The Federales

Before the deed comes the thought.  Before the achievement comes the dream.  Every mountain we climb, we first climb in our mind. – Royal Robbins

The Mexican Federal Police put a sportsman team together for the race.  I sponsored all three teams Chris Haines had in the race – 1x, 714x, and 286x.  They finished second last year and were trying to win.  Roy, the head of the police for all of Baja we very appreciative.  He told me his commanding officer in Mexico City thanks me, and gave me a special keychain with a badge on it.  I guess if I ever get in trouble in Mexico for transgressions real or imagined, I can call Roy.

Does it matter who you know?  Uhhh – yea!  Will I ever need to call Roy?  I hope not.  But that’s how you network with others.  You give first – hopefully with no other motive.  Create value for others by giving them information, assistance, introductions, or resources.  If and when you need something, you’ll have many people to go to for help.

The police had a big cookout for all three Contractor Nation teams a few days before the race in the parking lot across from the San Nicolas Hotel where we set up camp before the race.  We all had something in common here and were all pulling for each other.

The Baja 1000, like any great endeavor, was pulling people together.

Chapter Eleven – In Pursuit

From mile 280 I headed south to get to my next goal.  Make mile 380 by dark.  Better yet, if I could get to 415 by then I could get past some bad silt and a gnarly rocky hill climb by then.  Hopefully, I could stay ahead of the race trucks coming through until mile 415.

Highway 5 ran down the eastern coast of the Baja peninsula along the Sea of Cortez.  In our 2015 race I had this section of pavement in the race.  The highway was brand new.  I mean the asphalt was black as black gets and the guardrails and striping were brand new.  Now just three years later, disaster had struck here.

A monster storm came across the peninsula dropping a lot of rain.  When it got to the Sea of Cortez, it came back and sat here a while.  The flooding made lakes alongside the elevated highway in a dozen places.  The water eventually broke through the highway which was acting as a dam. 

One section of highway was completely missing for miles.  Then I got back up on the pavement and you’d be going along at 60 mph and see just three rubber cones across the road in front of you.  Just beyond that it dropped 40 feet straight down.  The highway was missing for 100 feet.  They made dirt ramps down into the desert and back up the other side where race vehicles and civilian traffic mixed.  Brand new bridges were collapsed.  This scene repeated itself a dozen times. 

It was erie devastation.  I was sad for Mexico and what they had to deal with here.  There were only two paved roads down the peninsula, and this was the only one on the east side.  Of course, the engineering was lacking.  I had come to appreciate American engineering and highway builders there. 

The scenery was fantastic.  To the left was the calm Sea of Cortez – the body of water between the Baja Peninsula and the Mexican mainland.  The baked brown hills rolled up to mountains out of the salt water, and the race course rolled with it.  I was headed to my next pit – Gonzaga Bay.  There was one store, a few small structures and a flat spot along the road where an occasional small plane landed.  My team would have a warm burrito there for me. 

At most stops there were locals watching my team and waiting for me to come in.  They’d be excited to see a real racer in the Baja 1000 up close.  If I took all my gear off and put jeans and a T-shirt on they wouldn’t be so impressed.  But this was the Baja 1000 and it was going down right now.  I always tried to acknowledge them.  A fist pump or even fist bump, a thumbs up, or my team giving them stickers made for a memorable moment for both them and me.  Shared experiences….

Arturo told me again, as wise reverent man encouraging his friend  – “No mistakes.  Smooth.  Smooth is fast.“  They whole team would always cheer me on loudly as I took off out of the pit down the course.  My soul heard them.

I was twelve hours in now and the sun was getting low.  I had prepared well.  I was ok.

714x was still in the race; in pursuit of something important.

Take charge

“When you start relaxing your grip on your permanent identity and see you can be anyone, who you want to be will become more important than who you are.  That will be a big moment in your life.” – Steve Chandler

Two years earlier I had hurt my neck badly in this race.  Whiplash.  It took a year to get better.  For the last year my neck was ok, with a few bouts a chiropractor could fix.  I was getting on a plane in three days for my third Ironman attempt and all of a sudden my neck was killing me.  I needed an adjustment but my chiropractor had just gone on vacation.  I knew I would be severely handicapped trying to race like this with a helmet on my head and 30 hours of vibration and up and down.

