When I first heard that the Sandblast Rally was going to let motorcycles compete for the first time in 2007 I wanted to race it in a bad way. It would have been amazing to have raced the first rally in the US that allowed motorcycles. For a lot of reasons it didn't happen, which is probably for the better. I had no sand experience and at that time I think the rally would have put me in the hospital.
In September of 2007 I went on a trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with about 20 other people from Advrider. The trip was four days and we rode 1200 miles, most of it deep sand. The guys there helped me more than I could have imagined...and plowing through all that sand regardless of whether I really wanted to or not didn't hurt either (300 mile days of deep sand is exhausting, I don't know how those Dakar riders do it). I floundered and fell, at least 40 times…and that is not an exaggeration. I was pretty much the slowest rider there. The coaching from three particular people on that trip gave me the basic tools I needed to survive the weekend.
The sand scared the hell out of me, which is why I think I enjoyed it so much. The only way to ride in it was by going fast, but the last thing you want to do while learning to ride on a new surface is to just jump in and twist the throttle. I went home exhausted from picking my bike up every 30 feet for 1200 miles. I promised myself I would conquer my fear of sand and learn to ride in it.
I didn’t get right back out into the sand, though, until I read something in November about the Sandblast Rally 2008. I immediately knew I had to race it, even though I have never raced anything in my life and I was still terrible at riding in the sand.
The first thing to do was start reading the rules, do the paperwork to get a NASA RallySport Competitor License, fill out the entry forms, get the proper safety equipment, read more rules, reread the rules, and then read yet more rules and regulations.
I did a lot of research on motorcycle modifications and what would give me a little help riding in the loose stuff. I then called Gary Emig at Emig Racing and explained what I wanted. I ended up ordering a set of triple clamps with a 20mm offset and his Revolution I steering stabilizer, it is the one that has no damping when returning to center. I also ordered a new set of Pro-bend handguards, since the Acerbis ones had taken a massive beating and the threads in the mounts were all stripped out. I ordered a Teraflex rear tire and a cheap GBC Dirt Shark Front (The front was recommended to me by someone who uses it on a KTM 950 with a Teraflex rear. He told me that he likes it better than the Pirelli MT21 I was considering and it wore and stuck better on the street.)
I stripped down the bike, cleaned it up, and put it back together with my new parts. I took the rear shock to the local Honda dealer and we set the spring compression properly, since it wasn’t set right from the factory. I also looked at the forks. Neither the compression nor rebound adjustments were set even close to the factory specs, in fact the forks weren’t even set the same as each other. I fixed all of that, set the forks a bit stiff on both ends, cleaned and put the bike back together.
I tried to go out as much as possible and ride the dunes, but we’d had a lot of snow. Getting out to practice was difficult and didn’t happen nearly as much as I had hoped. I played with the stabilizer settings and adjusted all the brake and clutch levers to be easy to reach while standing and riding.
The dunes were a nice place to ride, but I could help but think it was somewhat inadequate. It was easy to get off your line and readjust since you weren’t in danger of running into anything. I was afraid it was giving me the false sense that I was getting better. Going at speed on the single lane roads in the woods down in South Carolina would be a completely different story if things started to go wrong and I left the road.
There had been a lot of snow on the ground for several weeks before the race and I was unable to get out and ride. Tuesday January 29th seemed like the perfect day to take off work to go ride. Monday the temperatures reached 40 degrees and it rained all day. This melted most of the snow and gave me short window on Tuesday to get out and practice. The temperature was going to be around 40 until about 1400 hrs and then thunderstorms would hit and drop the temperature to around 4 degrees by midnight...creating quite a blizzard.
I left the house at 1000 with the plan to ride for about four hours and go home and clean things up and do some last minute prep, then leave the bike alone until the race since the weather was suppose to remain below freezing for the next week or so.
I had a Leatt on that a friend had mailed to me to try out and a pair of new (well, a year old but never worn) pair of MX boots to try since I didn't think my Setup Adventures would pass tech. I wanted to see if I could break them in a little in case I had to use them.
