| 2003 Race Reports |
June 1, 2003
Marshfield, Missouri
2nd of 13 in Vet (11th overall)
Experienced racers know that simple things are often the difference between winning
and losing. Simple things like Loctite, the stuff that keeps KTM's, those paint shakers
on wheels, from shedding their bolts. One would expect that after owning KTM's since
1999, I would fully understand and appreciate the consequences of absent-minded
bike maintenance.
But this is me we're talkin' about.
Matt and I drove down to Marshfield in his new Chevy 1500 HD with 4 doors, leather
seats (heated), a really big engine, and New Car Smell (standard). I remember a
time when a Silverado was the quintessential farm truck, parked next to F-150's at the
town café, lightly coated in gravel dust, a soybean-encrusted vinyl front seat (bench),
an interior aroma of dirt, sweat, and corn, and more often than not, a grungy farm dog
along for the ride. Times have changed, and I ain't complaining. There was certainly
no griping about the weather, as the day was about as pleasant as anyone could
have hoped for in June.
After signup we watched the last of the ATV racers cross the creek just before the
scoring trailer. The riders were only moderately muddy, which suggested a relatively
dry course. The practice lap confirmed this, although a few mud holes were scattered
throughout. The first half of the 10-mile course was bike-only singletrack, some trails
freshly cut and most very tight. Along with paper-plate mile markers stapled to trees,
the course workers added encouraging paper-plate messages like "Got Arm Pump?"
and "If You Can Read This You Might Want To Start Using the Throttle." This part of
the course seemed never to end, and as the miles passed the paper-plate taunting
became bolder. While I cannot confirm this, I believe one message read "Trees Are
Moving Faster Than You."
After bouncing off nearly every rock and tree in the practice lap, I had my sights set on
nothing more than finishing in the top half of the Vet class. Like the '02 Marshfield
race, I didn't feel like I ever found my groove. Earlier in the week I had replaced the
Brembo master cylinder with a Nissin (Honda-style) and added sintered metal front
brake pads after Kahoka chewed up the old ones and asked for seconds. The
sintered metal pads had not yet broken in and are less "grippy" to begin with, so the
faster, more open part of the course gave me plenty of sphincter-tightening moments.
Back in the pits, I topped off the gas tank and lined up next to K-Ruck #94 on the
starting line.
When the 15-second board dropped, I kicked the engine to life and saw K-Ruck blast
off beside me. He was a good 5 feet ahead of me before I could even let out the
clutch, which I promptly dumped like an 11-year-old learning to ride for the first time.
The bike stalled, took two kicks to re-fire, and I was dead last heading into the first
turn. The course began with a short grass track, where I passed one guy, then a
high-speed section next to the pits. Just before we entered the woods, a guy went
down while braking around a turn. Two down, ten to go.
Inside the woods, I made some progress despite the lack of passing opportunities. A
couple miles into the course was a tricky step-up on a small hill, infested with roots
and rocks. This spot had given me fits on the practice lap and was now holding up a
number of riders, but I avoided the bottleneck by taking an alternate line to the right.
After that, traffic thinned out. In these instances, coming back from dead last, I
generally have no idea what position I'm in or how many guys are ahead of me. Near
the end of the tight singletrack, I advanced on Neal Soenksen and his familiar all-gray
KTM. Neal always sets a fast pace, so in catching up to him I figured I was finding my
groove. For the first time in racing history, I had actually made a mental note of a
passing opportunity during the practice lap, at a point where Neal and I were rapidly
approaching. One squared-off corner later, the pass was made and I pushed ahead.
In the second half of the course, I blazed through the ATV trails and caught up with
Tom Eidam, Senior class fast guy and MHSC scorekeeper. As I approached him,
Tom collected a nasty bark sample, bounced off a tree and crashed hard ("Scared the
s--- out of me," he would say after the race). He gave me the thumbs-up sign and I
charged onward. As I came to the final creek crossing before the scoring trailer,
K-Ruck was pulling into the scoring lane. Beyond the trailer the course continued
straight and K-Ruck inexplicably turned right, victim of a navigational error. I passed
through the grass track where the race had begun and met up with him where the pit
area started. The fair racer that he is, Kevin let me by and unbeknownst to me, I was
now leading.