I called my back-up chiropractor.  He tried, but the next day it still wasn’t good.  I had to get on the plane.  We landed in San Diego on a Sunday.  I was really worried about my neck.  It was killing me.  I used Google and found chiropractors open on Sunday!  I took a taxi over there and told my team to pick me up there.  They didn’t care that I was not a previous patient or that I was paying cash.  I couldn’t believe it.  This is how it should be – and it was only $29!  Problem solved.  I dodged another bullet in this crazy quest.

There are times when I am not feeling good and I think I can’t do it.  I don’t mean to be negative, but I’d be asking myself, “How the heck am I going to do this?”  When you are hurt, or sick, or sore, or emotionally wounded – your ambition and optimism hits the deck.

But emotion is created by motion.  Get started.  When you are doing it, you’ll feel like doing it.  

Sometimes you have to solve a problem to get going.  Solve it, and get to it.  Bust through the resistance, and take charge.

Chapter TEN – Breaking it down

“When you are inspired, dormant faculties and talents come alive” – Wayne Dyer

I pulled up to the chase team at mile 135 and called an audible.  Yes, I changed the plan on the fly.  It had only been 30 minutes since I saw them last, and I was feeling great.  It was too cold to take my race jacket off yet, so I told them to meet me at the end of the San Matias wash. 

They could see me from the road that snaked above the wash nearly the whole way.  This was the wash that claimed Tanner in a pre-run crash last year.  By coincidence, Jesse got it on camera from the drone.  The San Matias wash is famous for having big rocks embedded in the sand that are the same color as the sand.  You have to have the eye of an eagle to pick them out or you’re going over the bars like Tanner did.

I emerged unscathed and stopped at the waiting truck.  I undressed for the cold, and prepared for the heat.  In ten miles I’d start 55 solid miles of sand whoops.  My plan leveraged what I had learned from pre-running the course into three main goals.

The next thing I had to do was head 35 miles down the Puertocitos Highway at the 60 mph speed limit for paved roads.  The problem is, the highway was missing.

Chapter NINE – Dust, Fog, Blindness

I had a plan.  I was starting last in my class today.  I’d stay close behind the rider in front of me and wait for a mistake and make my move.  Well, that plan was out the window one minute into the race.  It was so foggy you couldn’t see 100 feet.  The mist covered my goggles, which I had to wipe every 15 seconds in places.  In some spots I couldn’t see 40 feet!  It was the worst fog I’d ever seen down there.

To make matters worse,  the dust that would normally blow around you now stuck to me and my goggles.  It made mud on the lenses and when I wiped it, it scratched my lenses.  I had a washcloth on a wire tie hanging from my pack strap to wipe my goggles.  If you recall I had learned – DO NOT RIDE WHERE YOU CAN’T SEE.  I needed to finish.

The fog was so bad that at one point I had to take my goggles off.  Other riders had done the same.  It was better because you could just blink your eyes to clear your vision.  But a few minutes later when the dust clogged my eyes, I had to put the goggles back on.  But now they were wet and filthy on the outside and inside.  I could not see through them at all.  I had to stop.  I wiped them of bulk water with the now wet rag, but they were still foggy.  I held them in front of my exhaust which dries them really fast.  I repeated this process of taking the goggles off, drying them in and out in front of the exhaust, and putting them back on once more.

I finished the Tijuana Challenge and despite my difficulties, took satisfaction in that I was now in second place in the season championship points standings.  Three races complete out of four.  I was one of only two Ironmen to finish all three races so far. 

It felt good.  I was getting used to expecting to see the finish line.  We need to expect to succeed in life.  If we don’t expect to, we won’t. 

There was one race left.  THE RACE.  The Baja 1000.  I believed I could do it, and I had a deep desire to finish it.  Those are the two ingredients that make things possible.  Without them, it’s not possible.  But I had both now – belief and desire.