The first few hours were fun and tiring riding in the sand:
Things were going good. I was getting the hang of riding up a dune and pitching left or right and turning around...which I couldn't quite do before. I was getting pretty comfortable in the sand, but was getting tired so at about 1330 hrs I hit some trails in the woods and intended to just ride them west and then go cross country to the road and head home.
Well, I hit a little snag:
The trail led to a little creek crossing, which I'm sure is normally not problematic in the summer. I slowed enough to check it out and decide it wouldn't be a problem. Well, I was wrong. The entrance wasn't steep, but had about a foot drop off into the creek I hadn’t noticed due to a "wall" of thick roots. The exit was extremely slippery and a lot steeper than I thought. The 640 made it about half way up before starting to slide backwards and I couldn’t get any footing. I dropped it to the left as slowly as I could and then proceeded to get my left leg stuck under the bike. I took a minute to slide my leg out and get the 640 picked back up.
Well, this was a bit of a predicament. I laughed at first and tried to get up the incline again, but the sides of the creek were steep and so slippery I could barely even walk up them. I turned the bike around and made several attempts to get back out the way I had come in, but the roots were preventing escape that way.
I walked down the creek trying to find another way out. It got a lot deeper, but there appeared to be another trail leading out farther down. I pushed the bike farther down stream, which proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. The 640 became stuck repeatedly and required a large amount of effort to keep upright. If I stopped to rest for a minute, the wheels would sink into the bottom and I couldn't even put it in 1st gear and get it out. Several times I had to lean it over onto the bank and drag it out of the ruts in the bottom. The creek was pretty deep near the other exit I spotted, well over my knees in water that had been snow the previous day. It took me over an hour to wrestle the 640 the 50 yards down the creek just to find that I couldn't get it out of that exit either.
Then I spotted an inlet where there was a much shallower stream of water dumping into the creek. I wrestled the 640 around and walked into the inlet. I was completely exhausted by now and I knew that storms would be rolling in soon. Then I heard the thunder...damn it. It started pouring rain. I was able to get the bike into the shallow stream, but the bottom was even worse than the bottom of the creek and I could barely even pull my boots out of the muck every step. I had killed the battery by now also, so I had to kick start the 640 every time I got the rear stuck on something and killed it. It's odd kick starting a bike when most of the stroke of the kickstart lever is underwater.
At approximately 1530 hrs I had buried the 640. The rear was hitting a large root area and wouldn't go further. The good thing about the Teraflex rear in the sand is that it digs a trench quick; this was proving to be a very bad thing in the stream. It only took a second or to of trying to push the bike over the roots to have the rear buried over the axle and the center stand and rear of the skid plate bottomed out on the creek bottom.
...of all the days to accidentally leave my cell phone at home.
I finally had to admit to myself that I wasn't going to get the 640 out of the creek on my own.
At that time I was so exhausted and sweaty that I had taken most of my gear off and wrapped the Leatt in my waterproof jacket. I walked out to the road in a muddy t-shirt and my riding pants. There was a gas station about a half mile away. I stopped there to talk briefly to an unhelpful clerk. I then decided in my infinite wisdom (I get stubborn sometimes…ok, all the time) that I was going to walk home and get my own phone. I lived about 5 miles away and the temperature had gone from 45 to about 35 in the past hour. The police station I work at was about 4 miles in the same direction, so I walked there in my brand new MX boots and got a ride the last mile.
I called my wife, who had already known something was wrong. She stated that she just had this feeling at about 1500 hrs that I was in trouble somehow. I noticed that she had called my cell phone four times in the past few hours, which is odd for her. She's a wonderful woman and didn't even question anything I told her, she simply asked if she should go get a come-along from her father's house.
I went and picked her up, grabbed shovels, rope, tie downs, a tree saw and axe, flashlights, and the two come alongs and tow strap.
At about 1800 hrs we parked my truck off the roadway and walked into the dark woods looking for where I had left the motorcycle. When Kristina (my wife) saw it, she started laughing and jumped into the creek to see what we could do to get it out.
