National Enduro Racing for the Sentient Being
After living in the middle of freakin' nowhere in the eastern Nevada high desert for a year, where desert hare scrambles are the preferred form of recreation, I was starting to miss racing enduros. So when some fellows on ktmtalk.com started talking about going to the Desert Mountain National Enduro in Arizona, I quickly jumped on the bandwagon. I met Terry, Terry and Terry (yes it was confusing) in Las Vegas at Terry's house the day before the race. After we got acquainted and had lunch, Terry and Terry drove Terry's truck, and I hopped in with Terry in Terry's rig for the drive down to Wickenburg.
We got in too late to handle registration the night before, and the race starts early, so we were up and eating breakfast by 5:30 or so. Terry, Terry and Terry were enjoying their breakfast in a leisurely manner, since they were on minute 56. I was on minute 5, so I was naturally starting to get a little antsy. As it is, I'm pretty frantic about getting to race starts with plenty of time to move slowly and take care of business. At an enduro, you not only have to stand in line to register, but you have to pass sound check, get a rollchart, wind it up in your roll-chart holder, set your watch to key time, and then still get dressed, put gas in the tank, get your gas container on the truck that goes to the gas stop, etc... To add to the fun, this race had the world's longest roll chart, so naturally the slightest wrinkle early in the rolling process made it so big around that i couldn't get it all the way rolled up. After the 3rd try it was pretty close, and I was pretty close to having a heart attack. Fortunately, registration and sound check was pretty well-organized and went quickly, so I made it to the start line with less than 10 minutes to spare. Whew!
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photo courtesy of berkyboy (click pic for larger image, click link for more cool shots by berkyboy) |
At the start, I introduced myself to another Ktmtalk-er named Brent (fortunately not Terry). We only got to chat for a minute or so before he dropped the bleeder screw from his fork and couldn't find it. This is why you don't work on your bike at the start line, less than 5 minutes before your start minute. I helped him look for a while before I gave up and the riders on the minute before us took off. Amazingly enough, he found the screw and reinstalled it within seconds of our start-time. As our minute rolled over, I eased off the line while Brent and Lee (our other minute-mate) went hell-bent for leather down the trail. I was like 'hmmm, they must want to take a nice long rest at the 2.9 mile mark'. Even at my leisurely pace I got there with a couple minutes to kill. Good thing I killed them too, shortly after that was the first check, which I zeroed.
The first entire loop of around 40 miles was shared with B and C riders and was fun but not crazy riding. The only real obstacle we came too was a fairly steep hill about 10-12 miles in or so. There were a few guys there to help people that had trouble, and for unknown reasons there actually was someone flailing on the hill when I went up, but he wasn't in my way. I heard that the C riders had a pretty good sized bottleneck there, and I can imagine that if more than 1 rider was down or stuck it could get ugly and jammed up pretty fast. I think right after that I passed a guy on the minute ahead of me and then (big surprise) promptly threw my bike on the ground so he could get past again. I don't even know why I bother passing people that are still rolling, cuz that always seems to happen. A few minutes after that things started to go south.
We came to a trail split. I saw the 'A/B' sign pointing left, and the guy who had just passed me turned left, so away we went. A mile or two later, in a narrow sand wash/streambed I started noticing that there weren't many tire tracks. I didn't expect deep berms or anything, but there were like 2 tracks at most, and there should have been 12 or so riders ahead of me! About the time I was thinking that, I came upon a rider in front of me turning around. We hadn't seen any markings for a while, so we backtracked and found one half-eaten by a cow that seemed to point up the hill. We took off that way, looking carefully for more course markings, but then the trail dead-ended at a barbed-wire fence. Now I know national enduros are supposed to be challenging, but I never heard of the putting up barbed-wire as an obstacle, so we started getting suspicious. We went back and continued in our original direction to see what was down there, and lo and behold, we came across some more course markings. We had just panicked because of the lack of tracks. Sweet. Apparently most of the folks on the minutes ahead of us had gotten lost or something, but due to our superior intelligence and route-finding skill we were on the right track and feeling pretty good about ourselves. Away we went, happy as clams, patting ourselves on the back and following the obvious route markings.
All was well and good until we got to the next check, 17 minutes early. WTF? To make matters worse, the check personnel were scratching their heads and wondering why we didn't have markings from checks 2 and 3. Hmm. This is a puzzler. We got lost for a bit, but we pretty much ended up right back on the course. Well, hopefully, lots of people followed the clearly misleading course markings and so those checks would be thrown out. No problem. I chilled until I was back on time, and then headed out again, riding my race. At a reset, I hooked back up with my minute-mates, who were wondering what in the hell happened to me. I was like 'umm, didn't you guys have any trouble with the course markings?'. 'Umm, no' they admitted, giving me a look that is normally reserved for republican cabinet members and people who have been abducted by space aliens. Hmm. Now it's a real puzzler.
