"I watched in faraway horror as my teammate's front wheel slipped off the bridge in slow motion, sending bike and rider into the frigid river and completely underwater." The dirt in front of my face was fascinating. With each exhalation of air from my heaving lungs, a tiny mushroom cloud of dust would appear and then disperse. If it weren't for the fact that I was too tired to turn my head, I might have missed this micro-spectacle. Yet here I was, gulping down air halfway up a nasty hill in the middle of the Carpathian Mountains, kneeling in the dirt with my forehead resting on the ground, absolutely riveted by the puffs of soil three inches from my mouth. When I finally started to catch my breath, I turned my head and saw my teammate standing to my right. In hindsight, "drooping" might have been a better description given the way he was dangling over the seat of his motorcycle. The rear end of the KTM sagged under Alexander's weight, and I could see a line of sweat and phlegm dripping from the mouthpiece of his helmet. We were spent.
It had only been a few hours from the time that we ran out of water, but it felt like days since our hydration packs had gone dry. Even in my semi-foggy condition, the Eagle Scout in me noticed more than one symptom of heat exhaustion creeping on. Yet I knew that we had to keep pushing. Slowly, I clawed my way to my feet and swung a leg over my bike, which was still perched axle-deep in the rut where I'd left it a few minutes earlier. Alexander staggered over and dutifully grabbed the motorcycle's front Tugger Strap, and together we heaved the 250 EXC another two meters to the next switchback where the other bike sat. He and I both croaked a few hoarse words of encouragement before continuing our ascent, but our minor victory was short-lived: The hill above us showed no signs of letting up, and we still had three and a half days of this to go. As I sit here in my air-conditioned office in Southern California, the pure misery of that hill is as fresh in my memory as it was when I was ascending it. Almost a month has passed since we crossed the finish line of the Red Bull Romaniacs-widely known as the world's toughest hard enduro-and physically I am almost fully recovered, save for a few persistent blisters on my hands. Mentally, though, I'm somewhat shell-shocked. The race packed so much experience into such a small amount of time that it took me the better part of three weeks just to mentally process everything we went through. Trying to break the trip down into writable chunks has been challenging to say the least, as I have enough mental data to fill a novel. Every time I've sat down to write this story, I've drawn a complete blank and just stared at a blinking cursor on the text-less page. Eventually, though, my thoughts always drift back to another memory of the brutal race in Romania:
Around five kilometers into the first day's off-road section, the carnage began. We hit a series of slick, root-covered hills that required some light tugging and teamwork to get over, but we kept our momentum up. As the official naviguesser of our two-man team, Alexander kept checking and rechecking our route on the two Garmin GPS units mounted on his handlebar, while I kept an eye on my own Garmin and simultaneously watched for the telltale orange banner tape pieces that would let us know we were on course. Eventually, the hills flattened out into a fast, winding trail that ran alongside a deep ditch. One of our Expert Team competitors had swapped into the ditch not 10 minutes earlier, launching bike and rider into the trees below. His teammate shouted up to us that help was on the way and we should keep going, but both Alexander and I hesitated. Seeing the rider's motionless body sprawled awkwardly on the rocks in the creek bed below was a sober reminder that one rider's mistake can ruin a team's race, and help is never close at hand in a race like this.
Teamwork. Alexander Smith and I had become well acquainted with that word as we spent months preparing, planning and practicing for this race. An 18-day trip to Europe is never an easy thing to set up, and there was more than one occasion when we almost called the whole thing off. Yet for some reason, we kept pushing. From the countless emails we sent while arranging bikes to the long hours in the gym and the endless days of GPS practice we went through, it had taken our full effort to make our dream a reality. We took a lot of pride in the fact that nobody offered this race to us on a silver platter; we came up with the idea ourselves and made it happen. Of course, we couldn't have done it without the help of Acerbis, Tucker Rocky, MSR, Malcolm Smith Motorsports and a long list of other sponsors, as well as our hardworking pit crew and our two biggest supporters: "Pistol" Pete Denison and the legend himself, Malcolm Smith. We knew from the outset that if the trip actually happened, these two were coming with us. Our logic was simple: If we're going to race the world's toughest enduro in a faraway undeveloped nation, why not take our dads with us? After all, they may come in handy.
Just when I was beginning to accept the fact that the day was not going to end, the trail spit us out into a green field bordered by a road on the east and a massive, spectator-covered hill to the west. Naturally, the directional arrow on the GPS pointed west. Arranged at the bottom of the hill was a telltale Red Bull arch marking a checkpoint, and just beyond that I could see my dad standing in his signature cowboy hat. Pulling up, I noticed that he was more than a little relieved to see us, given how pounded we were at the last service point. My dad spoke deliberately and to the point: "Hit this hill as fast as you can in second gear, and try not to nail any trees. When you get to Malcolm, turn right and you'll be on the trail. Less than 20 clicks to go and you're done for the day. You've got this!" Following Pistol Pete's advice, I sized up the hill and launched straight at it. Pinning it around the trees, I suddenly saw Malcolm pointing frantically to the north and grinning like he'd just won the Six Days. I followed his direction and dropped directly onto the trail, where Alexander quickly joined me. We flashed our proud fathers a huge thumbs-up and continued down the trail.
If ever there was a time not...
If ever there was a time not to land short, this is it.
The trail riding in Romania was like nothing I've ever experienced. A mix of wild hillclimbs, trials-like rock sections and tight, technical trails, the Expert route that we raced was as tough as anything I've ever ridden in the States, including EnduroCross. Even the Hobby class route (which our class often used as transfer sections) was solid A-level stuff. The Pro segments, on the other hand, were simply ridiculous. Impossible hillclimbs and super-demanding trails were commonplace, and seeing the effects that these routes had on the Pro riders made me glad that we were riding the Expert Team class.
When we finally rolled into the service point, I handed the bike off to Pistol Pete and immediately began refueling, while Alexander gave his KTM to Malcolm and sat down on a lawn chair to tend to the bloody welts under his knee braces. While my dad fixed some minor crash damage and checked the bike over, I elevated my legs, sucked down several bottles of thickly mixed CytoMax and pounded as much pasta and fruit as my body could take. Toward the end of the mandatory 20-minute impound, I was shocked to see Jimmy Lewis walk up. A harsh morning on the Pro loop had led J-Lew to make the difficult decision to throw in the towel, but he said he wanted to finish up the day on the Expert loop with us. Holy smokes! Although approaching full old-guy status, my boss is one of the toughest guys I know. It's not uncommon for Jimmy to go for an all-night ride or run a 100-miler, and the fact that he'd had enough says a lot about the brutality of this race, not to mention the punishing level of difficulty of the Pro class. As we geared up and took off, I began to wonder what I'd gotten myself into.