Park Hills, Missouri

During the time in my life when racing dirt bikes ranked closely in importance to eating, breathing and making money to pay for it all, I tracked my motorcycle's every movement in a Microsoft Excel file. Each race or practice or play ride equaled a row in the spreadsheet, dated and described with locations, miles ridden and hours of seat time. St. Joe State Park easily found itself the most common entry. Only 60 miles from my apartment home, the park was my playground, my off-season training compound, and one of my favorite venues for racing.

Here I was again, within the friendly confines of several thousand public acres, ready to test my skills against the best rock riders in the lower Midwest. This year's Leadbelt Enduro would attract all the regulars competing in the Blackjack Enduro Circuit ("BJEC"), a well-organized club which promoted enduros in a handful of states, Missouri being the northernmost. To earn a spot on the BJEC schedule, the local sponsoring club had to have a serious land base and an active, enthusiastic membership. The Missouri Mudders were that kind of club, and St. Joe State Park was the right land base.

My third trip to the Leadbelt had me better prepared, mentally at least, for the beating to come. Previous attempts might be compared to a jackhammer attached to my hindquarters and let run for four or five hours straight. This rocky terrain was an exercise in suspension tuning compromises, not that I put much effort into it. I only knew my plush, massively heavy 50mm diameter forks kept the front end firmly planted, and the linkage-free PDS rear shock had me riding like a cowboy on Bodacious, the World's Most Dangerous Bull, for far longer than 8 seconds.

With this in mind, I took advantage of the off-road world's embrace of internet technology and signed up for the enduro in advance. At the early morning check-in, I learned the Missouri Mudders had honored my request for a row number north of 10. Today would be lucky #13. The theory behind a row in this range was based on math and probabilities. With five entries per row, four dozen or so riders would have already passed through the course before my tires touched the soil. Odds of those kind of numbers were thin, since riders tend to avoid the first several rows out of preference for sighting a well defined trail and avoiding the role of brush-clearer for the rest of the field. The first five rows would mostly be assigned to a handful of last-minute entrants, and many of those available spots might be empty. A more reasonable number of riders in the first 10 rows would be 25-30, a perfect amount of trail traffic to remove the brush and face-slapping tree branches, while preserving the integrity of the trails.

That was the theory.

It played out far better than my first Leadbelt experience, when I arrived late and hadn't registered in advance. A row in the mid-50s turned out well for reading the trail but was too heavy with the jackhammer effect. Today, the Missouri Mudders presented us with an 80-mile course and no early cutoff for the B classes. All the B's competed together in a combined class on the "long" course, same as the A riders. I liked my early row and pitied the poor souls navigating trails broken in by 250 other riders.

Aside from an early morning drive to Park Hills, I felt relaxed and prepared when row 13 departed from the starting line. The first 5 miles, geared towards the youth class, paced us at a leisurely 15 mph speed average. In the public area of St. Joe State Park, I knew these trails, the wide ones preferred by ATVs. Motorcycles made good time here, despite the rocky and hard-packed terrain. The casual pace should have made for an on-time arrival at the first checkpoint, for a normal person, yes. For me and my low-tech roll chart and clocks, not quite. I underestimated my speed, didn't look closely enough at my roll chart, and dropped one point at the first check. So much for timekeeping by feel.

A couple of expletives later, the trail poked out into the far reaches of the sand flats. I followed several riders past the arrows pointing us into the center of this desert-like section of what was once a large, manmade lake. Previous lead mining activities, in what is now the public riding area, required generous quantities of water, which were eventually dispersed after deactivating an earthen dam. The former lake, now a vast acreage of sand, is a great place to pretend you're in Arizona. It's also a good place to get lost during an enduro.

A quarter-mile later, with no sign of an arrow, we all realized our mistake and backtracked. This was an 18-mph transfer section through treeless sand, with only a few easy turns and deep whoops to navigate. I caught up quickly and found myself back on time when we entered the woods.

The speed average increased to 24 mph just ahead of the gas stop at the 16.3 mile marker. Even in the fast trails of the public riding area, I couldn't maintain this pace and arrived at the next checkpoint two minutes late. The route sheet mileage reset allowed a few extra minutes to pause, which is always a good time to step off the bike, stretch my legs and obsess over my pre-race maintenance routine. These moments provide ample time to scour the motorcycle with my eyes and worry about some minor detail overlooked on Saturday and too late to fix at a reset with only the basic tools in my fanny pack. Did I leave the chain too loose or snug up the seat bolts tightly enough or check the spokes for tightness or leave the water running at my apartment? All were valid questions, none of which could be resolved in the middle of a former Missouri lead mine.

