Round Trip – part 5

Friday – Race Day

I woke up feeling somewhat better.  We got a quick breakfast and suited up.  Dustin and I drove our race car #1914 to staging about seven blocks from our hotel.  I knew I’d have to wait there in the car for 90 minutes before starting to move toward the starting line.  In that time I felt ok, then sick, then nauseous, then very sleepy.

I had to give it hell for 210 miles, then Dustin and I had a plan – and it was a good one for a sick driver who was starting and finishing the race.

We got the green flag, but it was only the ceremonial start.  We were in the middle of a big city.  We had one hour to drive out of the city and regroup off-road for the real start.  All in all Dustin and I had been in the car for over three hours before the timed race actually started for us at about 12:15 PM.  I thought about how much better off we were than the poor motorcycles who started at 12:30 AM.  I had been there 6 times before, and I am glad I wasn’t on a motorcycle this time.

Here we go.  Green flag.  Lots of dust.  Movement – finally.  Waking up.  No time to think about whether I felt sick or not.  I was happy to be driving – because that I knew how to do and was good at.  Dustin called the turns like a champ.  It was on!

There were eight in our class.  They let cars go every 30 seconds.  We started 5^th.

At mile 35 we passed Eva Star, a 19-year-old girl who was an up-and-comer.  She always had her Dad in the passenger seat.  What a great thing to do between father and daughter.  Eva was in my car last year as a navigator for the Baja 400.  That’s a story I’ve told.  Something about passing a teenage girl in a pink UTV that makes me feel like a bully.  But…it has to be done.  Sorry.

The Factory Honda car in in the lead.  Our arch-rival Joe Bolton is in second, and David Pedder, who is the season points leader is in third with a ringer driver at the wheel.  We chased them down.  It takes 110 miles after passing Eva, but we can see them both ahead of us on the next hill clear as day, one behind the other. 

We are in the hills in a technical section.  Perfect.  The rougher it is the more of an advantage I have over them.  Maybe it’s my motorcycle eye picking the smoothest lines like my life depends on it that has them checking up more than I do in the rocks. 

“Light him up!” I yell to Little D.  Dustin pushes a button in our car that lights up a big blue light on the dash in the points leader’s car.  That tells him that someone is on his butt and closing, and he should pull over and let us pass.  This wasn’t one of the dustiest sections, but the closer you get, the thicker the dust is and the less of the rocks you can see.

It works!  He lets up and drifts to the side of the course and we go by.   Third place!  I’m thinking we can only better our position.  We will never be in fourth place again.

We see Joe Bolton’s dust ahead.  We are in hard red clay with lots of embedded rocks sticking up.  We pick through quickly.  A steep descent is ahead, Joe is already at the bottom.  I know this hill.  It’s very rough with rock ledges going uphill.  But going downhill those ledges are simply drop-offs and not hard on the car.  I’m flying down, trusting I am right.  At the bottom, we chase Joe between farm fences, left, right…”Light him up!”  Joe pulls over, and we go by.  I’m sure he is upset that it was us going by.  Too late now!  Bye Joe!

Second place at mile 145!  I like where this is going!  Now to extend our lead.  Not easy.  Joe’s car is fast.  Back up into the hills.  More red clay, more rocks.  We are flying for this terrain. 

A decent, off-camber (sloped right to left) as we go down.  There’s a deep rut presenting itself on the downhill side.  I try to stay above it, but it’s so off-camber that we are dropping into it. 

Bang-Bang!

Oh Sh#*!  It was the unmistakable feeling of rim to rock – twice.  We knew we had two flat tires.  We get to the bottom of the hill where three other cars had flats just like us.  Apparently, there was a sharp rock there slicing tires by the dozen on that hill.  The problem was we had two flats and only carry one spare!

I know two of our competitors are close behind.  Dustin gets out to change the tire.  We wait for car number two to roll up and figure they’d give us their spare.  This is where the plan to have a chase car in the race will make a difference.  We put our spare on the front as Joe goes by.  Then Pedder’s car goes by.  Fourth place again.  Ughhh.  I had chased so hard and so long for the spot, then lost it. 

Our race car number two pulls up after 8 minutes.  Mikey is driving.  He’s the mechanic who built our cars and the son of Mike, who is the driver I will be giving the car to at mile 210.  Mikey explains that he had a flat, so his spare is flat!  Oh no!

I’m sweating looking at my watch and coughing.  The minutes are ticking by…

Is this how it ends?

Round Trip – part 4

Thursday morning;  24 hours to race time.  I feel terrible.  I’m dutifully doing breathing treatments and taking everything they said to take.  I stay in bed most of the day.

I had to walk two blocks to near where the race started to get my helmet.  We were having my helmet speakers refitted at the PCI race radios trailer.  There were race vehicles in the tech line waiting to go up on the podium – a two-block long line.  Vendors mulled about selling food and sunglasses and all kinds of things.  Race fans walked in and out of the race vehicles in line, taking pictures and gathering stickers from whatever race team was handing them out. 

Then something tragic happened.

