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?

Don't just collect ideas

You learn a lot.  But you probably already have learned and know many things that can make you more successful and take you where you want to be, that you don’t use.

Don’t be a librarian of ideas – be a practitioner. 

Take action. 

If you don’t, it doesn’t matter how much you learn.

And when you take action, you’ll REALLY learn.

The root of your fruit

You are the root of your fruit.  

Like it or not, you caused this.

You can be in denial or blame, but that won’t help you change it. 

You don’t get in life what you want, you get what you are – what you deserve and cause and attract.

When you change, everything will change for you.

Distractions are the enemy

People who let others steal their time and cannot focus their attention to accomplish anything of value, will not achieve much.

Your time and attention are all you have to work with.

Guard them and use them wisely.

Circumstances reveal who you are

“Circumstance does not make the man.  It reveals him.” – James Allen

It doesn’t always go how we’d like it.

When it gets tough, you see what you are made of.  

When it goes sideways, you see if you make it worse, or better – and so does everyone else.

People who pass these tests and make things better no matter how they found them, will be more confident, get more opportunities, and become leaders.