All improvement in your life begins with improved mental pictures about yourself and what you can and will do.  Perhaps we are limited by our imaginations.  But imagining ourselves accomplishing something is easy, we just need to dare to do it. 

This is the beginning.  Reality is not fixed.

Chapter Eight – Barbed Wire

“The pain that is created from avoiding hard work is much more than any pain created from the actual work itself because if you don’t begin to work on those ideas that God has blessed you with, they will become stagnant inside of you and eventually begin to eat away at you.  You might seem ok on the outside, but inside you will be ill from not getting those ideas out of your heart and into the world.  Stalling leads to sickness, but taking steps, even baby steps, always leads to success.” – Russell Simmons

The Tijuana Challenge was a very different race than the others.  First, it was the shortest.  But it was a different format.  They laid out a 34-mile loop of tough rocky hills, including some very challenging hill climbs and “rock gardens”.  On Saturday morning at 6:30 am you race two laps – 68 miles.  Then on Sunday morning, you repeat it.  They’d add your times together to determine the winners.

There were only four riders in the Ironman class.  The season was already taking its toll after just two races.  Racers would get hurt and not return to the series.  Others did not finish a race and decided to abort their season plans if they had them.

Through a lottery, I was to start first in my class on day one and last on day two.  I got the green flag and raced into the dust of the bikes who started before me.  It was clear I had a big problem right from the beginning.  I had not pre-run the course and the other three in my class had.  Two of them lived locally so it was easy for them.  Pre-running was only open the weekend before, and I just couldn’t make another trip from Connecticut.  Others told me that I couldn’t get lost in such a short race because it would be well worn in.  I didn’t even use a GPS.

The problem is I didn’t know what way the course went and had to pause at turns to figure it out.  When there was a rise ahead I had no idea what was on the other side of it and whether it went left or right.  Francisco and Jose passed me and I conceded as I knew they were faster than me and knew the track.  I kept the third rider behind me. 

At mile 33, one mile before seeing the starting line again and beginning the second lap, I spied a very steep hill climb with single-track wheel marks up it.  It was sort of an alternate line that could shave a couple seconds off by straightening out the course where there was a switchback going up a hill.  The Pro riders look for any possible way to save time.  I figured if they could do it so could I. I went for it.

It was about 150 feet up and it got steeper and steeper at the top.  I had ten feet to go and my bike just stopped.  At first, I thought it was the steepness.  My bike was pointing up at a 45-degree angle.  I didn’t think I could get going again, but I had to try.  I downshifted into first gear, revved the engine and let the clutch out.  The bike would not move.  Something was wrong.

I looked down and I see barbed wire wrapped around my rear wheel.  To make matters worse, it was going off into the distance on the right, still attached to some fencepost somewhere.  Oh no!  In a short race like this bikes were bunched up.  I heard one coming already.  I did not carry my wire cutters in my side pouch because this was such a short race – what could happen?  This!

Two locals came down to help me.  They held the bike up and I got off.  Then I see the wire is cutting through my rear brake line!  A bike went by, then another.  I grabbed the rear wheel and spun it backward a tenth of a turn at a time.  Each time I did the bike lurched backward down the steep hill and the wire pressed through the skin of the brake line even tighter.  More bikes went by.

I thought about how I had to finish this race.  I was in third place in the points for the season and all I had to do was finish to be in second.  There wasn’t a lot of time to be held up or fix the bike, and riding without a rear brake would be difficult.  The descents on this course were so steep, that bikes and ATV’s were cartwheeling down the hills.  Using only a front brake would have me doing the same.

Finally, after spinning the wheel five revolutions backwards the wire came loose.  Now I had to turn the bike around on this steep hill which was ugly but I got back down to the bottom and went up the conventional route.  So much for saving a few seconds.  I lost six minutes – an eternity in a 68-mile race.  I tried to make it up on lap two but I ran out of runway.  No matter.  I finished the day.  Now we go to the hotel for breakfast and rest up for day two of this Tijuana Challenge race.

Who's going to stop me?

I decelerated into the dusty lot in front of the little Bella Vista hotel in Valle Trinidad at race mile 110 at 8:11 am.  I was five minutes ahead of my schedule.   My team got me in and out in five minutes and I was gone again. 