It took the two of us an hour and a half to get it out. About half an hour after we got to the bike the blizzard started and the temperatures had dropped into the teens. We ended up using the rope, come-along, and tow strap to pull the bike out of the rut I had created. The two of us couldn't even begin to move it on our own; in fact, it was so buried I couldn't even push it from side to side.
I had to saw one small tree out of the way since it was leaning over the creek and the bike couldn’t clear it.
A lot of pushing and kick starting later, the 640 was sitting on the gravel powerline easement next to my truck...in a massive snowstorm.
My goggles were too muddy to wear, so I just put my helmet on and my wife followed me home. It was quite a ride in near single digit temperatures with thoroughly soaked pants and boots. I could barely see a thing while riding since it was snowing so hard. I went about 5 MPH the entire way home. Once I got there I parked the bike, went inside and took a long hot shower so I could start to feel my legs again.
The next morning I went out to examine the damage. Sand was packed into every surface of the motorcycle. The throttle tube would barely turn, neither would the wheels or the knob on my new steering stabilizer. I couldn’t believe the mess I had made only one week before leaving for the race.
I couldn’t believe where the sand had gotten. The cush hub was completely packed, as was the counter sprocket, throttle tube, and just about everything else. I started tearing everything off the bike and cleaning it piece by piece. It took me two full days to clean the sand out of everything get the motorcycle back together.
Now it was time for some last minute preparation. I built an ugly aluminum bracket for the emergency triangle and bolted it to my rear Touratech rack. I then mounted the old Moose route book holder to my bars using one of the clamps from the Acerbis hand guards I took off and an L bracket I made. I loaded maps of the Cheraw, South Carolina area into my GPS III+ and made sure it had new batteries even though a power cable is hard wired to the bike.
On the day that I was putting the 640 back together my wife was, unknown to me, making me a present for good luck. She and my daughter had gotten this book for Christmas called “Stupid Sock Creatures”. When she showed me the book I thought the things were hilarious looking. She sewed me one and gave it to me that night. I still laugh every time I see it.
It was now race time. After two months of preparation, practice, spending a lot of money, and reading more rules and regulations than they have in your average nuclear power plant, it was time to sit back and wait. The following morning my friend Radek would pick me up and we would drive the 16 hours down to the race.
Then I remembered something that I had been meaning to do…put a DOT knobby tire on the front. In a mad panic I started calling around to all the dealerships in the area for a Pirelli MT21. I already knew that nobody stocked DOT knobby tires. I had been meaning to order one, but with all the other things I had to do to prepare I had forgotten what seemed like an obvious problem. After a near heart attack I called Radek. It just so happened that he had a MT21 that he had not mounted. He initially was going to race his 950 Adventure, but changed his mind and was going to take his 640 Adventure instead. He said his 640 had good tires and he wasn’t going to use the Pirelli. He told me that he would throw it in the truck and we could change the front out when we go to the Hotel. Crisis averted.
At 0230 hrs on February 6th Radek pulled into the driveway. I promptly ran through he house to the front door with the intention of helping him back up the trailer, slipped on the carpet and hit the back of my head on the door frame. I got outside in plenty of time to watch him back it in on his own. Radek hadn’t brought a ramp with. I had a bunch of lumber in the back yard and went to get a flashlight so I could go find a good piece to use as a ramp. I had three flashlights in my car, so I went to unlock it. As I opened the door I was still leaned foreword from trying to find the keyhole in the dark. I somehow managed to hit myself in the head with the corner of the door causing a nice gash in my left eyebrow.
We scrapped the ramp idea and just lifted the 640 into the trailer; ratchet strapped it down, and put all my gear in the truck. I said goodbye to my wife and dogs, cleaned up the blood on my forehead, and we were off.
