Piercing my luck

“Only the dead have seen the end of the war.” – Plato

The desert is dry. Real dry. You’re sweating, but your motorcycle and the desert combine to create a 50-horsepower blow dryer. You never get wet. How much water do you lose? A lot. You keep drawing water from the tube hanging over your shoulder that comes up from your backpack with a 3-liter bladder, but you still feel dehydrated when it’s daytime in Baja.

Many Ironmen, like Jeff Benrud, got IV’s halfway through the race. This restores you and gives you energy. Jeff didn’t have time to let the IV drip in. “Squeeze it in,” he told the nurse. Thinking about it, I wish I had an IV too.

I had 80 miles to go to get to San Ignacio. The sun was going down and I was 2 hours ahead of my schedule. I headed away from my team at the crowded pit at mile 524, into the setting sun.

I knew the course would get really tough before San Ignacio. It wasn’t too bad for a little bit, but hell seemed to start a lot sooner than it had during the pre-run. The course breaks down the more race traffic (both pre-run and during the actual race) that runs over it. Silt gets deeper. Ruts get deeper. Whoops get taller and deeper. Sand gets looser.

The sun went down on me. At this time of year, a day is composed of 11 hours of daylight, and 13 hours of darkness. That 13 hours seems like an eternity. When it’s dark, our spirits dim, and challenges rise taller than they seem in the day. The night is lonely, visibility and perspective drop, and there is no energy outside your body to draw on.

When we have tough times in our lives, night time can be desperate. The best thing we can do is go to sleep and in the morning, we will have light, hope and clearer thinking. Of course, that was not an option for me right now.

My mileage goals were more modest for nighttime because I knew about the night. I had to make it until daylight. I knew I’d feel reborn yet again with the coming of the sun – but that was far from now. Keep moving.

It was getting cooler, but not cold yet. I had a thin jersey on. I thought I’d be okay for another two hours. 

The whoops get deeper. Silty. Deep silt – up and down and up and down. I had to keep my front wheel from washing out or knifing in. If I had four wheels, I wouldn’t have to worry about falling over. 

The course deteriorated. It was bad. Really bad. Conditions like this took 10X the energy per mile than fast sections did. “Pay the toll, boy.”

I check my GPS screen often to be sure I am on course in the dark. Then I see the line on the screen that represents the course ends! As I progress, I watch the arrow move right off the line into space. Damn! Now I had to follow the tracks. There are many intersections and forks out here. I’d have to worry about that when I got to the next one.

I struggled to keep some speed up. I could ride in just about anything. Skills weren’t my problem. Keeping a reasonable race speed in this crap in hour 18 was. Then, in one second, I was down. A strange sensation… My engine shut off, and I could hear another bike ahead of me struggling with these deeply silted whoops like I was. The drone of his motor faded away ahead in the darkness.

I was on my left shoulder at the edge of the course. My hands were still on the handlebars. Normally a crash like this was nothing. You get up, start it up, and keep going. So that’s what I tried to do. But when I went to rotate my torso up off the ground, I was stuck. Pain…

I reached up with my right hand and clicked on one of the backup lights on my helmet. I turned my head down to see my predicament. I had fallen into a cactus – a prickly pear. The thorns were deep in my upper arm and shoulder. The plant I was attached to was firmly rooted in the ground. That’s why I couldn’t get up.

My bike is horizontal on my left leg. My left shoulder and arm are pinned to a cactus. The GPS and tracker on my handlebars are sideways with me, illuminated in the dark. 

The pain…