Round Trip – part 2
The race was Friday. It was the Sunday before. Dustin and I climbed in the pre-runner, a second race car we used to pre-run the race. These cars take a lot of punishment. You don’t want to beat up your race car for 1000 miles and then race it. Stuff breaks and the race car needed to be fresh on race day.
We headed out of town to the course. We found it on our GPS and followed it. I knew the sections. I had been racing down here for ten years now, and many races use the same sections with a few new ones thrown in for variety.
I thought about when Tanner and I went to find the racecourse to pre-run it 9 years ago, and we got lost before we ever started it. We were going through farm gates, through fields, over hills…we were so frustrated. Now I knew the area and how to connect these hills to that valley and how to get back to one of the two paved roads from most areas in the north of the peninsula.
Big ruts, washed-out sections, whoops 4 feet deep, rocks, steep hill climbs and descents. Rough and beautiful. We emerged on Route 1, the highway running up and down the Pacific side of the peninsula. Acambero was a restaurant where the course came out, and there were race stickers all over the walls and race jerseys hanging from the ceiling. We ate lunch and kept going.
Out to the coast and the Pacific Ocean. On gravel roads used by local traffic near the water, and up into the rough hills, and back. The ocean is beautiful. We pull out onto the beach in a few places and take some pictures. The people are poor, living at the intersection of parched brown sand and rocks and gleaming ocean with continuous streams of waves breaking white and dissipating into bubbles.
The course went on and on. We had to go to mile 210. Shouldn’t seem like a big deal, but it was. By the time we got to the spot we had decided to pre-run to today, we were beat from getting bounced around all day. It was cold now. I was on Eastern time too, and it seemed past my bedtime. My cough got worse with the stress.
We were back out at Route 1 and drove north seven miles with our team chase vehicles to a hotel in San Quintin. It was a remarkably clean hotel in great shape for this part of the world. The hotel had a restaurant and we didn’t hesitate. It was dark and cold. The cook was the owner of the hotel. To our surprise he was a great cook with an amazing variety of food – all delicious.
In the morning we started off again to pre-run from 210 to 400. My hallucination was that Dustin and I would start the race and go to mile 400 and give the car to Javier. Javier would go from 400 to 730, and then Dustin and I would take it to the finish – this year a total of 868 miles.
This section started ok. But as the miles went by there were some really technical rocky sections up mountains, whooped out sand washes with rocks mixed in, and just all-around crap terrain. In a way, crap terrain is awesome when you conquer it – if you are physically fresh. When we got to the end, we were beat – again.
I was coughing and feeling sick. I couldn’t deny it now. I was very sick. Didn’t I just get done with the Morocco Rally last month where I was sick the entire trip? Ughhh.
I decided to make a new race plan. Going to Race Mile 400 was too much. We’d be beat, and when you are beat, you slow down because it hurts.
We got rooms at George’s hotel in San Felipe and went to eat. It was very quiet. Nobody out. I couldn’t wait to get back to go to bed. Just as my head hit the pillow, the alarm in the empty building across the tiny parking lot decided to blare for seemingly no reason. After twenty minutes, it stopped. After another twenty, it started blaring again. I thought about how the race started in three days and wondered if I could get better by then. Right now I was getting worse, coughing my lungs out. I put a pillow over my sick head instead of on it and managed to fall asleep – blaring alarm be damned, pondering a new race plan.
Great story, thank you for sharing, so far. I missed all the fun! What amazes me is that you have the ability to push through and forge ahead, even while being that sick. Most people would’ve given in to inner quitter!