Great passions…

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” 

                                                                                 – Denis Diderot

Just past the checkpoint we parked and unpacked our gear bags looking for what we’d need for the afternoon of riding – the first half-day of a week of pre-running the third longest course in the Baja 1000’s 50-year history. You need to get it right. Once you leave the truck and head out into the desert, you’ve got what you’ve got. No second chances. At the same time, you don’t want to carry too much unnecessary weight in your pack. 

We offloaded the pre-run bikes from the trailer. The pre-run bikes are not the ones we’d race. The pre-run bikes had huge gas tanks, because when you are pre-running there are no gas pits set up every 50 miles along the course (usually in the middle of nowhere), like there are in the race. 

Our bikes were 2009 Honda 450X models. They are carbureted, not like today’s fuel injected models. Even my race bike is a 2009. Why? Because with the way Chris Haines’ shop (our race support team) builds these things, they are awesome! Overall, the race bikes are a step up in performance from the pre-run bikes when it comes to horsepower, suspension and weight.

Both Tanner and I had fitted our bikes with higher handlebars this year. I did it because I could stand up straighter and bend my neck less. Tanner did it because he is 6’3” tall. Experience. As you do new things, you get smarter.

We headed out. It felt good to straddle a bike again – in Baja. First, a high speed graded road, and then turn into the desert. Baja is the off-road racing capital of the world. If you went there, you’d see why. There’s an abundance of beautiful open desert terrain with countless miles of established dirt paths cut in. They’ve been riding here for decades. 

The wheeled traffic over and over again for decades has carved some epic surfaces to ride on. Ruts, banked turns, and perhaps most noteworthy – the whoops. Whoops are waves in the sand or dirt caused by tires accelerating or braking. The whoops get bigger and bigger over the years and provide interest, challenge, danger and even torture in the Baja 1000. It’s like riding a motorcycle on terrain that is shaped like an angry ocean, with big waves close together. When there are big rocks in these waves, and cacti and other thorny hostile vegetation close on both sides, it gets challenging. And riding whoops for 100 miles when it’s 100 degrees out is draining.

Tanner was ahead of me, and I was second in line. I stayed back so I didn’t have to breathe his dust, which is so fine it leaps into the air when any wheel touches it and is in no hurry to settle again. I come up to a plateau after a rutted right hand uphill turn and there is Tanner, stopped. 

Body language is hard to read when someone has a helmet on, but being his Dad, I knew something was very wrong…