A young man from a chase team was behind the wheel of a trophy truck in line.  Often the line is hours long and the driver doesn’t want to wait in line, so he lets a team member take the truck through.  When the truck is almost up on the podium for the driver interview, the driver will show up and get in.

Well, the kid went to start the truck to move it up 15 feet and the truck was in gear.  The 1000 hp truck started, lunged forward and hit the buggy in line ahead of him, which hit the car ahead of him.  There were people in between.  One had his arm severed.  Tragically, two of them were killed.

At the drivers meeting that night, there was a palpable sadness.

I got to bed as early as I could, still very sick, hoping the antibiotics would kick in after 48 hours. 

Round Trip – part 3

This year, we did something VERY different.  It was Chris Haines’s idea to enter two cars in the race.  Besides ours, we’d have another car that was driven by mechanics with lots of parts.  They’d stay behind us and if we had a problem, they’d be right there pulling up on us to help us fix it.  Chris is a racing veteran and in his mind, every minute counts.  I reluctantly agreed.  I wasn’t crazy about the plan because it was a big team – 14 people and five chase vehicles.

But now with my new race plan, I decided to steal a driver from the number two car and put him on my team so we could have three drivers.  Mike Sandoval was a great driver with lots of experience.  In my new plan, he’d take the car from me at mile 210 and go to 400, then up 70 miles of pavement that was in the middle of the racecourse and give it to Javier.  Javi would take it 260 miles and give it to me and Dustin at mile 730 and we would finish.  I thought it was a much better plan and that there would be far less suffering for everyone this way.  The old plan had us in the car for 12 race hours, Javi for nearly as many, and then we had to 4 hours to finish.  The new plan made more sense.

I woke up sick.  No better.  There was a war going on in my chest.  An infection I was sure. I was very aware of my lungs and where they were in my body.  They were inflamed.

We drove two hours north of San Felipe along the Sea of Cortez.  I was curled up in the back seat amongst backpacks and luggage.  We went through the military check near El Chinero.  El Chinero is not a town; it’s just an area – a spot.  It’s named that because many years ago a Chinese ship was grounded in the nearby Sea of Cortez – it’s shallow at north end and turns into salt flats.  The Chinese crew wound up getting to shore and walking.  They died in the desert here.  So, it’s El Chinero.

We stopped at Valle Trinidad and unloaded the pre-runner.  I decided to take Bobby with me for the 48 miles to where we’d see the road again.  Bobby had been on many trips with me to Baja races but had never been in the race car.  It was a great section for him to experience.  A mix of terrain.  He got to see how rough it was, and how beautiful the inner parts of the landscape were that few ever see.

When we emerged back at the road at kilometer 77, we pulled over at the chase trucks.  I sat there, sick, happy to be stopped.  Someone suggested we could skip the next section – that I didn’t have to pre-run it if I was sick because it was the same as the Baja 400 course that I raced two months earlier, and I knew it anyway.  I quickly agreed.  We loaded the car on the trailer and drove back through the switchbacks to the big city of Ensenada.

As soon as we got back I had to lay down – right now.  After an hour, they took me to the hospital.  I saw a doctor who prescribed something for the incessant cough and something else that was mostly acetaminophen.   They wanted to x-ray me but the technician wasn’t in.  The doctor said I should come back tomorrow.  I got the prescription and went to bed.  56 hours to race the green flag.

The next day, we had to go to registration, go through tech inspection, get interviewed, and get our trackers installed.  That took until noon.  Then I went back to the hospital.  I got an x-ray and a blood test.  Then he said I should get an EKG.  All three in under an hour – for $160.  I got an amoxicillin prescription and steroids.  We went to the drugstore and bought a nebulizer. 

This is a crappy race trip.

Round Trip – part 2

The race was Friday.  It was the Sunday before.  Dustin and I climbed in the pre-runner, a second race car we used to pre-run the race.  These cars take a lot of punishment.  You don’t want to beat up your race car for 1000 miles and then race it.  Stuff breaks and the race car needed to be fresh on race day.

We headed out of town to the course.  We found it on our GPS and followed it.  I knew the sections.  I had been racing down here for ten years now, and many races use the same sections with a few new ones thrown in for variety. 

I thought about when Tanner and I went to find the racecourse to pre-run it 9 years ago, and we got lost before we ever started it.  We were going through farm gates, through fields, over hills…we were so frustrated.  Now I knew the area and how to connect these hills to that valley and how to get back to one of the two paved roads from most areas in the north of the peninsula.

Big ruts, washed-out sections, whoops 4 feet deep, rocks, steep hill climbs and descents.  Rough and beautiful.  We emerged on Route 1, the highway running up and down the Pacific side of the peninsula.  Acambero was a restaurant where the course came out, and there were race stickers all over the walls and race jerseys hanging from the ceiling.  We ate lunch and kept going.

Out to the coast and the Pacific Ocean.  On gravel roads used by local traffic near the water, and up into the rough hills, and back.  The ocean is beautiful.  We pull out onto the beach in a few places and take some pictures.  The people are poor, living at the intersection of parched brown sand and rocks and gleaming ocean with continuous streams of waves breaking white and dissipating into bubbles.