During the second lap I put a few seconds on K-Ruck and kept riding hard, figuring
the other fast guys in our class were still ahead. The two largest mud holes in the first
half of the course were deepening, but still passable. In the second half I dumped the
bike around a corner and tumbled down a hill, but no harm done. I remounted and
finished the lap in the lead position. On Lap 3, Kevin caught back up to me near the
end of the singletrack. The course dropped us down into a wide-open quarter-mile
stretch of pasture, where I slowed to pull out a small tree branch lodged in the pipe.
Kevin flew by and I followed him for the remainder of the lap. The two of us were
running strong, but lurking behind us and setting a blistering pace were Elston Moore
and Steve Crews.
On the final lap, I waited for an opportunity to get around Kevin and found it at a creek
crossing in the singletrack. The main trail went wide right to avoid some tree roots on
the opposite creek bank. On the practice lap I had tried the straighter line over the
roots, but didn't think it was any faster. Even so, I gave it a try and squeezed in ahead
of Kevin where the trails converged. After another mile or so I couldn't hear him
behind me. In a section of winding grass track I looked back and saw who I thought
was Kevin just emerging from the woods, maybe 10 seconds behind. In the last
high-speed run through the pasture, I let off a bit to take a drink from my Camelbak,
and got passed by...Kevin? In stealth mode, he beat me to the woods and I followed
him for several miles. I had one last passing opportunity in mind, a creek crossing
that had been slightly re-routed. I figured Kevin would take the safe line to the left, and
I'd charge through the more risky (but shorter) main line.
I never got the opportunity. In a run through a dry creek bed, I let the back wheel slide
out on a side hill and Kevin was gone. After that minor fall, the front brake assembly
became loose around the handlebar, thanks to a lack of Loctite on the bolts that
clamp it tight. While the brake was still usable, it didn't exactly inspire confidence in
the higher-speed ATV trails. Around the 8-mile marker I heard the unmistakable buzz
of a small bore engine, gradually closing in on me. Closer and closer it came, and I
had a suspicion it might be Steve Crews, a Fredette-like freak (and I mean that in the
best possible way) who can ride a KDX200 very, very fast. I held him off until the last
creek crossing before the scoring trailer, where he did a kamikaze charge through the
creek and beat me to the scoring lane. We congratulated each other, and soon after
Elston Moore came through, followed by K-Ruck. Somewhere in those last couple of
miles Kevin dropped his bike, dropping from 1st to 4th. I felt his pain after the race
when I realized I gave up the win in the last 100 feet, which reminded me of how I felt
when Matt passed me in the last 300 yards of the Sedalia race in 2000.
Even so, it was a good ride, more fun than the Bush twins, and I was shocked to see
my name in the #11 spot in the overall standings. The Vet class placed four riders in
the top 20, a testament to our competitiveness. Doug Stone took the overall win,
followed closely by Steve Leivan. Tom Eidam recovered from his bark sampling and
won the Senior class. Matt equaled his best finish in the Open B class, taking home
the third place trophy.
June 15, 2003
Taylorville, Illinois
1st in Vet A (4th overall)
Sounds pretty impressive, eh? It's not, really, when you consider that I was the sole
member of my class and only 22 guys showed up to race. I continue to be
confounded by the organization of District 17 hare scrambles, as there were two
AMA-sanctioned races scheduled on this day (the other in Northern Illinois). When
two clubs have to compete for the same set of riders, nobody wins...but I digress.
The South Fork Dirt Riders hosted the race on their club grounds adjacent to Route
104 and easily accessible from I-55. If you are fascinated with electrical power
generation (and who isn't?), the road to South Fork passes through Dominion
Energy's Kincaid power plant, a 1,108 mega-watt coal-fire-breathing mass of
concrete and steel. The club's name is derived not from the famous cattle ranch in
Texas, but from the South Fork creek that borders the property. A nicely constructed
motocross track is the center point of the gently rolling property.
Each year I try to take in a couple of D-17 races to hone my mud-riding skills, and
South Fork did not disappoint. The thick clay soil inside the woods was still wet from
a few inches of rain the previous week, but wherever the sun was able to shine, the
clay was dusty and hard as concrete. A pre-race walk through most of the course
revealed surprisingly wide, fast trails in open woods and grass tracks. Ruts and
depressions in the hard clay were filled with standing water, most of it crap-brown
and smelly, the kind even your dog wouldn't drink. The creek had risen just above its
banks and was encroaching on the trail in several places. In one spot, the trail
appeared to continue following the creek, but sparsely placed arrows pointed left to
avoid a deep, water-filled hole. Anyone missing the turn was going for a swim.
