Broken bones and bloody needles in the dirt

(First race of the four-race series –  the “SanFelipe 250”, 320 miles, April 2018)

Victor and I executed our plan well on race day.  At dawn the race began on the beachfront main drag of San Felipe.  I rode great but I didn’t override the course.  At about mile 50, number 702x, Tony Gera came past me.  He had won the Baja 1000 Ironman a couple years earlier.  About 30 minutes later I saw a bike down on the left side of the course and a rider laying on the right side.  I stopped and went back.

 “Are you ok?”  I saw his race pants were torn open at his thigh.  Race pants are really hard to tear. 

“My leg is broken,” he said to me.

“Is it your femur?”  I expected him to say yes as that’s where his pants were torn.  Broken femurs can be life-threatening.

“No.  It’s my fib/tib” he said. 

There was nothing I could do.

“I’ll tell them at the next pit” I promised.

*******

Five hours later, a little past midway I pulled into a pit and it was nearly 100 degrees.  I did not expect Chris Haines, the owner of the support team and Baja racing legend to tap me on the shoulder as they were quick fueling my bike.  “Do you want an IV?”  “No” I said.  “Are you sure?”

Last year Chris’s team won the pro motorcycle championship in Baja – a goal he had been chasing for 20 years.  This year, his team would have the #1 number plate.  So at our home base hotel it was 1x and 714x, me.  (A three digit number starting with a 7 means Ironman class, and x means motorcycle, since there are more than twenty classes of four-wheel vehicles in these races).

The pro teams are in it to win it and they have a chase helicopter with radio communications to the rider.  Well, the 1x helicopter never showed; it broke down.  To ride in the chase helicopter, Chris gets a Navy Seal medic from San Diego.  Why?  These Pro riders are hanging it all out there and when they crash, it can be spectacular – and I do not mean that in a good way.  I suggested that Chris hire a helicopter from a race truck crew to at least follow the 1x bike for the first three hours, since the motorcycles get the green flag four hours before the trucks did.  When the helicopter had to drop the 1x team’s medic and go back to follow their own race truck, the medic got in the 1x chase truck.  That’s how they happened to be there at that pit to see me.

I thought about the IV.  It was very hot, but I was drinking a lot from my pack, and at chase truck stops Victor would put a washcloth from the cooler water on my back and saturate my jersey with water before I left.  That would make the next fifteen minutes much cooler from evaporative cooling until I was dry again.  (In a race, I’d sweat, but never get wet during the day because of the fast evaporation rate.) But I did want to see how an IV would make me feel.  Some Baja 1000 riders got IV’s in the middle of the race to rehydrate them and ”wake them up”. 

“Ok!” I yelled over my engine.  Jimmy Holly took the bike from me as I got off it and I followed the Seal Medic behind the truck.  He stuck a needle in my arm and put two bags of saline with a little sugar in me.  It took ten minutes or so, maybe a little more.  When he was done he took the bloody needle out of my arm and threw it in the sand.  It was like a war movie or something.

I hopped back on my bike with a new rear tire the mechanics had put on in the meantime, and I was off.  I didn’t feel anything.  Not worse, not better.  Would I have felt worse later without the IV?  I can’t say for sure.  But I knew now what was involved.

The race took me 12 hours.  There were 12 Ironman starters and seven finishers.  I was seventh.  If I knew how close I was to sixth, I could have skipped the I.V. or one of the last breaks with Victor, but I just wanted to finish.  I was racing my race, not against anyone else.

When I pulled into the finish in San Felipe I realized it was the first finish line I had ever seen in Baja.  In 2015 Tanner had finished the race that I had started.  The next two years of Ironman attempts I never finished.  It was a great feeling and something I wanted more of.