About 200 miles later we stopped for gas and checked on the bikes. The ratchet strap on the front right of mine had come loose and the bike had fallen onto Radek’s. The handlebar of his bike had been vibrating and bouncing off the upper right side of my front fairing for quite a while and there were a bunch of scrapes and a lot of missing paint. We readjusted everything and continued on our way. I was starting to wonder if all the minor problems I’d had during the morning were an omen that going to the race wasn’t such a good idea.
The rest of the ride down was an uneventful torture fest of trying to sit still in the truck for 2/3rds of the entire day.
Once in Cheraw we went to the hotel where we had made reservations. To make a long story short, they had screwed up the reservations. They had one room left for the night, but the following four nights they had put us in a smoking room. I’m not very picky about hotel rooms, but I cannot stand the smell of smoke. I paid for the room with out thinking about it. We then decided to go find one some place else. We found one about a mile away for cheaper with internet service, so I went back and talked the original hotel into giving me my money back. At about 2100 hrs we finally settled into the room for the night.
The next morning we took the bikes out of the trailer and changed out the not DOT front for the Pirelli MT21. I found that the ratchet strap that had come loose the night before had actually snapped completely later on during the drive. Luckily, the bike hadn’t fallen over again.
The day was absolutely beautiful. It was 68 and sunny. A far cry from the freezing temperatures we had left from the previous morning. The only problem was…we couldn’t go out riding. The Rally rules prevent practice in the area of the rally 90 days prior to the event. We were stuck staring at our bikes for most of the day and tried to find other things to do.
We met Andrew Fekete, Chris Wyckoff, and Mike Gilkey of the Adventurer’s Workshop team that morning. They were a bunch of really cool guys.
This is Chris; he is in love with his motorcycle.
RallyRaidio Call 1 I then started putting the road book together. It was 19 pages and barely fit in my road book holder.
It was so long I could work on it on one side of the room while Radek was on the other side of the room reading it and putting the turns in his GPS. Loading the GPS was going fairly well until some of the directions didn’t show road names, but had information such as “turn left at the first stop sign”. Those were a bit to vague to continue with loading the route for the rally. Radek decided he was just going to follow someone else through the transits and not worry about the route book at all.
Friday was the NCO meeting, registration, tech, and the shakedown stage; a full day of “hurry up and wait”.
At 1000 hrs the NCO (New Competitor Orientation) meeting started, there were roughly 50 people there. That meant there were a lot of new racers. The meeting lasted 2 ½ hours and covered all the basic rules, regulations, safety procedures, and how to use the time card. The time card was explained very well and was one of the things that worried me the most since I didn’t really understand exactly how the time keeping all worked.
We went directly from the meeting to registration. I had al my paperwork turned in a month before the event, so I was able to go through express registration and it only took about 30 minutes. Radek had changed bikes, so he was there for 2 ½ hours. We rode together so I spent the time outside looking at all the motorcycles and cars. I also met a lot of very cool people.
We then headed to tech. We went all the way there and realized we had forgotten the tech sheet that had been given to us in registration. We had to run back to the hotel, get it, and then go back. We both passed and it was a very quick process.
We then got directions to the shakedown stage. It was roughly 30 miles out of town. We were finally going to be able to ride our motorcycles on something fun. There was quite the line waiting at the start. It wasn’t a problem, however, since there were a lot of people to meet and talk to while waiting.
That’s James Embro behind me on the orange Dakar bike.
My friend Radek started two bikes in front of me and we were let go at 30 second intervals, just like we would be on race day. It was a scary fast deep sand 1.7 mile course and I was going as fast as I possibly could. About three quarters of a mile into the run I started seeing motorcycle parts strewn about in the sand…a turn signal, then a brake light, some black plastic parts, then another turn signal. It was a very fast right hand sweeper. As I rounded the corner I could see someone with a BMW stopped on the side and Radek picking his bike back up. He had hit the ground pretty hard. I stopped quickly to see if he was ok and he just waved me on and said he was fine. I stopped and waited for him at the finish time control. It didn’t take long for him to come around the last turn behind three of the Dakar bikes riding extremely quickly. I followed him up to the main road and we headed back to the beginning to the stage to ride it again. As I was following him I noticed that his rear rack was bent downward pushing the entire fender down toward the rear tire. As he passed over small bumps in the road his rear fender would make contact with the tire. I pulled along side of him and motioned for him to pull over.