With so few riders, the start was only two rows, one for the trail riders and another for
everyone else. I took a wide line into the first turn and was about mid-pack through a
half-mile of grass track. Several man-made jumps made things interesting before we
turned into the woods. The trail was sloppy, but the tightly packed clay was difficult for
the rear tires to chew up and no significant ruts developed. Passing opportunities
were ample as we followed the creek. In one of the few "virgin" sections of woods
(about 100 yards in total) I managed to clip a tree with my handguard and crashed,
nearly damaging a highly sensitive area of my body with the end of the handlebar. I
remounted quickly but the small group I had followed was long gone.
We exited the woods on a very rough, high-speed section of the property. The hard
clay was causing an abnormal amount of headshake in 5th gear, the kind where you
wonder if you'd still be on the bike if not for the steering damper. As we re-entered the
woods, I caught up to one of the guys I had followed before crashing. He missed the
arrow directing us around the deep water hole and took a plunge, his race surely over
on the first lap (a few laps later I saw a Suzuki turned upside down near the water
hole, having water drained from the engine, apparently victim #2).
The last section of the course was basically motocross in the grass, with some
medium-sized jumps that would have been fun if not for the landings. This part of the
course I had not walked before the race and after the first jump wished I had. I
launched the bike over the center of the jump and was shocked to see a large
water-filled, deeply rutted mud pit in the landing zone. RC could have cleared the mud
pit with ease, but I landed in the center and somehow kept the bike on two wheels.
The next two jumps were more of the same, but I went wide left and missed the worst
of the mud landings.
In about 12 minutes I had completed the first of what would be many laps around the
course. With such a small turnout, the trails stayed in decent shape and I did my best
to clear out the water-filled ruts. In the open areas, some of the stagnant pools of
water had been baked by the sun long enough to be warm as I splashed through.
The next hour went by quickly and I began catching up to the trail riders. Passing was
very, very easy. On my last lap I came up on a guy laboring through a slimy mud hole,
his back tire spinning aimlessly, no momentum, and both feet hanging out for
balance. Nine years ago, almost to the day, that was me. I did my first race on
Father's Day in 1994. As I flew by this struggling rider, I had a thought: I've come a
long way, and it sure feels good.
Marshfield, Missouri
2nd of 13 in Vet (11th overall)
Experienced racers know that simple things are often the difference between winning
and losing. Simple things like Loctite, the stuff that keeps KTM's, those paint shakers
on wheels, from shedding their bolts. One would expect that after owning KTM's since
1999, I would fully understand and appreciate the consequences of absent-minded
bike maintenance.
But this is me we're talkin' about.
Matt and I drove down to Marshfield in his new Chevy 1500 HD with 4 doors, leather
seats (heated), a really big engine, and New Car Smell (standard). I remember a
time when a Silverado was the quintessential farm truck, parked next to F-150's at the
town café, lightly coated in gravel dust, a soybean-encrusted vinyl front seat (bench),
an interior aroma of dirt, sweat, and corn, and more often than not, a grungy farm dog
along for the ride. Times have changed, and I ain't complaining. There was certainly
no griping about the weather, as the day was about as pleasant as anyone could
have hoped for in June.
After signup we watched the last of the ATV racers cross the creek just before the
scoring trailer. The riders were only moderately muddy, which suggested a relatively
dry course. The practice lap confirmed this, although a few mud holes were scattered
throughout. The first half of the 10-mile course was bike-only singletrack, some trails
freshly cut and most very tight. Along with paper-plate mile markers stapled to trees,
the course workers added encouraging paper-plate messages like "Got Arm Pump?"
and "If You Can Read This You Might Want To Start Using the Throttle." This part of
the course seemed never to end, and as the miles passed the paper-plate taunting
became bolder. While I cannot confirm this, I believe one message read "Trees Are
Moving Faster Than You."
After bouncing off nearly every rock and tree in the practice lap, I had my sights set on
nothing more than finishing in the top half of the Vet class. Like the '02 Marshfield
race, I didn't feel like I ever found my groove. Earlier in the week I had replaced the
Brembo master cylinder with a Nissin (Honda-style) and added sintered metal front
brake pads after Kahoka chewed up the old ones and asked for seconds. The
sintered metal pads had not yet broken in and are less "grippy" to begin with, so the
faster, more open part of the course gave me plenty of sphincter-tightening moments.
Back in the pits, I topped off the gas tank and lined up next to K-Ruck #94 on the
starting line.
