Flow, Failure, Redemption

Jeebus, where to start?

I was an upstanding respectable streetbiker when I met him. Look at me now...

Now that right there is funny, I don't care who you are.

Sorry folks, a real update is coming soon... life's just a little hectic right now...

Mommy, Mommy! Ned made me think I could climb some crazy shit that I couldn't!

Mommy Mommy,

Les and Ned have cost me thousands in bike repairs, health insurance, spare parts, hotels, gas, pre-running, tires, entry fees, memberships, the list goes on... Oh why did I have to go and get talked into racing??? Now when is the next one???

Jake

Before I get to this, a few words about enduros:

The very basic point of a cross-country race, to me, is riding cross country. There are trails criss-crossing every bit of land in the world, and the sport of enduro started as riding the terrain of our world smoother, better, faster.

While nothing could be more practical than that starting point, the rules of an enduro are a bit arcane. In its historical form, an enduro required the participant to stick to a defined time schedule over entirely unknown terrain. Trick is, the time schedule was artificially fast in places, so that everyone ran late. The fastest rider should be able to run the least late, and there's your race.

BUT, and this is a big but, running early carried twice the penalty as running late, so a hothead could easily wipe out their advantage in speed by using it in the wrong place.

In this way, the race was equal parts strategy and thinking on your feet, and riding. A good enduro racer will try to figure out what the organizer was thinking, and ride ahead of schedule where they think they can get away with it, to offset the risk that the trail will get tougher and they'll be made late.

Another historical feature of enduros, especially nationals, was that they were long and hard. Scratch that- they were Long and Hard, in a way that fully deserves the capital letters.

At their best, these enduros are an all day game of cat and mouse between the rider and the organizers, and the intensity of staying on the game not only physically but also mentally is what attracted many of us to the sport.

Apparently, this kind of event does not appeal to motocrossers accustomed to applying the latest graphics kit, keeping track of the most fashionable sunglass and footwear options, and occasionally circulating a known track within sight of the truck to collect trophies in short, brainless races that reward only speed, not strategy or conserving energy or equipment. Some of us liked it this way.

To appeal to these heathens, the AMA decided to remake the enduro circuit. Gone is are the secrets of timekeeping- they tell you when to go fast and when you don't have to. Gone too are the Long and Hard days- these events are about half the length they used to be, and typically over much easier terrain, where minor differences in speed add up to a major difference in results. Hard terrain separates the men (and ladies) from the boys and girls. Easy terrain turns relatively minor differences in corner speed and braking the deciding factors in results.

But I digress, and maybe some of that is the G&T talking. More Bombay Sapphire, and Big K brand Tonic, this last just to piss off Mutineer and Kbasa, please. In any case, new enduros have gotten rid of much of the cross country aspect, by making contrived special tests, often with purpose built obstacles, as well as the thinking part of the game. In my mind, at least, new enduros are therefore not actually enduros, but once again, I digress.

And I'm making excuses, too, but I'll get to that.

Ah-HA! I knew there was some sort of chemistry behind these brilliant, adjective-laden diatribes...as was Edward Abbey's and Timothy Leary's strategy. Great minds think alike.

I can't pretend to weave the sort of interesting objectives on life and riding as Neduro can, but I have to add here that the thing that ruined Enduros in their purest form, and at their peak, was nothing more than the enduro computer.

And, as any instrument that improves the accuracy of timekeeping does, it added many decimal places of precision in a revolution that made it indispensable to the serious enduro racer. This begun a cascade of changes in the way an enduro was run that were somethign akin to the dawn of the jet era in aviation; there was no going back unless the very rules of the game itself changed.

Where the course used to be so long and hard that staying on a minute was indeed a difficult task, now the computer did for you what your gut, head, odometer and wristwatch used to be neccessary to do. This automatically enabled a lot of riders to think less and ride more, and consequently we inadvertantly and steadily filtered for more and more of the folks who were more and more "heathenous."

To be competitive, however, said heathens had to be financially endowed enough to afford $500-700 worth of computerized timekeeping equipment to be competitive. Oops - now we filtered for well-off heathens - another inadvertant step away from the original game of simple challenge.

Because the mere milliseconds acrued in special tests now mattered, courses could be shorter and the spread of finishers still appear the same. Land access issues furthered this phenomenon to the point that courses and demands on the riders were very close to those that the etnies-wearing, trophy-girlfriend toting, giant-Fox-sticker-on-the-back-window-of-their-lifted-truck motoheads could be competitive in - and now we have what the rest of the former purists detest: "qualifier" style enduros, where anyone who's fast and can make it around the course is competitive.