Once we were stopped I started looking at the damaged 640 and tore the rack off. I then pulled all the loose piece of plastic fender out and cut the taillight wiring loose from it. The rear sub frame was bent downward also. We tried several times to bend it back, but we couldn’t get it to move. I decided that we wouldn’t go back to the shakedown stage, but should head back to the hotel and see what we could do about getting the bike back in race condition before the morning. It was about this time when Radek looked at his handlebars and asked me where the hell the wristwatch that was taped to them came from. He said he didn’t own anything like it and was wondering why the heck someone would put a watch on his bike. He didn’t remember that we had gone to Walmart the night before and bought a couple watches to help with time keeping and some other supplies. I asked him if he remembered the crash and he didn’t. As I was talking to him I noticed that his helmet was cracked completely through the chin bar on the right side. I knew this wasn’t a good sign.
Radek on the shakedown stage before the crash:
I wasn’t quite sure what to do so I asked him if he could ride back to the hotel and follow his GPS. I would follow him and if he started doing something weird I would do what I needed to do to get him to pull over and we’d go from there.
He got on his bike and found that it wouldn’t start. We looked around the bike for a cause and then I realized what may have happened. As I was pulling the taillight wires through the zip tie to get them loose from the broken fender pieces the wires touched and blew a fuse. Radek had a spare and we were on our way back to the hotel.
About 2 miles later Radek pulled over to the side of the road. I asked him if he was ok and he told me that he didn’t know where he was going. I asked him if he thought he could follow me, which he did the rest of the way back to the hotel. Once there he didn’t know which room was ours. I let him into the room and tried to talk him into going to the hospital, which he refused to do. He went back out into the parking lot and kind of just wandered around for a few minutes. I went out with him and started looking his bike over. On three more occasions I had to tell him which room was ours.
RallyRaidio Call 2 We sat in the room for quite a while and it was obvious that he was getting a lot better; although he started complaining about his back and thought he might have bruised or broken a rib.
He said he still wanted to race.
We went outside and looked at the subframe. We then used the bottle jack from his truck and placed it between the rear tire and the frame and raised the jack. It pushed the frame back up into place, but then it cracked.
If there is one thing that I am good at it is rigging things together. We went to Walmart again and bought supplies to refit some lights to his fender and temporarily reinforce his subframe for the race.
I was going to use to small metal brackets and hose clamps to hel support the subframe, then put trailer lights on the side for turn signals (whether they actually worked or not) and then screw a brake light to the rear of the fender and wire it in. We were going to cut up the “for sale” sign and write his license plate number on it since it was lost during the crash.
Luckily none of that was necessary. Radek finally told me he wasn’t going to race. He went and talked to Oliver, the service crew guy for the Adventurer’s Workshop team. Andrew Fekete, owner of Adventurer’s Workshop, graciously told us we could store tools and gas on his service vehicle. Radek was going to hang out with their team for the day and be my service crew. I was very glad about this and was hoping that Radek was going to change his mind about still racing.
After all of that, I started looking at the route book at about midnight. The rally bulletin board had listed several changes to the route sheet which I had not yet corrected. The main problem was that the bulletin board listed the corrections for instruction numbers 83 and 110, but the motorcycle route books did not have instruction numbers like the car route books. I went outside and talked to some guys downstairs that were working on their car’s broken odometer. They introduced me to the team’s co-driver and he pointed out the instruction numbers to me. As it turned out, he didn’t know about the corrections, so he changed his route book as well. I then loaned their mechanic my wire strippers/crimps since they had just destroyed theirs.