When the 15-second board dropped, I kicked the engine to life and saw K-Ruck blast
off beside me. He was a good 5 feet ahead of me before I could even let out the
clutch, which I promptly dumped like an 11-year-old learning to ride for the first time.
The bike stalled, took two kicks to re-fire, and I was dead last heading into the first
turn. The course began with a short grass track, where I passed one guy, then a
high-speed section next to the pits. Just before we entered the woods, a guy went
down while braking around a turn. Two down, ten to go.
Inside the woods, I made some progress despite the lack of passing opportunities. A
couple miles into the course was a tricky step-up on a small hill, infested with roots
and rocks. This spot had given me fits on the practice lap and was now holding up a
number of riders, but I avoided the bottleneck by taking an alternate line to the right.
After that, traffic thinned out. In these instances, coming back from dead last, I
generally have no idea what position I'm in or how many guys are ahead of me. Near
the end of the tight singletrack, I advanced on Neal Soenksen and his familiar all-gray
KTM. Neal always sets a fast pace, so in catching up to him I figured I was finding my
groove. For the first time in racing history, I had actually made a mental note of a
passing opportunity during the practice lap, at a point where Neal and I were rapidly
approaching. One squared-off corner later, the pass was made and I pushed ahead.
In the second half of the course, I blazed through the ATV trails and caught up with
Tom Eidam, Senior class fast guy and MHSC scorekeeper. As I approached him,
Tom collected a nasty bark sample, bounced off a tree and crashed hard ("Scared the
s--- out of me," he would say after the race). He gave me the thumbs-up sign and I
charged onward. As I came to the final creek crossing before the scoring trailer,
K-Ruck was pulling into the scoring lane. Beyond the trailer the course continued
straight and K-Ruck inexplicably turned right, victim of a navigational error. I passed
through the grass track where the race had begun and met up with him where the pit
area started. The fair racer that he is, Kevin let me by and unbeknownst to me, I was
now leading.
During the second lap I put a few seconds on K-Ruck and kept riding hard, figuring
the other fast guys in our class were still ahead. The two largest mud holes in the first
half of the course were deepening, but still passable. In the second half I dumped the
bike around a corner and tumbled down a hill, but no harm done. I remounted and
finished the lap in the lead position. On Lap 3, Kevin caught back up to me near the
end of the singletrack. The course dropped us down into a wide-open quarter-mile
stretch of pasture, where I slowed to pull out a small tree branch lodged in the pipe.
Kevin flew by and I followed him for the remainder of the lap. The two of us were
running strong, but lurking behind us and setting a blistering pace were Elston Moore
and Steve Crews.
On the final lap, I waited for an opportunity to get around Kevin and found it at a creek
crossing in the singletrack. The main trail went wide right to avoid some tree roots on
the opposite creek bank. On the practice lap I had tried the straighter line over the
roots, but didn't think it was any faster. Even so, I gave it a try and squeezed in ahead
of Kevin where the trails converged. After another mile or so I couldn't hear him
behind me. In a section of winding grass track I looked back and saw who I thought
was Kevin just emerging from the woods, maybe 10 seconds behind. In the last
high-speed run through the pasture, I let off a bit to take a drink from my Camelbak,
and got passed by...Kevin? In stealth mode, he beat me to the woods and I followed
him for several miles. I had one last passing opportunity in mind, a creek crossing
that had been slightly re-routed. I figured Kevin would take the safe line to the left, and
I'd charge through the more risky (but shorter) main line.
I never got the opportunity. In a run through a dry creek bed, I let the back wheel slide
out on a side hill and Kevin was gone. After that minor fall, the front brake assembly
became loose around the handlebar, thanks to a lack of Loctite on the bolts that
clamp it tight. While the brake was still usable, it didn't exactly inspire confidence in
the higher-speed ATV trails. Around the 8-mile marker I heard the unmistakable buzz
of a small bore engine, gradually closing in on me. Closer and closer it came, and I
had a suspicion it might be Steve Crews, a Fredette-like freak (and I mean that in the
best possible way) who can ride a KDX200 very, very fast. I held him off until the last
creek crossing before the scoring trailer, where he did a kamikaze charge through the
creek and beat me to the scoring lane. We congratulated each other, and soon after
Elston Moore came through, followed by K-Ruck. Somewhere in those last couple of
miles Kevin dropped his bike, dropping from 1st to 4th. I felt his pain after the race
when I realized I gave up the win in the last 100 feet, which reminded me of how I felt
when Matt passed me in the last 300 yards of the Sedalia race in 2000.
