanical bad luck than he did, so he lead the points.  I had the speed to beat him even though he had more power and speed than we did.  I was faster in the technical terrain, and he  was faster in the open areas and sand.  

He started ahead of us.  Ever 30 seconds another race vehicle gets the green flag.  Our turn!  It was 15 miles on pavement with a speed limit our of the city of LaPaz to get to the dirt.  Let’s go!  at mile 30 the stair step hill climb came.  I could see Joe’s dust in front of me.  I raced into it.  At the top of the hill I caught and passed him.  

“Whew!  Mark we are leading the Baja 1000!”  Fist bumps in the bouncing car.

A few miles later we got on the bumper of a buggy (not in our class), and turned our siren on and pressed our push-to-pass button, which lit up a blue light in his car telling him someone wants to pass.  We followed close and waited for him to find a place to pull over, as it was just one lane with thick bushes and cacti on both sides.  A fork in the course came and he went the wrong way.  But we followed!  

Mark called it – “Wrong way!  Wrong Way!”  Dang.  Stop and turn around.  A tight three-point turn.  150 yards back to the course.  We see Joe who turns the right way and is ahead of us again.  Dang!

We get right on his bumper and follow close.  He can’t shake us.  He pulls over.  In the lead again at mile 45!  “Who Hoo!”  Feeling good!  

The race was just getting started.  1270 miles to go…..

The Big Race 2023 – part 1

2023 was my 9th year racing in Baja.  A Connecticut guy racing in the desert – so unexpected.  But so many incredible shared experiences have come from it, why stop now?

Most of that time I’ve been racing a motorcycle.  I still race motorcycles, having done a 500-mile race in August.  But this year for the Baja race season I decided to race a UTV (side-by-side) four-wheel vehicle for the entire four-race season to see if I could win the championship in our class.  

The first race was 270 miles. We lost the Electronic Control Module.  Freaky.  Lost four hours.  We finished fourth.

The second race was 500 miles.  We nearly won, finishing second 13 minutes behind the leader even though we got two flat tires.

The third race was 400 miles.  We were leading for 120 miles, and then a new alternate driver I had on the team lost the lead and broke an axle.  We finished fourth.

Now the big one.  The longest non-stop off-road race in the world – the Baja 1000.  This year 1311 miles.  The same distance from New York to Miami.  Far.  Very far.

I had to assemble a great team.  You can’t do all the driving by yourself – it’s too much.  The chase team and mechanics I had.  Great guys who I knew well by now.  I decided to bring Mark Daconto, my great friend of 30+ years.  I had brought other friends over these years, but never Mark.  Who knows if it will be your last race, so I asked him. 

Then I asked him to be in the passenger seat, or “Navigator”.  The job is to look at the GPS screen and call the turns.  “45 right, 30 left by 20 right, hard left to virtual checkpoint…”  I didn’t know if he could do it.  Some people get motion sickness, and some are claustrophobic.  But we were going to find out.

Dustin Gebers does the codriver’s job very well, but I had to give him up to Victor, my friend from Mexico who could drive well.  Then we had Javier Gonzalez who I have known since 2015.  He was a mechanic for a living AND taught the special forces how to drive off-road vehicles fast.  Nobody is more qualified than Javi.  

The race started in LaPaz, on the south end of the Baja peninsula and ran north (for the first time) to Ensenada.

CBS News called our team and wanted to do a story on the race.  I wound up giving Jeff Glor, a CBS news anchor, a ride in our race car.  He got the full treatment – handing our race team stickers to the crowd from the car, and something rather rare. 

When we got to the dirt on the course that they had been prerunning for weeks, the course was blocked with an old couch and four large men standing in the way.  We stop.  I knew what was happening.  It was a shakedown.  A fifth guy types something into his phone into the Google translate app.  He shows me the message.  “This is private property and you can’t come through”. 

I smiled and said “Come on amigo” and some other amiable words that he could get my meaning without understanding the language from my tone of voice.  He shook his head and wrote another message about how much it cost them to maintain the roads.  But they weren’t roads.  They were not used by any civilian vehicles.  Only off-road vehicles could make it up the steep hill ahead with vertical rock ledges.

I dug out $20.  That would usually do it.  This was not this guy’s land.  He was a thug who was hustling us.  CBS News witnessing this whole thing.  He had a front-row seat to a shakedown.  He said “It’s ok if we turn around, I’ve seen enough.”  I said “No you haven’t”, because I knew the rough part of the course was ahead, and he had only seen a couple miles of relatively smooth course with some turns.  I wanted to show him how brutal this race really is.

I dug out ten more dollars and two stickers and offered them to the guy.  He shook his head like it wasn’t about the money and he cared about “his” land.  He typed another BS message, showed me and waited.  I waited too.  If I was with my team it may have been different.  But I dug another $20 out to make a total of $50 and took an “Aww shucks, come one brother” attitude. 

He typed another message.  “$100”.

Dang.  The sun was going down and I had to get moving if I was to get some good footage for the four GoPros that were on my car.  I gave him the $100 and the posse moved the couch and stepped out of the way.

In all my years this has only happened twice.  Baja has been very safe for us, and the people are really nice.  I don’t want to give the impression that they aren’t.  

I sped up the course.  I banged along the rough terrain and it wasn’t long before the CBS guy was cussing and saying “OK, I quit”.  “There’s no quit here,” I told him and pressed the gas pedal down even more.  I’m, laughing in my helmet.

To be continued…

"Full Effort is Full Victory"

“Full effort is full victory” is a famous saying by Mahatma Gandhi.  (Mahatma means “great soul”)

What does it mean?  What does it mean to you?

This is not some ‘everyone is a winner’ saying, or to say that winning is everything.

Instead, it speaks to what I have said is the meaning of life – “To be the best version of yourself in service to others.”

If I give my best effort, then I have done my best.  I have done all I can do with what I have and who I am on that day, and I have probably learned something and become even better in the process.

If I don’t or am not giving my full effort, it could be because I am lazy, devious, cowardly (even to not have stepped toward what I was made for in the past, therefore suppressing my passion), or some other vice or easy way to get through life.

Full effort is full victory is a statement of you vs you, of conquering yourself and your lower impulses and nature.

Are you giving what you are doing your full effort?

Passions keep you young

“Finding a passion is not an antidote to aging, but it is the nearest thing to it that human beings have found so far.” – Dr. Mardy Grothe

As I get older I find this to be very true.  I have great interests that I pursue with vigor because I love them.  Some with my mind (businesses, writing Think Daily, sales, marketing, etc.) and some with my body (motocross, racing, working on my land with a chainsaw, etc.), and they keep me young.

If I didn’t have these interests, I am sure my physical and mental faculties would be worse off by a fair margin.

Do you have a great passion that keeps you going and young?

Effort is Your Responsibility

Whether you have big goals and are chasing them, or you are losing, effort is always your responsibility.

Nobody can make efforts for you, and if they do, they are wasting their time – because if you don’t want it enough to give a great effort, then nobody can really help you.

Be honest; are you giving it your best effort each day?