I went to bed at about 0130 hrs, but did not sleep at all. I was about as nervous as I have ever been. The shakedown stage run was fun, yet terrifying at the same time. Riding on sand is like a long controlled crash. You have to go fast enough to get on top of the sand and once you get there you have to stay there. Slowing or braking causes your tires to dig and then you go down. I don’t know how those fast guys do it, going as slow as I was was still scary as hell. I thought about how that was only 1.7 miles long and the races stages equaled 70 miles with 130 miles of transits. I would nearly fall asleep and then have a short panic attack that would wake me back up, this repeated over and over until my alarm clock went off at 0600.
Race Day….
The alarm went off at 0600. I took a quick shower, got my under armor gear on and tried to eat everything I could in the room for energy even though I wasn’t really hungry. At 0700 I put on the rest of my gear and went outside and started the bike. I made a quick trip to the gas station and was then off to the starting area.
Checking to make sure my watches are synced to the official race time and that there are no new course corrections.
Once I got to the starting area I couldn’t help but notice that I seemed to be carrying about 10 times as much equipment as everyone else. I asked around to see what everyone was carrying with them. Pretty much everyone said they only had their factory tool kit and water. I was a bit overloaded and found Radek and started unloading everything from my vest. I’m used to touring so I had a spare tube, tire tools, wallet, phone, balaclava that I hadn’t bothered to take out of the vest, my camera, and aspirin. I took all of these things out and only left what I absolutely needed to race. The weight of the vest was much better.
Next one to start at 08:48:00!
The race begins!
It was an 11.6 mile transit to the first stage, and the second time I’d ever tried to use a route chart to follow directions. It proved to be easier than I had anticipated and I made it to the first stage without issue. The first time I had used one was on the Trans American Trail and it proved to be useless, I followed it for five turns and gave up on it.
The time control hadn’t been set up yet, so we all waited.
It wasn’t much longer and we were off on the first special stage of the day, Campbell Lake. It would be the longest stage of the day at 14.27 miles…until we would run it backwards for stage 5 after the cars had turned it into a rutted out mess. The stage took me 20 minutes 37 seconds.
It was a long winding sand road (well, they all were) and there were some really fast sections way out in the woods that would then get really deep in the turns. I wrecked about three quarters of the way through it. The nice wide straight section narrowed at a T intersection as the race course went straight into the woods on a deep sandy two track. The two track went down a small hill and then right. I was still going too fast as I entered the two track and went down on the right side in the right hand turn. I tumbled off the side of the bike and my first thought was to get the hell off of the course before I got run over. I picked the bike back up, started it, and was off again. Then I noticed that the forks were tweaked and the wheel wasn’t lined up with the bars…I’d have to fix that later.
The person working the finish time control was Anders Green, the guy that put this whole rally together. I could tell he was staring at the right side of my bike as he handed me my time card back, but I wasn’t quite sure why.
It was then another 5.78 mile transit to the second special stage, Hunter Pond. Before I got to the end of the transit I stopped and got off the bike, ran around to the front, put the front wheel between my legs, and jerked the handlebars until the wheel lined up again.
During the Hunter Pond stage the bike wasn’t handling well at all. I was all over the place (even more than usual) and was thinking to myself that I couldn’t be that tired already.
After the Hunter Pond stage there was a transit to the first service area in the town of Patrick.
Me doing math…you don’t see that everyday.
While stopped at the Service I found out what the handling problem was with the 640. The bolts holding my steering damper had back out and the entire damper was sliding back and forth, not just the arm. The crash on the first stage had probably been the reason. I tightened it back down and had no more problems with it.
Since we’re in a pit area I’ll explain rally as I understand it, which may not be good because I’m pretty sure I still don’t understand it. At the beginning of the race we were given a time card. The time card had your start time recorded on it as you left the starting line. It also lists your allowed transit time. You have to add your transit time to your actual start time, this is the exact minute you have to show up at the time control for the beginning of the first stage or you get time penalties. To complicate things further, once you arrive at the stage you line up in the same start order. On the minute that you get up to the starting line you hand your time car to the guy recording start times. He writes down your actual start time for the stage and hands it back to you. Now you have to look at the actual start time, add the allowed stage time and the next allowed transit time together and add it to the start time you just got. That is the exact minute you have to check in to the control at the beginning of the next stage….everybody got that? Me neither.