The math?  807…I’m at 110, that’s a little better than an eighth complete.  The next section is fast.  70 miles an hour – but it’s brief.  Turns come up fast at that speed.  A racer is always pushing to a speed where danger is manufactured and hyper-vigilance is necessary, no matter what the terrain.

I see a bike down on the left ahead, and another guy tending to him.  He has a broken leg.  A few miles later an ambulance is coming.  Good thing we are on a graded road so they could access him.  It was a road called “Mike’s Road”, named for Mike’s Sky Ranch – a motel for racers 25 miles off the paved road in the middle of God’s country.

It was getting warmer, but not warm enough to take my race jacket off and subject myself to the 55-degree wind.  I was happy there was wind.  It was my wind.  It meant I was moving forward. 

“It’s not who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me” – Ayn Rand

Chapter SEVEN – Falcon Attack

I took off out of my second chase truck stop at mile 74 with seven miles to go to have 10% of the race behind me.  You think about these things in such a race.  Doing math in your helmet is a pastime I developed in Baja, especially in the Baja 1000.  If the answer was some difficult fraction, I’d set my sights on what mile marker ahead was a tidy one I could compute.  20% complete, 30%, 33% and so on.

This section was easy.  “Easy”, or any adjective is always a relative term in Baja.  The sun was high enough now not to be in my eyes and I could see the ground and all the hazards clearly.  Time to go fast.  Cool wind, strong exhaust notes behind me, and miles passing under me.  

I pre-ran this section one extra time four days earlier, and I knew it well.  We were out doing some video work with the team and waking up my riding muscles for the week when Kevin noticed steam coming from the front of my race bike that I hadn’t noticed sitting on it.  It turns out he had an eagle eye.  My radiator cap was missing.  It was on there twenty minutes ago and now it was gone.  I have never had that happen before.    Good thing it wasn’t in the race!

We looked for it but had to give up.  We rolled into Ojos and split up to find a radiator cap so we didn’t have to waste two hours or more going back to Ensenada.  Ojos Negros did not have an auto parts store – or a department store or much of anything except dusty little places to eat belonging to families trying to survive. 

Victor and I saw a Sportsman team support van on the side of the road just as their three-man team of military veteran riders rolled in.  They were from North Carolina.  It has been my experience that in desolate hostile places on earth, people become more friendly as they instinctively know their life may depend on it.  Ok, this wasn’t life and death – this time.  They were great guys and I am sure they would have helped us anyway.  They gave us one of their own radiator caps.  In return, I gave them advice as I was a Baja veteran and they were racing their first race.  They knew me from our YouTube movie “Into the Dust”.  It turns out they would not finish the race.  I do not know what happened to them.

As we proudly screwed the radiator cap on, Kevin and Bobby and Arturo pulled up with another one!  They asked a local with an old truck where they could find one.  He exited the truck, opened the hood and scalded himself getting the radiator cap off his own truck!  Ten bucks and it was a deal!  How did they know it would fit a 2010 Honda 450X?  Arturo just knew – and it did!

Later that day we were shooting vlogs alongside the Baja 1000 course.  I’d ride my bike up to Ted, take my goggles off and do a “Video Think Daily” message.  Jesse had the drone up shooting some video of me on the course in the whoops.  That’s when the attack occurred.

Falcons and hawks eat other birds.  They circle at high altitudes looking for flying prey.  When they see one they dive bomb it and pluck it right out of the sky.  Apparently, our new $1700 drone looks like a bird.

The blades shredded off the drone and it fell to the desert floor.  When they told me I looked up on the ridge and saw the culprit.  He was probably wondering what the heck was going on with his food supply these days, and his feet were probably dinged up I am sure.

We couldn’t fix our drone there, but all agreed that we needed one.  The race was in four days.  Jesse and Ted found a place to buy one in California and we had Javier, who hadn’t come down to Mexico yet pick it up.  The images we shot were well worth it.

