Weekends between races are usually filled with play time on some form of two-wheeled recreation. More often than not, I drive to St. Joe State Park, where for an affordable $3 I can spend a day playing and practicing on my KTM 300EXC. Once in a while, though, my play time blows up and makes me wish I hadn't had so much fun. The weekend before the Fosterburg hare scramble, I fell hard while riding at St. Joe. The crash left me struggling for air as I lay in the middle of loose rock. Riding buddy Matt Sellers had accompanied me that day, helping me rise up and swing a leg over the bike with bruised ribs.
In my condition, I almost chose to stay home the following weekend, but instead drove to Fosterburg with Matt and expected to treat the day as another play ride. That was the plan, until the green flag dropped. Suddenly I didn't feel much like play riding, when everyone else was racing.
The Splinter Creek club grounds, like everywhere else in the Midwest, were dry and dusty. With only 80 acres to work with, trails at venues like this never really get a chance to sit idle and acclimate back into a normal woods environment. Splinter Creek makes use of almost every square foot of the property, leaving the course packed down like clay at a brick factory. If a rain shower should happen to float over this type of terrain in its present condition, the result would be wet clay, slippery as ice. Of course, Matt was on hand for this race, which involved me and the State of Illinois. How could it possibly rain today?
Like the previous hare scramble here in May, riders were spaced apart in rows at the motocross track, anticipating the flagman's every motion. My thoughts were focused only on kick starting the engine with minimal impact to my sore ribs. Years later, when most dirt bikes came equipped with electric start, I wouldn't have given this a second thought. But my 300EXC was a kick starting brute, and I'd had my share of issues making the engine fire on the starting line.
Finally the Open B green flag dropped and my engine started on the first kick. Matt jumped out to the holeshot while I rode cautiously. For a time, the adrenaline of the start kept me racing with the others. But after 10 minutes, Matt and the only other rider in our class were out of sight.
Riding alone in the woods gave me time to loosen up my ribs, but I was unable to ride aggressively. The Splinter Creek club grounds were full of hills and ravines and gullies, all part of the region's terrain transition to the Mississippi River, ten miles west. On a normal day at Splinter Creek, I'd be wearing a smile as wide as the river. Today was not that day. I couldn't slice through the narrowly spaced trees or hammer through intricately woven roots or even finesse my way through off-camber trails. All of it hurt.
What's more, Matt and his annoying algorithm showed up to prove, once again, what happens when he races in Illinois with me. During the last half hour of the race, for the first time in months the skies opened and dumped out rain. If only the clouds had shut off at ¼ inch of precipitation, the trails would have been perfect. Instead, the rain continued to the end. For many, the final lap turned into survival, but I was actually riding just fine. Then I found a short, slippery uphill that changed my demeanor. This was where the packed clay turned to ice. It only felt like ice, of course, but I had to hop off the bike and push the rest of the way to the top, just like those early season, frozen ground races.
The rain came down lightly and over time, rendered my goggles useless. Now was the moment to play risk-reward games and ask myself questions like "How important is vision, really?" and "Can my eyeball be fixed if a tree branch pokes all the way through it?" My comprehensive analysis came back with a conclusion that the googles had to go, and fast.
Two minutes later, local fast guy Lee Lankutis squeezed around, lapping me for about the 4th time, when a burst of mud shot off his back tire and straight into my eye. My mouth may have spewed a set of colorful metaphors directed at Lee, but he is a good guy and of course had no idea he'd done any harm. As with most racing, the incident was forgotten after the mud cleared from my eye. I just wanted this thing to end.
A damp checkered flag flew then next time I reached the main checkpoint, ending my race with relief. My ribs had survived. Back at the staging area, Matt was already packing up in the rain, attempting to change clothes inside the confines of my little red single cab pickup truck. But for its 7-foot bed, the compact truck was never intended to transport two full-size motorcycles, two grown men and 400 pounds of gear to rainy dirt bike races. With help from creative contortions, we donned our street clothes and called it an Algorithm Day...again.
