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I laugh. “I really don’t think that’s possible. I’m bigger than you so when you think about it, there’s more of me to love you.”
Her tone eases. “You’re impossible.”
THAT NIGHT, TEN hours ahead of the trucks, we line the bikes up on the main boulevard. Fog has rolled in and my nerves are all over the place.
And believe it or not, Shade’s too. “I don’t know about this, Roan.” He shoves his hands into the pockets of his black jacket, his eyes distant, biting his lip. “I don’t like this fog. It’s fucking eerie.”
I shrug it off. “It’s fine.” I’ve seen worse in the mountains of Lesotho. Imagine thick fog you can’t see a foot in front of you in a steep ravine with boulders the size of cars.
The streets line with drunk spectators setting up camp to catch all the action. Aside from this fog, one of the biggest dangers in Baja are the spectators and just getting out of town. People have been lining up for days, drunk, and out of control. A lot of the time, they just don’t think before they toss something in the road or just plain do something idiotic like throw themselves out there.
I’m interviewed next to Shade and Tiller. They want to know why freestyle guys would want to race Baja, let alone have a chance at winning it. My answer?
“There’s more to us than slinging tricks. Our roots are in the sand and I think our starting position shows we’re competition for all the teams out here.”
By the way, we’re starting first.
Just before midnight, Ricky looks as if he’s going to cry when I throw my leg over the bike. Our plan is to have me run the first two hundred miles and then hand the bike off to Tiller, then Shade, and I’ll finish the race for us. When riding a factory-sponsored race, it’s one bike per team relay-style covering roughly eight hundred and eighty-three miles.
“Eat sand and ride,” Ricky says, leaning his head into my helmet, fighting off his tears.
Shade says, “Send it.”
And Tiller, he simply knocks his knuckles into mine and hits my helmet with his other hand. “Don’t die, ya dumb motherfucker.”
I laugh because that’s what I said to him when he overdosed years ago. Wildly inappropriate given the circumstances, but it’s just like him to say something like that.
When the green flag drops, I take off into the city, two minutes ahead of the rest of the riders.
The race itself is exactly what I knew it’d be. I’d spent a lot of time on the Baja peninsula over the years and desert riding. It’s your typical endurance race that tests your ability, sanity, and quite frankly, your will. You have to stay alert, never knowing what lies ahead. I swap the lead with the Kawasaki rider six times in the first two hundred miles but manage to get us a two-minute lead even after misjudging a cattle guard and sending myself sailing into a silt bath. Not long after that, I hit what I think is a coyote and go down in a rocky section. It ends up separating the cartilage in my sternum. Still, I push through to the first check point where I hand the bike off to Tiller.
During Tiller’s two hundred miles, he runs out of gas during a sand section and has to siphon fuel from a UTV with the hose to his CamelBak. Pretty sure he swallows some too.
KTM is in the lead when he hands the bike over to Shade. While he manages to retain the lead again, Shade suffers from arm pump the majority of his sections and goes down in a bed of rocks and breaks his ankle. He pushes through it to the next checkpoint where I have to take over and finish the race as night begins to fall again. Our GPS is broken, the team helicopter is refueling and I’m left alone to navigate through the course.
It’s the first time in my racing career I’ve gotten scared. Something doesn’t feel right. Probably because I’ve taken enough silt baths to remind me how much I hate them. If you’ve never experience silt, it’s worse than sand. It’s like a thick dust that consumes you and your ability to see anything. It’s what I imagine quicksand to be like.
Once I’m out of that, I push the uneasy feeling aside and keep going.
Racing at night is a true test of endurance for any racer. The worst part for me? Whoops. Do you know what whoops are? If not, they’re evenly spaced hills about three or four feet high and usually around ten feet apart. Experienced riders can glide easily across the peaks with little effort but one wrong move of the front tire dipping too low, or the back kicking out, you’re screwed. Sand whoops are worse because you have to use every ounce of muscle strength you have to keep your bike upright. There’s sixty miles of that brutal bullshit where I have to stand to avoid too much jarring motion in my chest. But something happens to me when I enter the last road section coming into Ensenada. I’ve spent the last six hours on a bike, I’m delirious, dehydrated, and have had some pretty decent conversations with my dad. I know—though I’d never allowed myself to think of him while I’m on a bike before—as the city lights and finish line come into view, he’s with me. I think he’s what gets me through those last few miles when I want to stop or die.
But I don’t. I push on and finish the race with no idea of our position or what kind of penalties we might be facing. I finish one-minute ahead of the rest of the riders, but because of the adjusted time, I would have had to come across the line two-minutes and one second ahead of the KTM team to win.
I’ll start by saying, freestyle motocross is corrupt, just like any sport. There’s always someone willing to bend the rules—from the riders to the judges. Whether you’re buying medals or your spot on the podium over favoritism, it happens across the board in every aspect of professional sports. Baja is no different. I knew that going into it, as did my brothers. Especially with Rod Mullin heading up this year’s Baja race.
Even with an abundance of penalties issued upon Tiller’s runs, the speed-limit deductions on the roads, we end up finishing second for Honda. It’s good. You know I wanted first place, but there’s a moment I will remember the rest of my life.
The one standing on the podium next to my brothers and knowing with every part of my heart, our dad is standing there with us.
Do you see the three of us there? All choked up. Okay, Tiller gives zero fucks, but I grasp the greater meaning behind all of it and damn it, it feels like a win to me.
I hug them, even Tiller, and say, “Thank you.” It’s all I need to say because they know.
Shade limps to the side, leaning against the Honda van, his eyes on the desert. He smiles and looks over to me. “I never knew I wanted to do this, until those long stretches of sand.” He laughs, chugging water. “And then I realized what that feeling was like to be completely alone.”
You might think, what the fuck does that mean? Until you’ve been there, in absolute isolation in the middle of fucking nowhere, you can’t understand it.
“All this sentimental shit is making me crazy.” Tiller chuckles, a bottle of water in his hand. “’Let’s fucking eat.”