Chapter SIX …One Step Back

“I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within us.” – Lillian Smith

I knew my knees were not great.  Running was a key part of my training for these races.  Running a long time.  Afterwards my knees would be quite sore inside where the bones from my upper and lower leg interact.

I run in Spartan obstacle course races.  In April I ran a Spartan Sprint.  Last year Tanner got me to run Spartan races in the Elite class with him.  Not because I was an Elite runner, but because when he finished, cold and wet and tired, he didn’t want to wait around for me to roll up hours later in the Open Class where I might start a couple hours after him and finish maybe three hours after he did.

I went to this race in Massachusetts alone on a gray morning.  At 7 am I took off in the Elite class, getting to the top of the first hill dead last.  But, like ‘the little engine that could’, I started passing guys who fired all their energy off too soon.  At each obstacle I passed guys doing their 30 burpees for not completing the obstacle.  I tried to use my head in these races and learned the obstacle techniques over many races, and I did not fail any of them.  I would never be the fastest, but maybe being smart with my abilities would make up for a good measure of my physical limitations. 

I finished in the middle of the Elite class and inside the top 3% of all 6000 runners for the weekend.  While my knees weren’t impressed, I was feeling very good about my fitness for the upcoming race season.

Three days after the successful Baja 500 race in June I ran a 5K race in the woods.  It was going great until near the end I felt something wrong in my right knee.  I limped across the finish line.  “It’ll be better in a few days” I thought.  A few days passed and it was not better – it was worse.  A few more days and a couple weeks…no improvement. 

I could not run or squat at the gym.  How could I work out?  In Baja, the limiting factor is your body.  The next race, the Tijuana Challenge was in 90 days. I went to a knee specialist and got an MRI.  It was a torn meniscus.  I scheduled surgery for July 3.  Would I have time to recover?  I did not know.

Luckily, it was the longest break between races of the season and I was injured at the beginning of that break.  Ten days after the surgery I was in the gym.  “I’ll go easy” I said.  It was probably premature, (maybe stupid), but I needed to try to balance my knee getting better with losing my edge that I had worked so long and hard for.

Two weeks before the race I had my doubts if my knee would be healed enough.  Would the race destroy my knee if it was too soon and kill my Baja 1000 bid?

There is no negotiating with Baja.  None.

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” –E. H. Chapin

Blinded

The course turned into an area called Uruapan.  It was characterized by hills and whoops in the hills, and deep silty sections in the low areas.  In some conditions it was fun – but not these conditions.  At the beginning of the race bikes and ATV’s are clustered together on the course.  The ATV’s and faster riders would be coming by me.  I was Ironman, and I had a plan.  I needed to be the Energizer bunny, not the roadrunner.  I had 31 hours ahead of me. 

As ATV’s came through and passed me, they’d fill the still air with silt that blinded me.  I had to slow to a crawl or just stop and wait to see again.  I was a smarter rider and I had a rule – do not ride faster than you can see. 

Bikes came by me.  Mostly Sportsman teams.  There were over 20 of them and on average a rider would go a couple hours and hand the bike off to their teammate.  Their dust slowed me down considerably.  Then Liz came by.  I stuck to my plan – don’t ride into the dust.  Sometimes you get away with it, but one crash and my entire year could be over.  It was a gamble I did not have to take.

Rick Thornton came by me and a minute later he crashed on rocks.  I stopped and asked him if he was ok.  His flat black helmet visor was broken.  I wondered how scuffed up or injured he really was.  About twenty minutes later the visibility again was very bad.  A Sportsman rider came by me and as he did he rode into a giant gnarly desert bush and crashed right in front of me.  More evidence that my plan was smart.

I pressed on as the sun came up right in my eyes, making visibility even more difficult.  I was looking for mile 74 to see my crew.  I was happy to see them.  I would always be happy to see them.  They were always happy to see me.  It meant I made it through another section.  It meant I was still in the race that half the teams do not finish.  It was their race too.  The last thing they wanted was for it to be over too soon.

They were ready for me.  Each had a job and what they needed in their hand or at the ready.  It was a positive sign.  It was 7:06 am.  I was 7 minutes ahead of my plan. 

It was working.

“And the purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt