“Allison’s going to ironwoman it.”
Oh really? Checking my text conversation I just had with her.
Her, moments ago: “Yea let’s team up. 600 miles is alot, but 300 each is a nice taste of long distance desert racing like we’ll see in Baja. We can ride the 450x!”
Poor Josh. Hindsight is always 20/20, but at the time he had 4 or 5 guys committed to teaming up and sharing a 600 mile 2-day race.
With my hopes and dreams set on a 500 or 1000 mile race in Baja, or Vegas to Reno, or the Mint, dividing 600 miles by 5 people sounds alot like my little league baseball career: stuck in left field for most of the day, and only going up to bat once.
I held off breaking the news to Josh, just on the off chance she does decide to try 600 miles in 2 days all by herself.
Allison could totally ironwoman it. She is the best mechanic I know, and knows her machine inside and out. She has done everything you can possibly do to her 2009 crf450x, and she’s been riding it longer than me or any of my friends have ridden their bikes, so she is insanely confident with it. When we ride together, I purposely pick difficult and technical terrain to ride, because I struggle to keep up with her when we go riding in the open, fast stuff.
A few days later, Allison commits to teaming up. We share the news with Josh, and start planning. I don’t feel that bad for him. He has a number of heavy hitter fast guys with him, so he’ll be faster than us, but that’s not the point for us. The experience is what we’re after. The education. We signed up for this and had our notebooks open and ready. School was in session.
Fun fact about school they don’t tell you about when you’re a kid: school costs money. this little educational opportunity was not without tuition: $800 for the entry fee, no additional cost for teams, so $400 each? Cool! But since we’re using her bike, I offer to pay $600 to her $200. Small price to pay for me to be provided with an amazingly well maintained bike.
Ope. Just kidding. Both team members have to pay $60 to become members of the race series. And the scoring transponder (electronic device that records us going over the start and finish lines) is $100. And then the Racing Trax transponder (electronic device that broadcasts your location to the race officials, friends and family, alerts officials of mechanical/medical emergencies, other racers of your proximity, and generally weighs your bike down for no reason) cost us $260.
Quick math: 800 race + 120 memberships + 100 transponder + 260 bigger transponder= $1280 to go racing.
And that’s just to get to the starting line. According to Josh, “welcome to the big leagues. San Felipe 250 is a $2340 entry fee.” We really do get spoiled with our $60 Mrann races…
Next: Time off. The race is Friday and Saturday. Tech inspection is 9am on Thursday. In Vegas. 7 hours from my house, and I work until 1030pm Wednesday night.
Oh well. I just spent a grand to go race 300ish miles in the desert. Not gunna cancel the whole damn thing just because it’s going to eat up half my PTO for the year.
Allison had a few mods to make for the race, her end of the bargain was to supply a desert race ready bike for 2 people and have it last 600-something miles.
Interesting task, as neither one of us had ever competed in a race like this, and I had never spent more than a few minutes on her bike.
Still, like I said, she is the best mechanic I know, and she had a race-proven platform to start on: a CRF450x, the desert race bike that had won the Baja 500 and 1000 at least a dozen times since the XR650R was retired. Allison bought the bike knowing “this is the bike that’s won baja. If I want to race baja, this is the bike I need.”
Beyond that, she’s done just about everything you could do to the bike: Scott’s steering dampener, AHM suspension, Reckluse Auto clutch, IMS 3 gallon tank, Voyager pro gps, and Nitro Mousse foam in the wheels. I tease her and say its not even a Honda anymore, its an ACJ450x.
(ACJ is her initials, for those out of the know)
So that’s how the bike started. Allison has been running this bike in 100 mile desert races for about a season and a half. Big, giant 450 honda (not known for the lightest of the 450cc dirtbikes) on the technical fast-paced trails of MRANN.
This type of race will be different. MRANN is usually about as long distance as you can get while still being pretty technical and interesting. Plenty of rocks and singletrack and hillclimbs and sandy washes. In order to pound out three hundred miles in one day, the terrain gets, how shall we put it? Easier?
Oooooh, sorry…
Now is probably not the time to fully introduce this race.
About half a page up was probably the correct time.
You’re already passed that point, so now you’re likely lost as shit.
I actually had someone, 3 hours after the race ended message me and go “what the hell are you doing? I’ve tried for 3 days to understand the format of this damn race and I don’t know what the hell you guys are doing!”
So here goes:
Baja Nevada
So it’s called.
600 ish miles. 2 days. Starts in some far away place called Alamo, Nevada, goes half the race course to Tonopah (ooo, I know that one. its in the middle of the state, about halfway to Vegas!) then the second day is 300 more miles to the finish line. You’re welcome to team race it, and there are plenty of pits, so you can tradeoff as many or as little times as you’d like. Just THE BIKE has to be consistent for the whole race. Alamo-Tonopah-errrrrsomewhere.
To be completely honest, I hadn’t paid attention to where it finished. Full disclosure, I probably should have.
We split the race, so we could each get a full day of riding long distance. I would race day 1, and Josh told us its customary for the owner of the bike to finish the race, and since Allison was more comfortable and therefore faster, she could play “anchor” which, from high school track, was the fastest and last runner in a relay race. The fastest person is typically the last, as by the time the last person gets the baton (or bike, in this case) the stakes were pretty clear on what it was going to take to win, so your strongest racer went last to either bring it home, or make up alot of lost ground by the slower teammates.
Which explains why I didn’t much pay attention to where the race finished.
But I should have.
There was quite a bit of time from when we paid for the race, committed, and began planning, and the actual race. So much so that I hadn’t really even looked into the details of the race except for here and there until it was closer on my radar.