With a splash of fuel in the gas tank, I set out into the woods for another brisk 24 mph run through the public area of St. Joe State Park. Full speed ahead, I had no worries of rounding a blind curve or climbing a hill and finding a head-on collision a few feet away, for the park was closed to anyone unwilling to race. This was a sprint through a complex network of trails developed over many years by pleasure riders, linked today by hundreds of brightly colored arrows. On a normal play day, random selection took me along whatever path suited my taste, but today I was on a mission: Avoid the big rocks, control the bike across the small ones, and keep those arrows in sight.

Half of the first loop wandered its way through these well-traveled trails before we diverged into the other side of the park. The Missouri Mudders had been allowed to open a section of fence into the vast unknown of the forbidden trails. During a past play ride, I stumbled across these trails by way of a secret exposed gap in the barriers which marked the edge of the public area. Before I realized I'd left the confines of the public area, I thought I'd found something wonderfully undiscovered, but I'd only crossed over into the trails on which we would spend the next 20 miles of the Leadbelt Enduro.

Glorious singletrack, and plenty of it.

These mature woods, with moderate hills and trees large enough to snuff out most of the undergrowth, put me in a zone where I could tolerate the rocks, and to a point, even get along with them. This happens where the ATVs don't go. The singletrack left behind by motorcycles tends to move the earth less. Hand over a trail to a four-wheeler and the path will widen and expose every rock and root. The little I saw of ATV trails only served to connect the web of singletrack, some of it so unbroken with twists and turns that I found myself in 4th and 5th gears. Downshifting would usually come quickly, as trail bosses aren't especially keen on laying out that kind of risk to riders. As much as I was capable of ruining myself at these speeds, I could only imagine the damage an A rider could do to himself, traveling 50 mph or more, inches from a blur of trees.

The warp factor singletrack came and went quickly. Most of the forbidden trails, moist with just the right grip, twisted through the woods with a third gear flow. Trees of all shapes and sizes whizzed past as the trail altered direction continuously. The occasional softball-sized rock added a little excitement now and then, while the steering damper showed me love each time I drifted a little too close to a tree and felt the smack of the hand guard. I'd wheelie over a shallow gully, then find a perfect 6-inch berm around a tight 90-degree turn, dump the clutch and give'er hell to the next corner. Over and over, this trail perfection, the mother of all enduro hopes and dreams, repeated itself like the endless TikToc videos which would grace our world two decades later. No description does proper justice to the experience. It can be felt only by purchasing a dirt bike and entering a race like the one I was enjoying today.

The course eventually wound its way back to the staging area, where I refueled, cleaned my goggles and ate a granola bar. I'd dropped 15 points in the first loop and, with a mileage reset, was allowed 15 minutes to regroup and begin the second loop. Those minutes passed quickly. One would expect a quarter-hour should be plenty of time for a handful of minor tasks and some rest, but I relaxed a bit too much and found myself at the beginning of the second loop with only two minutes to spare. I glanced at my roll chart, then my mechanical odometer, and realized I hadn't reset my mileage to zero. The second loop would be identical to the first, so the club decided we might as well begin our mileage count the same as three hours earlier. I spent most of my spare two minutes frantically spinning my odometer knob backwards until my hand cramped up.

With a numb thumb and forefinger, I began the final 40 miles of the Leadbelt Enduro, an exact repeat of the first 40. But this time the speed averages differed and the checkpoint just shy of 5 miles in had disappeared. This second loop was a test for the fastest and best conditioned.

For certain, the state of the course wouldn't add much extra challenge. These pristine trails, now fully broken in, offered primo traction. No riders would battle through the sunny, mild weather and the best lines exposed themselves without a hint of modestly. The real racing began when the speed average increased to 24 mph. From the gas stop at 16.3 miles, even the quickest riders would push at full-on race pace, chasing that elusive 24 mph. These Missouri woods, as mature and unencumbered as they might be, were more than a match for anyone on two wheels.

Uneventful is a poor word to describe any dirt bike race, but it's adequate for the two hours my KTM 300EXC pulled like a tractor while I sliced through the trees. My mind, body and bike came together, flawlessly, for the singular purpose of riding out the Leadbelt to its 80-mile end, without incident. The rocks, sand, hills and trees passed...uneventfully.

Near the end, I approached my physical limit just ahead of the final checkpoint. Four score and zero miles before, I'd entered the longest-distance race of my life. More than five hours later, I could say I competed to the best of my abilities. The timekeeping mistake at the first checkpoint cost me one position in my class result, but I felt satisfied with a final score of 40. This was the Leadbelt Enduro, old-school to its core, with no easy transfer sections or room for complainers. I dreamed well on Sunday night of another race, someday, just like this one.