Wow.
Twenty races in one season. It was driven, quite simply, by a pure joy for racing. I had tasted a bit of success and put in a great deal of time and effort off the bike to be better on it. Too cheap to join a gym, I bought a handful of free weights and used various pieces of furniture to tone my riding muscles a bit, all within the confines of my one-bedroom apartment. I began paying attention to what I ate, with a few exceptions (Pop Tarts, mainly). My Trek 850 mountain bike had taken me on many adventures around the St. Louis area, both on and off the road, adding some stamina to my legs. In the final year of my 20s, I was in the best physical condition of my life.
Also keeping me in the racing scene was KTM. The 300EXC held up well throughout the year with no major broken parts. Unlike last year, when I'd spent over $1,000 replacing components, the only bike expenses this season were mostly maintenance related. The bike just kept running, no matter how badly it was treated.
My body also stayed together with no broken parts, although I had some close calls and always endured some sort of minor ache or pain. Just when one bump or bruise or sore spot healed, another was waiting to take its place. My riding was improving and I could see incremental results, but make no mistake, I was in no danger of breaking into the A class. Slightly above average was good enough for me, considering I was, athletically speaking, barely average. I was also average at best, from a pure skill perspective, in piloting dirt bikes through the woods. On the other hand, I did have a key asset which served me well in racing: A tremendous stubborn streak. I was determined to survive whatever the woods threw at me. As I would learn in the years to come, this was a very good asset for racing. It was also a characteristic of those who enjoy flogging themselves on dirt bikes, beyond any measure of reason or common sense.
All of these things kept me in the racing spirit as I returned to White City for a third time in 2000. I'd come here two weeks earlier for the annual enduro, that messy affair which left me with two consecutive Big Red DNF's. With no significant rains since, the course had dried out fantastically. These were the trail conditions of my dreams. Soft, smooth and loamy dirt, just waiting for dirt bikes to blend it into perfection. I couldn't wait to get my tires on it.
The Cahokia Creek Dirt Riders (CCDR) club had laid out a virtually identical loop as the first and last timed sections of the enduro. The only difference would be the speeds. The knobby tires of 150 dirt bikes would grip every corner and hill like a bottle of Elmer's, and not the white stuff kids use in school. This traction was like the yellowish glue used by carpenters for joining wood. Extreme grip, those trails.
On the starting line, I surprised myself with a reasonably decent start. The big 300EXC was the largest-displacement dirt bike I'd owned, yet the engine fired up relatively easily. But the procedure took some time to master. I needed to warm up the engine for several minutes, and when the flag person gave the signal for silence, add a blip of wide-open throttle as I pushed the kill button. This was a poor man's way of "priming" the combustion chamber, in hopes of a quick start when I threw my leg down on the kick start lever. At the same time, I kept the transmission in 2nd gear, holding in the clutch the whole time. My hope was the clutch plates wouldn't induce any drag as I fired up the engine. I preferred to believe these things were responsible for my good start, but in reality, it was probably just good timing.
The mayhem of the dead-engine start lasted only a short time. The usual jockeying for positions wasn't as intense, since I'd jumped out in front of most of the other riders on my B-class row. This was a good feeling. Confidence inspiring. I often heard the wise old sages of off-road racing say the key to success is to ride your own race. In the early stages of a hare scramble, this is a hard thing, especially if you're part of a group packed tightly together, each person searching for the near-impossible: Pass the guy in front of you while riding through rough terrain on trails wide enough for one normal-sized motorcycle. The most common way around the rider in front is to find a shortcut. For example, if the lead rider follows an established line to the outside of a tree, cut your own trail to the inside of the tree and make the pass.
Easy as cake.
That is, if you can actually find that inside line amidst the chaos. Or if you can shake off the nervousness from the pack of riders behind you, all looking for the same line and pushing you to make a mistake. Do you take a risk and hop over the log everyone else is avoiding? Do you climb the trail less traveled, in hopes it will take you to the top of the hill before the other guy makes it there? These are the decisions all must make, within nanoseconds. It is mayhem.
Fortunately this was a rare hare scramble where the bedlam and disarray were mostly behind me. I could ride my own race from the start. And ride I did. I slammed my KTM into the hill climbs, tractored along the sidehills, wheelied across the creeks and jumped a few gullies. If nirvana could be defined, Cahokia Creek on a dirt bike was it.
At 40-minutes apiece, my lap times gave me 3 turns around the track. Had I shaved a minute or two from those laps, I might have made a fourth lap before the two hour time limit expired. The course was so much fun, I was actually disappointed to miss out on another lap. Afterwards I discovered the only other person who entered the Open B class had broken his chain mid-race. It was like winning a race nobody else entered, where the first place trophy is awarded with a big asterisk attached. I didn't care, though. I could have finished dead last and would have considered this day a win.
Thank you, CCDR.