The course went on and on.  We had to go to mile 210.  Shouldn’t seem like a big deal, but it was.  By the time we got to the spot we had decided to pre-run to today, we were beat from getting bounced around all day.  It was cold now.  I was on Eastern time too, and it seemed past my bedtime.  My cough got worse with the stress. 

We were back out at Route 1 and drove north seven miles with our team chase vehicles to a hotel in San Quintin.  It was a remarkably clean hotel in great shape for this part of the world.  The hotel had a restaurant and we didn’t hesitate.  It was dark and cold.  The cook was the owner of the hotel.  To our surprise he was a great cook with an amazing variety of food – all delicious.

In the morning we started off again to pre-run from 210 to 400.  My hallucination was that Dustin and I would start the race and go to mile 400 and give the car to Javier.  Javier would go from 400 to 730, and then Dustin and I would take it to the finish – this year a total of 868 miles. 

This section started ok.  But as the miles went by there were some really technical rocky sections up mountains, whooped out sand washes with rocks mixed in, and just all-around crap terrain.  In a way, crap terrain is awesome when you conquer it – if you are physically fresh.  When we got to the end, we were beat – again. 

I was coughing and feeling sick.  I couldn’t deny it now.  I was very sick.  Didn’t I just get done with the Morocco Rally last month where I was sick the entire trip?  Ughhh. 

I decided to make a new race plan.  Going to Race Mile 400 was too much.  We’d be beat, and when you are beat, you slow down because it hurts. 

We got rooms at George’s hotel in San Felipe and went to eat.  It was very quiet.  Nobody out. I couldn’t wait to get back to go to bed.  Just as my head hit the pillow, the alarm in the empty building across the tiny parking lot decided to blare for seemingly no reason.  After twenty minutes, it stopped.  After another twenty, it started blaring again.  I thought about how the race started in three days and wondered if I could get better by then.  Right now I was getting worse, coughing my lungs out.  I put a pillow over my sick head instead of on it and managed to fall asleep – blaring alarm be damned, pondering a new race plan.

Round Trip – Part 1

It was a dry cough.  No big deal. 

Five days to leave for Baja. 

We had won the Baja 1000 race last year – when it was 1311 miles long, one way from LaPaz to Ensenada.  An epic win.  Winning the longest non-stop off-road race in the world can only be “epic”.  And of course, when you win, you want to go back and win again.  So that’s what I was doing.

I had set a goal to enter three races in Baja in three different classes and podium in all three in the same year.  I had finished second soloing the San Felipe 250 on a motorcycle in the 50 and over class.  Then I finished third in the Baja 400 on a motorcycle – solo again.  The 1000 I thought, would not be a problem to podium on four wheels since we had won it last year.  We had the speed.

But alas, Baja is a ruthless master.  What happens over 1000 miles of the toughest “racecourse” you’ve ever seen depends on a lot of things; some in your control and some not.  Luck played a part – good luck and bad luck; on your part and on each of your competitors’ parts.  Let’s see how this goes this year…

I flew to San Diego and met my trusty co-driver Dustin Gebers who flew in from Nashville.  We also met two friends who were there to help and experience it with us.  Dustin Coffey was from Knoxville Tennessee.  Two Dustin’s from opposite ends of Tennessee.  Dustin Gebers was not a small guy, but standing next to Dustin Coffey he looked small.  So we quickly coined them Big D and Little D.  I don’t think Little D was excited about that, but we all know if you protest, you’re going to get it even more.  Such is the custom among great friends.

My brother-from-another-mother, Bobby Miles, was there as he had been so many times before.  We also had Ted Waldron, my video guy, and Jesse Dostie from Florida.  Ted and Jesse made the Into the Dust series movies, and the band was back together for more moviemaking.

The team had the race vehicles on trailers already across the border. Two vans picked us up at the San Diego airport.  We headed to the border crossing and down through Tijuana along the coast to Ensenada.  We enjoyed pointing out the sights to Big D who had never been to Baja before.

I coughed yet again.  “What’s that about?” asked Little D.  Just a dry cough I’ve had for nearly a week now.   No big deal. 

I secretly hoped it was no big deal…

Life is simple

Master the basics – the fundamentals. 

Don’t complicate it by looking for a magic bullet.

Grand goals are made up of not-so-grand steps taken with concentration and self-discipline while nobody is looking.  

Even a not-so-grand but good, healthy, happy life is the same way.

Do you have the fundamentals right?

The right thing is not always fun

Self-discipline is necessary to succeed.

To achieve what we want, we have to do what we don’t want.

Can you do things you don’t really want to do by keeping your focus on your higher-level goal or purpose?

Ignore the man on the couch

The man in the ring, in the game, in the struggle to do better and achieve worthy goals, should ignore criticism and opinions from the man on the couch.

Choose a different set of risks

On one hand you risk getting to the end and never having tried, gone there, seeing it, saying that, accomplished that…. and dying with your song still inside you.

On the other hand you may be uncomfortable, look a little silly at first, be criticized, or stumble a few times before you get it.

Which set of risks do you pick?

Courage Required

Active pursuit of a better you and climbing toward something better requires courage.

Goals – Let’s go!