White City, Illinois

Ten days before the Big Red Enduro near White City, torrential rains dumped 6 inches of rain on the race course. This should have been ample warning to consider a different event. As messy as the Cahokia Creek Dirt Riders (CCDR) property could be after any rain, I might have known the outlying sections of the enduro would be no better.

That said, the CCDR never cancels a race unless the creeks cannot be crossed. With floodwaters receded, the waterways were crossable and the enduro was on. I would later find the waterways were crossable mostly in a theoretical sense.

Very theoretical.

My racing mind convinced me to drive up to the CCDR club grounds and test my KTM 300EXC yet again in the Illinois mud. Bill Steele, my recent acquaintance from Illinois, had also convinced himself to attend, making the long drive from Bourbonnais. Bill was racing for AMA District 17 points, like most of today's competitors. The Big Red enduro had a reputation for being the kind of old-school event which brings about our racing fathers' nostalgia. You know, back when enduros were 300 miles long and men (that is, real men) finished them on converted Harley choppers. The legend of the Big Red was known well enough that most avoided the race unless series points were at stake, in which case those riders prepared as if they'd been checked into a 13th century English prison under the name William Wallace.

No points were on the line for me, so row 25 seemed a good choice, given last year's Big Red experience wandering through the woods searching for arrows around every other corner. On the other hand, one would think the memories of Marietta in 1999 would still be fresh, but I knew not what this enduro had in store for me.

The course began with an 8 mile timed section on the CCDR club grounds. The trails were familiar from past events, and with a light turnout for the race, the slippery soil was less rutted than what I would have encountered at a typical hare scramble. Normally when Illinois mud is given a week to dry out, trail conditions can be quite nice. But six inches of rain, along with clouds and a few more smaller showers leading up to the race, was simply too much to overcome. Even so, these first 8 miles would be the easiest of the day, and I had no idea...yet.

This was not to say the club property was easy riding. Quite the contrary. Every trip up a hill, big or small, I paddled my feet like a goose launching itself off a lake. In the low, flat areas, sharp changes in direction happened only if a berm was there to guide my tires. On the north side of Illinois Highway 138, I came upon Bill Steele at the bottom of a steep hill, already finished, three miles from the start. Clutch problems ended his day, but somehow he would place mid-pack in his class. This was yet another foreshadowing event of which I was probably better off being unaware. Otherwise, I might have quit right there and joined Bill for a beer or three back at the staging area.

Instead, I slogged through the club grounds, dropped a moderate number of points at the timing check and followed the arrows through country roads. Eventually the arrows pointed to a narrow band of woods next to a creek. Here were the trails ridden only once a year for the Big Red. One would think this might be a good thing, the woods having been spared from the ravages of previous mud riding throughout the racing season. This could have been true, had the club not routed the course back and forth across the small creek, over and over again. In such soggy conditions, the first 10 or so riders had a relatively clean approach to the crossings. They only had to give their bikes a bit of throttle and climb straight out of the 30-inch bank on the opposite side. The next 10 riders found one or two ruts to choose from, ever-deepening as more bikes passed through. Occasionally some of them became stuck in a rut or searched for a way around another motorcycle stuck in a rut.

By the time a third wave of another 10 riders came upon a given creek, the crossings were a mass of ruts on the opposite side of the creek. One might be passable without much effort. The rut next to it could be a 15-minute exercise in motorcycle extraction. Who could tell? The middle rut, closest to where the trail was originally routed, was usually bad news by the time I arrived. Even the short drops into the small creek were a crap shoot. Under the murky water might lie a hole large enough to swallow my front tire and send me over the handlebars. This went on, again and again. I saw one guy simply stop crossing the creek and make his own trail on one side, under the assumption the marked trail would reappear around the next corner. He was a smart one. I kept following the trail, with a creek crossing success rate of about 50%. At least five times through this section, I dug my rear tire out of a bottomless muck, standing knee high in black water, gloves dripping, boots waterlogged and goggles removed.

Near the end of the section, I began parking my motorcycle ahead of the crossings and scouting them on foot. It was a slow process, but not as much as pulling a 240-pound motorcycle (or 260, fully mud-laden) out of a creek. I was now dangerously close to falling 60 minutes behind and houring out.

The transfer section to the next woods should have been an opportunity to make up some time, but a good deal of it was through harvested cornfields. Normally the residue left over from stalks and leaves makes for easy riding, but the fields were so saturated, I had to keep the throttle pinned in third gear to maintain momentum. The dozens of minutes I hoped to make up were but a few when I arrived at the third timed section.

This one would be my last. The trail foliage was thick enough to obscure many obstacles which seemed to appear around blind corners with little warning. A log here, a gully there, all slippery and requiring a certain level of momentum. I simply couldn't ride fast enough to force the KTM through these hurdles. Time and again, I was off the bike, lifting and dragging and pushing. Finally, thirty miles into the race, out of 80 in total, I fell an hour behind schedule and was sent back to the staging area. The club members pulled my scorecard at the same point I'd quit last year after breaking my ribs. Once again, I rode directly through downtown Mount Olive, covered head to toe in black, and parked my KTM at the staging area. The bike was almost unrecognizable, its orange plastic painted in mud. By this time I'd added about 30 pounds to the motorcycle and loathed the thought of forcing it into the back of my pickup truck.

I learned later in the week only about 10 riders finished the course, out of 70 or so who entered the enduro. Those guys earned my respect. They are the next generation of men who will tell their children about real enduros .