Knob Noster, Missouri

In some ways the development of an aspiring hare scrambler is similar to that of a long distance runner. The first marathon is an exercise in discovering how one's mind and body responds to the physical toll of those punishing miles. With more races, experience is gained and lessons are learned. This takes time, though. Ever see a world class marathon champion under the legal age of alcohol consumption? Like a budding hare scrambler, experience matters, and I was about to discover this at the Knob Noster round of the Missouri Hare Scrambles Championship.

The new-to-me venue with a funny name lie just near enough the Whiteman Air Force Base to spot an occasional B-2 stealth bomber overhead, but that was only part of this day's surprise. Where rocks should have littered every square inch of trail, mud lay in its place. Here I walked, scouting trails squarely in the lower half of Missouri, without a stone in sight. Rain had dampened the area earlier in the week, and dare I say the race course gave the appearance of a Central Illinois hare scramble. Did I drive the wrong direction from St. Louis?

Of course I did not, and this was indeed the same part of Missouri which had broken me so many times. Maybe I'd meet the same fate as my many previous races in this difficult state, but at least I'd be ejected onto softer dirt. If I were to crash during the mad dash to the first turn, not only would the mud cushion my fall, but I'd likely slide my way into the woods. Already the club had prepared for those unfortunate souls without four-wheel-drive, with a John Deere tractor on standby to drag vehicles in and out of the staging area. The starting line would soon deteriorate into a quagmire of grass and muck sticky enough to make a Kansas pioneer drool. This wasn't just mud, it was building material.

My KTM 300EXC had been repaired after its ear-splitting incident at Tebbetts two Sunday's prior. After rummaging through a few boxes of useless parts, I'd located the original muffler which I affectionately named "The Torpedo". Never had such a monstrous appendage graced a dirt bike, or attracted so much attention from trail impediments. This thing had to go, I declared shortly after purchasing the motorcycle. With an oversized debit to my credit card, a shiny new FMF Turbine Core silencer became yet another aftermarket add-on, and the stock muffler was tossed aside. Then came Tebbetts, and suddenly The Torpedo came out of retirement. Between then and now, a host of crashes had slightly repositioned the subframe mounting holes, but a bit of sledgehammer persuasion convinced the muffler bolts to align properly. A half-dozen blows later, the frame welds cracked just enough for the bolts to mate with the mounting hole threads. Problem solved, and I apologize to the nice man who would purchase this motorcycle a two years later.

The Open B class attracted a full cadre of racers, due in part to Knob Noster's proximity to Kansas. The Forward Motion series, representing Eastern Kansas off-roaders, often used this site as hare scramble venue, and some of their riders paid a visit to battle the MHSC regulars. Their familiarity with the course far exceeded mine, starting with proper tire selection. My trusty Michelin S12 rear, a staple for Illinois races, hung safely on my garage wall, in favor of a well-used Bridgestone rock tire. I mean, who would have thought? The practice lap was mud and bottlenecks, leaving me thoroughly perplexed. The first of several traffic snarls came when MHSC Women's class leader Amanda Lappe found a tough line up a creek bank about a mile into the course. While she struggled, I stepped off my bike to clear out alternate lines. Kurt "PizzaMan" Mirtsching suddenly appeared, pointing out a perfectly fine line which required no clearing. Several riders quickly made that path the easiest route around the bottleneck, while I marveled at Kurt's perpetual helpfulness. I felt that in the proper circumstance, I could nicely ask him to move over during a race, and he might just consider it for a moment before roosting me with his big KTM. If ever a man existed who exemplified the spirit of the MHSC, I was surely racing with him in the Open B class.

Later in the practice lap, I could have used the help of PizzaMan, or any other rider for that matter, navigating a wide creek crossing. I followed several motorcycles down into the creek, where a trio of riders turned upstream and charged through the center of the channel. I chased behind the lead rider, his green Kawasaki slowly disappearing under the fast flowing water. He soon lost balance, awkwardly stuck out his boot into nothingness and fell over. Like the stern of the Titanic, a lone handlebar-end was visible above the rush of the creek. I hopped off my bike, walked it to a sandbar, and noticed the arrows we should have been following. A quick U-took me downstream through the creek, near the unfortunate Kawasaki rider who now stood helplessly in the center of a thigh-high, fast-flowing stream. With a word or two of condolence, I returned to the arrows and quickly exited the creek.

Back at the truck, the noon hour passed as I poured half a gallon of water from each boot. I grabbed a roll of duct tape, having recalled a long ago vision of a rider wrapping strand after strand of the magical product around the tops of his boots. This was waterproofing for the economically challenged, and I happened to own a lot of duct tape. I also happened to be a dupe for ineffective solutions to greater problems, of which 3 yards of duct tape could not possibly solve.

