Hayward

One of the things I love the most about racing is the stories that propagate from all of your race buddies afterwards. These stories usually start once you get back to the pits, continue through the awards ceremony, and continue all the way through a five hour drive home. It is amazing how a five hour drive can be filled with stories about a race that was only five hours longs, maybe it’s because we re-hash the same story every hour or so. To my luck, the Hayward Enduro was no different, wait, maybe a little, the stories actually started before the race, I forgot to mention that we had our mentor, Duane Eller, along for this excursion. For those of you who do not know Duey, he is a true icon to the sport of offroad dirtbike racing in the midwest. He is the one who taught me everything I needed to know about time keeping, including how to abruptly throw yourself and your bike into the bushes when you drive up to check five minutes hot. It is amazing how at 60 years old, (I think it is 60, ok we will call it 59) that I find myself considering it to be a good day when I can stay ahead of Duey.

Ok, back to the story telling. It seems that everyone has one (or maybe two) stories that they seem to focus on after the race. It is usually the one event that probably had the biggest impact on their day. Let’s start with my story for the day since it is probably the lamest. It had to do with how I pooped out in the long 12 mile section, couldn’t even make time on Speedy, even though he did not have any front brakes, and it took me 20 minutes to recover at the next reset. Like I said, pretty lame, I know. Don’t worry they get better.

We also had the novelty of having a couple of newbies along for the ride, always good for the generation of a story of two. The first was John Buechner, while not a newbie at riding off road, he is a newbie at the whole enduro thing. His story started at the very last reset when he came rolling down the hill with a bike that was running at the 50db level, ok the 50db’s was Tom Kingsland huffing behind the bike while he was pushing John on his bike from the check to the reset. Once at the reset John proceeded to tell us how his bike would not start, his leg was sore from kicking so much, and he did not have a spare spark plug in his fanny pack. Like I said he is a newbie at the whole enduro thing. So, knowing that we only had 3.4 miles remaining of the tightest, gnarly, trail of the whole day, I was kind enough to remove the four pounds of fanny pack from my waste (in selfless fashion of course to help out a fellow rider, right) and told John I had a spare plug and wrench in my fanny pack he could use but he would have to carry it back to the pits. I think Speedy caught on because just as we were getting ready to leave, he also found the kindness in his heart to leave his fanny pack with John. In the event he needed more tools. Once back at the pits, John finally came rolling in with three fanny packs strapped around his waste. John, now knows what Speedy and I deal with on a regular basis. No, not riding with a fanny pack, but riding with about an extra 10 pounds we could loose from around mid section. Wait, that is for extra traction, right?

The next story centered around a CR250 with a 3.4 gallon tank that can’t seem to make it more than 20 miles without running out of gas. So the entire ride home we put our collective engineering IQ’s together to hypothesize on the root cause for why the Hamburgler’s bike continues to run out of gas at around 20 miles when it should be able to go the entire race without re-fueling. Now after a long hot race and a couple of beers some of the culprits got a little far fetched, including aliens and gnomes, but in the end we settled on the fact the he should just sell the damn bike and buy a new one. Like maybe a slightly used 08 KTM 250??????

Now for the story that tops them all. Speedy could have ended with his story about how is front brakes fell out in the 2nd section and once back at gas he cobbled together a make shift brake pin, how his brakes continued to over heat and lock up, no he had one better. Now, this story ranks right up there with my wild turkey episode while mountain biking. (If you don’t know this story ask me at the next race) So, Speedy decided this story was good enough to actually wait until the drive home to roll it out. It was about and hour into the drive home when he started to on fold the story. I will tell the story as if coming from him.

Speedy: So here I was cruising along the trail in the second to last section when I came around a corner and there was something sitting in the trail. It was about the size of a rock, but thought, no it couldn’t be a rock because there are no rocks in Hayward and this one looked like it had fur on it. Just before I got to it, it looked up at me with eyes the size of watermelons about ready to pop out of its head as it almost got turned into roost from the big 300 and took off running down the trail. I said to myself, “hey it’s a rabbit” So the rabbit continued to charge down the trail at greater than 18mph average speed. I know this because I gave chase and he was shooting roost from his little back legs and leaving me in the dust. This hare and hound chase proceeded for a couple hundred yards when to rabbit’s and my surprise the ground beneath his feet vanished. The trail dropped straight away about 20 feet onto the other side of berm. Now while I was able to get on the binders, the rabbit was not so lucky and he shot out into the air and seemed to be suspended like Wil-E-Coyote dropping off a cliff. The poor little fella dropped 20 feet down to the bottom and before I could make sense of what just took place, he vanished.

Ok back to me, I tried to comment but with tears of laughter welling up in my eyes as I had a visual of this rabbit airing it out over this berm with Holy #$%@ eyes as the ground vanished beneath his feet, all I could do was chuckle and think to myself this is going to make for a good story. See below for picture of the actual rabbit.