The future is promised to no one.

“Most men ebb and flow in the wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.” – Seneca

Wheels touched down in San Diego. We spent the night there, and we both slept as long as we possibly could. We woke up and just laid there waiting to fall asleep again. A few rounds of that until we could sleep no more. Can you bank sleep and make a withdrawal later? I hoped so. 

I had been purging my body of caffeine. I drink coffee and found not having it the week before the race easier than I had imagined. If I tapped into caffeine during the race, which was inevitable, I wanted my mind and body to respond.

We drove across the border back to Ensenada. It was Sunday. I thought about the race all the time. Conversation was often just an interruption of an internal dialogue. We all talk to ourselves. And that voice is the most important voice in our lives because we hear it all the time, and believe what it says because we generated it. 

Questions and thoughts would come up. “If anyone can finish this race, I can. Nobody is better than me.” “The race promoters would not lay out a race course that was impossible. Would they?” “This race was for multi-driver trophy truck teams that travel at twice the speed of bikes. It’s not a single rider motorcycle course…” Yes, no, maybe, and correct.

We had three days to prepare for the green flag on Thursday morning at 1 a.m. Ensenada erupts in race mania on race week. It’s the only place in the world you can see 800 hp trophy trucks, which are nowhere near street legal, trolling city streets like they owned the place. All the classes of race vehicles did. We had to stay focused. We had a lot of work to do.

We got on our newly modified race bikes for the first time in a year. We rode 34 miles to test them and pre-run the first 34 miles of the course. I was determined not to do this the day before the race. No riding then, just rest. So we did it Monday at dusk. The course went through the smallest, dustiest of towns called Ojos Negros. Poor kids were standing along the streets, if you can call them streets, waving. I stopped at six groups of them and gave them stickers to their great delight. 

As it got dark we tested our race lights. It may not sound like something you have to do, but at night if your lights are not pointed in an ideal way as you bob up and down, it could make a big difference. Worse, if your lights go out, you have trouble. 

We had secondary lights velcroed to our helmets like Mickey Mouse ears, with a cord running down to batteries in our backpacks. We could ride by them alone if necessary, though probably not as fast because they were not as bright as our headlights. We also had a secondary power supply and replacement fuses for our lights. If they went out, unplug this connector and plug that one in. Last year Tanner lost his lights in the race – twice.

We carefully considered what to carry and how, and what to put in what bag in the truck. This was a one-way race unlike the last two. We couldn’t leave anything in the hotel.

We shopped for good food – not easy in Mexican grocery stores. That’s why we did some shopping in San Diego and drove it over the border. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took visiting Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev to an American grocery store, he wept at the abundance we had, that his country did not. We truly are lucky to have a relatively free market, innovation, and millions of capitalists and entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to make a million details better so we can have more selection, quality, low prices, and convenience. Big Mexican grocery stores aren’t exactly third-world, but they aren’t exactly your local Whole Foods stores.

Tanner’s back injury had improved. My left knee was mostly better from slamming on a box jump, and my left foot was tweaked, but dramatically improved from my woods run four days earlier, and it did not hurt when I rode. My neck injury from last year’s race was as good as it had been in a year. When I rode it was not perfect, but okay.

We went to bed early and slept as late as we could. If we couldn’t sleep, we just laid there. 

We knew what was coming, and time was short now…