With a knowing nod to a pair of riders whose boots were taped to their pants, I found my position on the Open B starting line. The grass of this open field had been cut for baling just before our arrival and was windrowed into straight lines across a quarter-mile square. By the end of the race the hay would appear about as fresh as a cattle feedlot in April, but at midday the scene was green and idyllic, hot and humid. Sunshine baked my toes inside the black boots, and I wished for those cool, refreshing half-gallons of water.

A two-kick start put me far back in a 19-rider pack, where chaos ensued. Riders in their most aggressive states of racing aligned wheel-to-wheel, swapping positions within the narrow trails of this bike-only course. Like a drywall texture gun, the tire of the bike ahead of me sprayed mud against my goggles, and I carefully chose an opportunity to clear the lens. Like a pull-strong Woody from the Toy Story movies, the roll-off dispenser could advance a goggle-wide strip of clear tape and restore a certain level of vision, but this maneuver required one less hand attached to the handlebars. In the midst of a freight train of racers, steering my KTM with a solo arm added a bit of chance to an otherwise risky sport, but I managed to grab the string and pull it twice, all within about one second. If the pull string could have made my goggles speak, they might have reminded me that in this single second I had made about 25 decisions, all designed to keep my wheels upright and my motorcycle pointed in the right direction.

The precise target for which I aimed was directly ahead, in the form of a dozen or so racers slicing through trails about as wide as a dirt bike. Without the usual hundred or so ATV riders blasting a 60-inch path through the woods, advancing through the pack took some cautious passing. When that failed, I upped the aggression a notch or two and picked off riders one by one. My patience had worn thin, even though I knew for certain a hare scramble was rarely won on the first lap. As riders thinned out across the course, I reminded myself that a race could surely be lost on the first lap, should one of those 25-a-second decisions turn out poorly.

Ahead of me was PizzaMan, now visible through a maze of trees and about to test his decision making skills in series of ruts. His choice put him sliding sideways, boots dabbing desperately while the bike fell to the ground. I skated by and found myself in a top-5 position. With more space between riders, the second half of the lap put me into an Illinois-like zone, where the trees whizzed by in a blur, the rear wheel did most of the steering, and I focused only on the narrow patch of sticky mud in front of me.

I managed to slip into 4th place at the end of the lap, gaining nearly a dozen places through my blitz around the course. The effort of all those passes put me far behind the leaders, who pushed ahead without the burden of navigating through traffic. David Taylor and Tracy Bauman had already distanced themselves from the rest of the Open B class, leaving me and Marty Smith fighting for third place. We battled inside the narrowly spaced trees, through trails which at times had to be cut with machetes or brush mowers to be ridable. I swapped places with Marty several times as we attempted new lines or out-braked each other at corners, desperately searching for that edge which would stick. If only I could leave him in a storm of mud, maybe I'd have a shot at catching the class leaders. But Marty's riding style was steady and free of mistakes. My only hope was an outright pass for 3rd place and enough speed to hold him off to the finish.

Sadly though, at this point in the race the checkered flag might as well have been a lightyear away. I'd found myself deep in an ever-changing battle with Marty, and I wasn't even sure he was in my class. He had raced only four of the previous nine MHSC events, and thus far during the season we hadn't socialized. In this genre of racing, there were no identifying characteristics of an Open B racer, other than the memory of riders on the starting line. My recollection was faint, but I had a hunch Marty was a guy I needed to pass.

Thirty minutes per lap would seem an adequate period in which to make a pass stick, but the muddy course threw a wrench in that theory. Bottlenecks would form around tricky obstacles, made even more challenging as the trails changed. Mud tends to alter a course much more frequently and significantly, leading to even more decisions packed into those one-second intervals. In the first half of the race, the club quickly rerouted trails around deteriorating conditions, but on the third lap I found myself among the problem areas. A stranded rider on a slippery hill had me attempting an alternate route twice, while another downed rider decided to pick up his bike at the same instant I passed, sending us both into the mud.

Through all of this, Marty remained within striking distance. On the 4th and final lap, I passed Marty once again and dug in for a last final push to the end. A mile before the checkered flag, Marty slipped by, determined to hold his position. We had entered one the MHSC staples of a race course, a run through the center of a creek. This one was small and narrow and offered few opportunities to pass. Every so often the trail would take us up and out of the creek for a short distance, then back down in, over and over. Near the end of this run, an alternate line had developed where the trail dropped down into the creek. The original line came first, while the alternate route entered the creek several yards ahead. I decided this was my last and only hope of passing Marty, so I took the original line, upshifted to 2nd gear and twisted the throttle wide open through two feet of water. The splash was a waterfall-like soaking of every inch of my bike and body, but I edged ahead of Marty and held my position to the scoring trailer. I earned 3rd place by four seconds.

With that, I emptied another half-gallon of muddy water from each of my boots. I felt an intense sadness upon realizing the duct tape had failed me. But then I admired my hard-fought trophy and the heartbreak subsided. Knob Noster helped solidify 3rd place in points for the Open B series, after 10 rounds of racing and 5 more to go. Much work remained, but I liked my chances at a podium for the season. And I really liked the Missouri Hare Scrambles Championship.