By the way, the car guys have a co-driver that does all this for them.
OK, back to the race…more pictures from the first service area…
I think all the sand on the right side of my bike was what Anders was looking at earlier after the first stage…he was just noticing that I had crashed.
After the first service we were all herded into a little taped off area where they reseeded us, which means they re-ordered us in relation to our times on the first two stages to help prevent passing on the stages. I couldn’t help but notice that there weren’t many people left behind me after this was done.
That’s Amy Feistel putting someone’s time card back in their jacket pocket for them. This proved to be hard to do with gloves on. You had to do it by feel if you were wearing a Leatt brace like I was since it was impossible to look down.
The next transit was 21 miles to the stage, Sexton’s Pond. I had noticed that the odometer on the KTM was extremely inaccurate. This was the longest transit and the odometer error became very noticeable the father into the transit I went. Up to this point the instructions on the roll chart were very good and easy to follow.
The stage was only 7.31 miles long and, if I remember correctly, one of the ones that I felt really good on. It’s amazing how you can have these perfect moments while riding like this. You just seem completely in tune with the motorcycle and you’re going pretty quickly through the course (quickly for me is all relative by the way). A few minutes later something breaks your concentration and it all falls apart for a while before you can get back into things. Not being used to spectators, they were one of the main things that really broke my concentration, other than the deer that ran in front of me on this stage.
Another phenomenon that occurred over and over the entire day was an extreme let down every time I saw the yellow warning sign that the finish time control was coming up. I really wanted those stage sections to keep on going. I’m not quick and I’m not a fantastic rider, but I love to ride my motorcycle. The longer I get to ride the happier I am. 7 miles of race course wasn’t enough to satisfy that, neither were the 14 mile sections. Coming from a touring background, the short racing stages may have left a bit to be desired as far as length. This, however, was not a tour. This was a race. The camaraderie between the racers and all the great people I met made this all a non-issue, however, so if you are on the fence about trying it…don’t hesitate.
I was talking about the spectators breaking my concentration…here is a good example of that. The following photos are all of my second, and last, get off. If the cameras had been on the opposite side of the race course you would see that there are probably 40 people standing in a big group watching the corner. That kind of made me about a hundred times more nervous about choking on the corner, which prompted me to do everything I could to choke on the corner.
If you wreck in front of a spectator section, you can bet there are a hundred different pictures of it…I simply slowed way too much and got the front to dig in. I simply fell over on the left side. After looking at all the pictures of this corner, the outside line seems like it would have been the one to take.
I put these together to show the low side in sequence:
And I was sent off with a cheering crowd.
Just on the other side of this corner was an exhaust pipe lying in the sand, the third one I had seen that day (and later found out it was the second time I had seen that particular one). I almost hit it, but was able to maneuver around it in time.
The end of stage three to the beginning of stage four was where there were changes to the road book. One of the tulips (diagrams) was incorrect and the mileage was way off. I hadn’t bothered to change the mileage error, mostly because I didn’t understand exactly what the correction on the main bulletin board meant exactly. Now I was going to have to do the correction in my head. As luck would have it, at the end of the first stage two of us left at the same time and were able to consult each other as to where to go. This proved not to help too much since we got lost after the first turn. In another stroke of luck we happened to come to the correct road, just at the wrong intersection, just as two other competitors rode by. We followed them to the next stage.
The road book error gave us time to do a 12 mile transit that was really only 4 miles, so we had time to eat, piss in the woods like bears do, and talk for a while.
Stage four, Sand Trap Reverse, then led to the second service for the day, which was for fuel only. Radek put gas in my bike while I went to the restroom (I almost felt like a real racer).On the way to the restroom I noticed this little piece of damaged equipment which appears to have gone end over end:
I asked about the rider and was told he might have a broken ankle.