Even so, it was a good ride, more fun than the Bush twins, and I was shocked to see
my name in the #11 spot in the overall standings. The Vet class placed four riders in
the top 20, a testament to our competitiveness. Doug Stone took the overall win,
followed closely by Steve Leivan. Tom Eidam recovered from his bark sampling and
won the Senior class. Matt equaled his best finish in the Open B class, taking home
the third place trophy.
June 15, 2003
Taylorville, Illinois
1st in Vet A (4th overall)
Sounds pretty impressive, eh? It's not, really, when you consider that I was the sole
member of my class and only 22 guys showed up to race. I continue to be
confounded by the organization of District 17 hare scrambles, as there were two
AMA-sanctioned races scheduled on this day (the other in Northern Illinois). When
two clubs have to compete for the same set of riders, nobody wins...but I digress.
The South Fork Dirt Riders hosted the race on their club grounds adjacent to Route
104 and easily accessible from I-55. If you are fascinated with electrical power
generation (and who isn't?), the road to South Fork passes through Dominion
Energy's Kincaid power plant, a 1,108 mega-watt coal-fire-breathing mass of
concrete and steel. The club's name is derived not from the famous cattle ranch in
Texas, but from the South Fork creek that borders the property. A nicely constructed
motocross track is the center point of the gently rolling property.
Each year I try to take in a couple of D-17 races to hone my mud-riding skills, and
South Fork did not disappoint. The thick clay soil inside the woods was still wet from
a few inches of rain the previous week, but wherever the sun was able to shine, the
clay was dusty and hard as concrete. A pre-race walk through most of the course
revealed surprisingly wide, fast trails in open woods and grass tracks. Ruts and
depressions in the hard clay were filled with standing water, most of it crap-brown
and smelly, the kind even your dog wouldn't drink. The creek had risen just above its
banks and was encroaching on the trail in several places. In one spot, the trail
appeared to continue following the creek, but sparsely placed arrows pointed left to
avoid a deep, water-filled hole. Anyone missing the turn was going for a swim.
With so few riders, the start was only two rows, one for the trail riders and another for
everyone else. I took a wide line into the first turn and was about mid-pack through a
half-mile of grass track. Several man-made jumps made things interesting before we
turned into the woods. The trail was sloppy, but the tightly packed clay was difficult for
the rear tires to chew up and no significant ruts developed. Passing opportunities
were ample as we followed the creek. In one of the few "virgin" sections of woods
(about 100 yards in total) I managed to clip a tree with my handguard and crashed,
nearly damaging a highly sensitive area of my body with the end of the handlebar. I
remounted quickly but the small group I had followed was long gone.
We exited the woods on a very rough, high-speed section of the property. The hard
clay was causing an abnormal amount of headshake in 5th gear, the kind where you
wonder if you'd still be on the bike if not for the steering damper. As we re-entered the
woods, I caught up to one of the guys I had followed before crashing. He missed the
arrow directing us around the deep water hole and took a plunge, his race surely over
on the first lap (a few laps later I saw a Suzuki turned upside down near the water
hole, having water drained from the engine, apparently victim #2).
The last section of the course was basically motocross in the grass, with some
medium-sized jumps that would have been fun if not for the landings. This part of the
course I had not walked before the race and after the first jump wished I had. I
launched the bike over the center of the jump and was shocked to see a large
water-filled, deeply rutted mud pit in the landing zone. RC could have cleared the mud
pit with ease, but I landed in the center and somehow kept the bike on two wheels.
The next two jumps were more of the same, but I went wide left and missed the worst
of the mud landings.
In about 12 minutes I had completed the first of what would be many laps around the
course. With such a small turnout, the trails stayed in decent shape and I did my best
to clear out the water-filled ruts. In the open areas, some of the stagnant pools of
water had been baked by the sun long enough to be warm as I splashed through.
The next hour went by quickly and I began catching up to the trail riders. Passing was
very, very easy. On my last lap I came up on a guy laboring through a slimy mud hole,
his back tire spinning aimlessly, no momentum, and both feet hanging out for
balance. Nine years ago, almost to the day, that was me. I did my first race on
Father's Day in 1994. As I flew by this struggling rider, I had a thought: I've come a
long way, and it sure feels good.
Marshfield, Missouri
Taylorville, Illinois
Taylorville, Illinois
| South Fork - with oil wells |
| South Fork - no oil wells |
 |  |  |