Pretty early on, the dangers, pit locations, and race information were posted, but I hadn’t looked into it overly closely. We can blame my attention/focus issues, or we can say I had a bunch of other things more pressing on my plate.
Either way, I hadn’t looked into the situation until it was nearly time to jump on the bike and go.
Allison, however, was in the process of modifying her overweight harescramble racer for it’s intended purpose: long range desert racing.
When you stretch out a race from 100 miles to over 300 in a single day, the course…
Ah, where were we before?
yes. the course.
WHAT we were racing on.
We both knew very well the knuckle busting, hand shredding, quadricep muscle exhausting, body beating single-tracked-whooped-out-rocky-hill-climby-dusty-mess that was a 100 mile desert race, but what happens when you make it THREE HUNDRED miles instead of *only* one hundred miles?
It gets easier.
Its…. gotta get easier, right?
Needs to.
Or we are both in for a real friggin bad day.
Luckily, it did. Quite a bit, actually. Once we found out that trophy trucks, side by sides, and 4 wheelers were following the exact same track we were, we both breathed a looooooong sigh of relief.
….For a moment.
“Like, *gulp* did you say trophy trucks????
– Us, like a Scooby Doo episode
Okay, so, drama and hysterics aside…
trophy trucks are a problem.
The above photo depicts a typical begining of a dirtbike race. Massive cloud of dust. Hard to see other bikes, rocks, bushes, generally anything, right?
You run into another bike, oh, thats gunna hurt both of you right? Ask me how I know.
What if, instead of another bike, in the same dusty, adrenaline-filled conditions, you got hit by a half a million dollar fiberglass body ford raptor going 75 miles an hour?
I’ve heard enough horror stories about race trucks down in Baja just blasting along at 80mph in the dust and mess and then
THUMPTHUMP
oops. Some poor bastard with a flat dirt bike tire just got run over by someone who couldn’t tell the difference between running over a decent sized rock and a dirtbike (and its rider). So he potentially has no idea he just ran you over. In the middle of the desert. Dozens of miles from help, or even other racers.
So yes, great news. The terrain is much easier. But the term “easier” doesn’t mean boring. It means you have to go faster in order to stay ahead of the 4 wheeled monsters with less situational awareness, a steel cage protecting them, and a MUCH bigger engine.
Speaking of faster, I won’t go too too deep into motorcycle gearing, but if you remember your first mountain bike, maybe it had gears, and you noticed it had a bunch of gears in front, and a bunch of gears in back, and depending on the various sizes of each, the bike either got much harder to pedal when slow, or much easier to climb hills, right?
Dirtbikes are the same way. Picture your engine is your legs. Some sprockets make the bike climb and do wheelies much easier, but other ones make the bike reeeeally slow to accelerate, but run MUCH faster top speed.
Which is exactly what Allison had to do to turn her overweight harescramble machine into a long distance desert racer. Make the gears different so it will outrun all the trophy trucks.
Once again, sincere apologies to all of you who are familiar with bikes, gearing, and all the above mods I listed. I’m trying to entertain a bunch of people here.
However, this ends up being hilarious and important for the rest of the story.
ALRIGHT.
2 weeks out. Allison has the bike squared away with 14/47 gearing, fresh Kenda tires, and a gorgeous set of green numbers for the big day. In her words, “holy shit that 14/47 makes it feel almost like a street bike.”
Now we just need to get Matt’s ass on the bike so the way it functions is not a complete surprise Friday morning.
I show up Saturday morning, 5 days before we head to Vegas, pick up the bike, and text my friend Annie.
“Hey, I totally wanna go riding with you, but I’m practicing on Allison’s bike for a long distance high speed moto-race. Know anywhere we could go practice that?”
Annie: LETS HIT CHALK BLUFF.
*facepalm* Annie likes enduro riding. Annie loves riding over tight twisty single track complete with logs and rocks and hillclimbs and the really ‘hard’ shit. She’s a blast to ride with, buuuuuuut thats…. not….. quite…. what I had in mind.
Annie, stamping her feet: You’ll be fine. That thing’s got a rekluse, and you’re tall. You’ll be fine.. Also, I need someone to change my chain and sprocket.
🙄 the things we do to repair friendships….
1 bleeding finger, a broken chain tool, and a few hours later, Annie and her fresh chain and rear sprocket, our friend Kelly on his same-era CRF450r, a re-geared borrowed 450x, and I drive the hour away into the mountains to ride single track.
To see this glass half full, the tight single track gave me a good chance to feel how the bike feels on harder stuff, which you could argue teaches you faster than open fast riding does. I learned alot, what I like about it, what to watch out for, and just build some necessary muscle memory on it.
So if there’s gunna be any technical hard sections that a trophy truck could also potentially hit, I’ll be ready! 😅
Kelly and I never got higher than 2nd gear all day. I hit a stump, Kelly dumped once? And Hard Enduro Annie smashed her fat 2 stroke pipe to fucken smithereens.
The following day (Sunday before the race, for those keeping track) I took off on a solo adventure to ACTUALLY PRACTICE FOR THE RACE.
My original plan was to go out to the east side of Fallon, and hit some long, empty, flat dirt roads to see how the bike handled high speed gravel roads. I fell short of that goal, and ended up on the north end of Fernley, much closer to home, and ironically the same place I usually take every bike right before I race it.
This was also a bit of a failure, as I kept getting bored with hitting fast 2 track, and kept jumping on soft sand trails, difficult rocky hillclimbs, and got lost a few times.
Sunday concluded the Prep and Practice phase. Ready or Not, Here We Go! 2 short days of work, then its Road Trip Time!
To Be Continued…..
Stand On It 