I found these pictures of its recovery:
After the service it was time to transit back to the Campbell Lake stage and ride it backwards. As I approached the turn for Campbell Lake Road there was a sign on the opposite side of the street saying “Camp Sand Hills” with an arrow pointing in the direction I was supposed to turn. As I looked back at the street sign I saw the first letters as “Camp” and assumed it said “Camp Sand Hills Road”. Well, it didn’t. I realized my mistake about a mile further and turned around.
Stage five was the long 14 mile course run backwards…I loved it.
After stage five was another service area at the high school in Cheraw. It was 40 minutes and I was able to take my gear off and relax. Radek arrived shortly after I did with food and some power gel packets, one of which I was able to shove down my throat.
I hadn’t considered getting gas because I have a 6.75 Gallon tank. What I didn’t realize is that Radek had only put 3 gallons in my tank at the previous service because he wanted to keep the bike as light as possible for me.
I then left the service area to run the last two stages, the next of which was the Hunter Pond stage run in reverse.
The start of Hunter Pond Reverse:
At the start of the stage they told us there was another error in the road book. The mileages were off and one of the tulips had you turning where you should go straight…it wasn’t something we could mark on the road books since they were already wound up in the holders. Besides, my road book holder was starting to give me problems and advancing it was becoming difficult.
The transit was short and after one wrong turn that led to a road that was blocked off for the race; I was ale to make it the start of the last stage.
The last stage had not been run all day. We al stopped and waited as they had a pre-sweep vehicle run it to make sure the course was clear. We arrived with plenty of daylight left, but we would be running this one in the dark.
I was a bit worried about running in the dark since I had no auxiliary lighting and the lights on the 640 are pathetic. As it turns out, I was right to be worried.
As the sun set, the bikes started taking off. 18 minutes later it was my turn to go into the darkness. If that wasn’t enough to worry about, I hit reserve one minute before the start. I did some quick panicked calculations about whether I could make it to the finish or not. Then I figured that the bike would ruin out of gas wherever it would run out of gas…and I was off.
I was pretty much riding blind through the woods. I could see the lighter area where the sand road was versus the pine needle strewn ground around it , but not much else. I would occasionally catch glimpses of the caution tape letting me know there was a turn ahead, but I could see so little that I would almost have to completely stop before seeing which way the turn even went. I think everyone that was behind me passed me.
My headlights seem about a hundred times brighter in this picture than they did that evening…
I made it through the stage and encountered another problem…I had made no provisions to see my road book in the dark. It was useless. Actually, it was already useless because I stopped being able to advance it during the last transit.
There were still several riders at the end of the stage. They were encountering the same problem. Instead of using the road book, we located the finish on the GPS and followed it instead. This would be the first time the entire day that I would even use my GPS.
Still very worried about running out of gas I decided I would fill up at the next gas station…until I remembered that I gave my wallet to Radek at the beginning of the day to shave as much weight from my vest as possible. I had no money.
The closer I got the finish, the more I calmed down. If I was within a mile I would push the damn thing there. I pulled into the finish, turned off my bike, and handed my time card in. I hung out at the finish for a minute talking to several people before getting back on the bike to go to the hotel. It wouldn’t start. I had run out of gas. That could not have been timed any closer than it was. After a lot of laughing by all of us that were standing there Aaron Gibson gave me enough gas to get the bike back to the hotel.
The race was over. I hadn’t bothered to see how well I had done…and I honestly didn’t care. I had a lot of fun and that was what I came down to do. I also met so many great people that the race was really secondary to having met all of them.
RallyRaidio Call 3 I found out Sunday night that I had come in 29th out of the 51 bikes that started. A far cry from the 50th place I was expecting (hey, I figured one person would be slower!).
After the race Radek and I went to the bar where the race had started. There were a couple other people there I had met during the weekend, Jason Adams and Aaron Gibson. I had a very good time hanging out with them for the short time we were there and can’t wait to see them again in Tennessee.
The following morning we packed everything up and drove the 16 hours back home. The temperature was 65 degrees when we left. It was 0 degrees when we pulled into my driveway at 0300 Monday morning
