Cuba, Illinois

The first round of a motorcycle racing season brings a special energy, borne of a long winter healing bodies and rehabilitating old bikes and setting up new ones. It's a release from cabin fever on a single Sunday in the early spring, where an army of likeminded dirt bikers gather to compare off-seasons. Whose gym membership will pay off most? Will the new bike perform better than the old one? Did six more weeks of winter really happen?

I was drawn into that energy on a cold Sunday in March, anxious to try out my new KTM 300EXC under race conditions. I had joined an exclusive club with this bike, my first KTM, bought after many years of admiration. Magazines raved about the 300EXC. The internet was madly in love. Dealerships sold out early. This was the bike I had aspired to, purchased in December and broken in over the winter. I was smitten. This was an amazing machine and I simply couldn't wait to show the world how much better I would be with Austrian engineering between my legs. After all, Shane Watts was winning everything on KTMs, and now I was ready to take it up a level and dominate.

Then came Cuba.

I had convinced my new riding buddy Matt Sellers to travel with me, enticing him with a free ride to the race site. A fellow 300EXC owner and St. Louis resident, Matt took the bait and rode shotgun, deep into the land of AMA District 17. We had met earlier in the year at St. Joe State Park in southeastern Missouri, he on an older white version of the 300EXC me on the later-model orange. At this point in our relationship, Matt hadn't realized the folly of trusting an Illinois native who declares of a District 17 race in March: "It shouldn't be that bad."

As we drove north, Matt began to get it. Our dirt bike relationship was still in the stage where politeness overruled free expression, but his body language could not lie. Matt wasn't happy about the snow. The countryside was dusted with a loose white powder, gradually melting as the morning drew on. We arrived at the race site in the middle of a cornfield, not a tree within a quarter mile, 40 degrees with a stiff wind and nowhere to catch cover except the inside of a single cab GMC Sonoma pickup truck. This was a vehicle made for me, a skinny, single guy with no responsibilities to anyone but himself. Matt was three inches taller, 50 pounds more robust, and used to toting two small children in much larger vehicles. He would not trust my judgement about Illinois races ever again.

To kill time more than anything else, Matt and I scouted the starting area and strolled a short way down the trail, then shivered back to the truck. To put it mildly, traction would be at a premium. Wherever the sun hadn't shone directly, the soil was frozen. The hosting club had faced the starting line toward a wall of a hill, 100 yards distant. Matt and I stared in disbelief. "That will be a bottleneck," he stated plainly, "in the first 10 seconds of the race." Truer words have been spoken approximately twice in the history of mankind.

To my dismay, racers began lining up across a handful of starting rows. In my fantasy, everyone packed up and left by now, but alas, that first race energy trumped all the terrible things in store for us. These people were ready to race. Some were even practicing the wall-like hill directly in front of us. Unbelievable, those nut cases. And as a final insult to anyone riding with normal tires, the promoters included a studded tire class. I shall refer to this as the cheater class, for that's how the sole rider in the class appeared as he lapped me approximately 8 times.

Each row was disbursed by the sound of a shotgun blast, dead engines springing to life, chunks of mud shooting high into the air. All bikes aimed directly for the wall-hill, some climbing with better success than others. When my turn came, reality called, and it told me I needed help. The wall-hill stopped me. As the bike lay on its side, I glanced down at a tear in my beautiful new seat cover. I dragged the bike down the hill and tried again, this time successfully.

On this day I might have blamed my troubles on bad tire selection or frozen ground or lack of physical conditioning. But I'd talked myself out of a good finish before the race even began. The first lap was spent tiptoeing through narrow trails, sliding randomly in all directions, pushing, pulling, dragging, tugging, kicking, cursing and generally begging my 300EXC for forward momentum over the smallest of hills. I entered survival mode.

By lap 2, knobby tires had cleared the snot off the trails, some left with exposed frozen ground. I'd spent some of my youth riding my little blue motorcycle in snowy barn lots, but this frozen ground was a whole other kind of riding. Some hills were barely passable and became downright impossible near the end of the race, which had been reduced by 30 minutes from the usual two full hours. As it were, this was still about an hour too long. I was certain I'd spent more time pushing the bike than riding it.

On the final lap, I was exhausted and just didn't have the energy to push the bike up one of the last hills. I had just witnessed Lee Lankutis struggle up the worst hill, he the man who had dethroned local legend Dave Edsall as overall hare scrambles champ and spent most of the 1990s dominating District 17. If Lee could barely climb this hill, how was a mere mortal like myself supposed to make it to the top? I was defeated, stuck at the bottom of a ravine, searching for any way out which did not involve that awful hill. My alternate exit plan was a 15 minute struggle up yet another, slightly less daunting hill. I will admit, this way out was well off the course and flat-out cheating. But it was either that or endure the feeling of breathing the last air of my life, so I blamed it on the sadistic promoters who should have cancelled the darned race to begin with.

While I pushed and dragged the bike up the final hill, the engine seemed to be overheating, which tends to happen when one's average speed is next to nothing. I finished my lap, celebrated the sight of the checkered flag, and then collapsed at the truck. Matt was already packing his gear and ready to go home. He was quiet for awhile, then opened up after the miles passed and we both agreed we'd never go back to Cuba.

Ever.