No worries though. The course was fun and I was having a ball, though i was not too successful trying to ride, keep time, manipulate my rollchart, and avoid getting fatally skewered by herds of vicious, marauding cactus. Round about the time we got to gas at the end of the first loop, it dawned on me that there had probably been a 1st-loop/2nd-loop split, and we had probably gone the wrong way. No other explanation seemed to make sense. Sure enough, when we got to the same spot on loop 2, I took a closer look. Well, not really, I didn't have to look closely. The signs were as clear as day. We had obviously just been stupid and not read them, and we turned left on A/B loop 2 instead of right on A/B/C loop 1. That's what I get for following someone. Dang and blast it.
Oh well. Not much to do at that point, so I just soldiered on. Since it seemed pretty clear that I was going to end up with a DNF, I started being a little more proactive about pulling off when anyone came up behind me, and the fast guys were starting to get pretty close now. About the time we turned off onto the 1st A split, I started feeling tired and cranky. Luckily, the trail was pretty serious, so I had very little attention to waste on feeling sorry for myself. It was kind of like trailriding with Bill Dart, only with the fastest riders in the country coming up behind you and wishing you would get the hell out of the way. The trail was steep, rocky, narrow (like 6"), and on a viciously steep sidehill, with occasional switchbacks and technical bits. David Lykke went by first. I'm sure he actually lost 1-2 seconds behind me, but i was in the middle of a pair of steep-ass rocky switchbacks, so there was no way to pull over or even slow down without stopping and falling right in the way, so I pulled off as soon as it leveled out. A bit later (more attentive now that I knew the pros were catching me), I pulled over for Steve Hatch, and then followed him as he dog-paddled up the next steep hill. He sure disappeared fast once we got to the top though. After a bit we came to the only bottleneck I ever saw on the A loop, at a steep, trenched-out, muddy and rocky switchback. I took the opportunity to pull over there and wait for the 2-3 guys that were flailing half way up to get out of the way, and I let a few psi out of my rear tire for traction-enhancement and as an excuse to rest another 30 seconds. At that point, Mike Lafferty cruised past, rolled off the throttle long enough glance up and take in the situation, then rolled back on the throttle and rode up and around the flailing guys as if they weren't even there. I don't think he even took his feet off the pegs. I was pretty impressed.
That section was pretty much the top of the climb, so then we started on an even scarier descent. It would have been really cool if I hadn't been looking behind me so much. Real enduro racers will really go out of their way to avoid holding up a faster rider, and I so wanted to believe that I was a real enduro racer, even though I had already failed the reading test. Billy Russell passed me on the downhill. I tried to cheer him on, but he didn't hang around long. At one point I could look down this steep and ridiculous rocky mountain, and see 10-15 tiny riders strewn along this very faint ribbon of trail, way way down below me. Kinda cool, but not something you want to focus on for too long. This was a good trail to practice your 'don't look at the front wheel' technique, since falling off the edge looked pretty uncomfortable.
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Me at the watefall. Click to go to joedirtphoto.com (from whence i stole this pic) and see more pix |
Then we tied back into the B course, which must have been much shorter or much easier, because all of the sudden i was mixed in with riders with numbers in the 40's, and they were choking up the trail. Most of them were pretty congenial about getting out of the way, but I did end up following some semi-terrified old guy through the entire waterfall section. The whole time I kept encouraging him "atta boy, you can do it, looking smooth, yeah buddy, you can just pull the heck over any time if you need to rest, keep it up, looking good", but he seemed immune to my hints. Finally at the bottom of the last drop he bounced over into the shrubbery, and as he tried to get back into the trail I took the opportunity to elbow my way past him. Definitely not a real enduro racer. I believe this pic is precisely at that last drop. Don't ask me why my feet are off the pegs and I'm prancing like a schoolgirl to stay out of the water. I must have thought I was made of brown sugar or something.
Shortly after that, the B course finished and the A's headed out for some more gruesome rocky singletrack. At about this point, I started thinking about survival mode. I was starting to get a little tired and sore and low on gas and cranky and thirsty and disheveled and a few other bad things. I think I only saw one rider pass me on that last loop, so either everyone else felt just as bad, or I was behind everyone already. In the bottom of a creek bed, my bike decided to run out of gas. Doh! I have no idea how far I can go on reserve, so once I switched the petcock and got going again, I rode even more conservatively for the last few miles. Apparently I had enough karma to survive, because I made it to the finish with no problems.
Back at the truck, I saw Terry and Terry. They informed me that Terry (the one I rode with) had hurt his knee badly enough that he didn't want to continue the race, but not badly enough to need serious medical attention. Having passed that information on, they headed back to Las Vegas while I set about changing clothes, getting something to eat and drink, and making graven idols to pray to in thanks for surviving my first National Enduro. I'll be back next year, with reading glasses.
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