No Cigar

Last weekend was the annual local off road dirt bike race put on by our local club the Book Cliff Rattlers MC. It was an enduro format with 7 special tests totaling 83 miles of gnar singletrack. Every year I dream of winning the home town race. I have finished on the overall podium at least 6 times but never the top. I started the first test like a bottle rocket and within 5 minutes I was flying upside down, feet first over my handlebars. Some how I still won the over all on the test. I finished the next several tests in 3rd or 2nd without loosing more that a second or two of the leader. After test 4 I gassed up my 12 year old trusty CRF450X and ate a few caffeine electrolyte pills. I blitzed test 5 and felt great. After finishing test 6 I knew that nobody could match what kind of shit I had just done. It was like perfect poetry in motion. Very speedy motion. ( I later learned that I overalled the test by a considerable amount of time.) The last test was the big ten miler and I was ready to squeeze every bit out of it. It started with a couple miles of super steep downhill bob sled deep ditch rear brake locked trench warfare. One mistake would be a huge over the bars, After dropping what felt like thousands of feet the course turned to two track. Fast moister soaked sandy two track with sweeping corners and 5th gear water bar launch ramps. I was giving my tall desert gearing everything it had and loving it. Then the technical rocky climbs came. This was why the final test was for A class only. I made not one mistake. Feeling strong I could almost taste the overall trophy, a huge vintage snowshoe mounted with a trail sign placard. It would look perfect above the mantle... "FUCK!" - The first of many to come out of my mouth after my brake pedal grazed a slab-rock in the middle of the trail causing me to loose balance as my bike and I fell 15 or 20 feet down into a creek. I burned my hand on my rear brake rotor as I flopped my bike off of me. The brake pedal had punched a hole in my clutch cover and there was gear oil all over everything. The rocky creek bed was a rage of foot deep water cascading off one boulder to the next. everything was slicker than greased moose shit. There was a barb wire fence directly downstream so up and out was my only option. I knew my race was over but I knew I needed to get my self out of the shit hole. There were tree limbs and branches as big as my legs everywhere and my poor beat to shit clutch was rattling like some vintage Ducati. With some end over end bike flopping, clutch abuse(No, murder!), and a bunch more "FUCK!"s we got back on the trail ten minutes after ejecting from it, crossing the finish line only a half mile away. I finished the last test in 140th out of the 230 entries, 10 minutes off of the leader, 20th overall for the day. So close yet so far. Could always be worse. Much. And a finish is a finish regardless of position or engine oil quantity...

On the next episode of flogging Molly: will the old red head Honda get a trophy.....