ANd of course, the AMA has no choice but to embrace the masses in order to keep attendance at levels that keep sponsors and money flowing into the sport - so the racing has regressed to what we have now. It's been one of those things that changed so slowly that no one noticed until some event horizon came along that seemingly changed everything all at once, even though most of hte changes took place long before that one change brought them all to light.

I hope that helps. I need another SoCo & Sprite.

I'ts been a week, come on Ned, I need a fix...

Jake

He may be a little busy.

Link

I'm cool with the wait.

So ... the secret to improving lap times is to suspend a pair of Levi's with fishing line or something and work out the aim/trajectory to leap naked and land fully clothed...?

Moto kung-fu.



Um ... how about a Haiku??

Jump to put pants on?
Then Ned will make moto fast!
Hope to win, not crash.


I'm struggling with this whole Zen thing here Ned...

Damn this is good. :huh








Where's that DRZ I was lookin' at in the Flea Market?

hilslamer, you definitely nailed the dynamic of the morphing of the enduro in the U.S. for sure. I started racing enduros in '74, so I'm fairly familiar with logistics of the old watch and route sheet method. Enduro computers definitely affected a classic and "thinking man's" element of enduro racing...not completely removed, but dramatically "dented". I'm in Texas, and our TSCEC circuit still uses the old exacting time element of scoring at each check, but computers have changed the face of this element.

I noticed recently that another technology element has eaten away at the innocence of enduro racing...the Chatterbox. Even in the realm of an annual 10-12 amateur race circuit, some riders are using the Chatterbox to communicate checkpoint info to another following rider to improve results. Geez...what's next?...real-time sattelite feedback to locate checkpoints?...LOL! Yeah, you can try to legislate technology out of such events, but it's amazing how creative some can hide said technology to gain advantage.

On one hand, you get the impression that many of these riders have lost the true and satisfying reason for racing in the first place, but then you realize that we're now using water-cooled dirt bikes with 12" of travel...so the romantic notion of "turning back the clock"...no pun intended on an enduro discussion ...isn't really an option.

Still...enduros strike me as the last bastion of pure off road motorcycle competition in its truest sense. But that's just a personal perspective and perhaps not even worth $.02.

That's damn good advice. I learned that the hard way roadracing, years ago. Its not simply staying on the throttle longer, that just leads to faster crashes. You have to have a plan.

I really enjoy your writing and this old fart hopes to be in a clininc of yours someday.

scfrank

There is another , I think more important change : bikes are reliable now I raced in my youth in Italy, in 1979 and 80 , and the placement of a race were basically made by three-thirds
The last third were the DNF's
The second third were the DNF's at the second (or third) tour
The firsts were the finishers, and sometimes were the time penalties to make the list ...
Blown tires ...so many before "mousse", blown suspensions, clutch burnt, fouled plugs, bent frames, broken frames and so on ...

Today bikes are really much better -not that it really makes a difference : a pair of years ago an Italian magazine tested a 1978 KTM 250 GS versus a Yamaha WR250F on the same "enduro test" rode by a great enduro champ , Giorgio Grasso, former world champ. the overall difference in time was below 10% of improvement ...
As the rider said, the difference is that now he may ride a race season with small work, when once the bike had to be rebuilt (e.g. frame soldered, forks straightened) every two races...

I owe an update, but in addition to everything else, it's been a busy morning here.



No, it's not mine. Sorta. (As usual, there's a long story. We'll get to that in due time...).

Doing a little bike shuttling for GP?

pssst...... I got to ride it today.......

Hilslamer, TNC, and Giorgio, very interesting points, all!

Giorgio- I'm fascinated by the test you refer to. My experience has been that in racing situations, we are as fast as we understand how to be, plus or minus a few percent for setup, conditioning, and so on, with rare exceptions like whoops, which are very sensitive to setup. A few percent is meaningful in the context of competitive results... but it's only a few percent.

What I mean is, each time I hit a new plateau of riding, it comes from gaining understanding of one point or another, like line selection through a corner, or where to open the throttle, or whatever. This understanding applies to all bikes, and while some work better than others, once the understanding is there, I can do what I couldn't before. It's fascinating to see this quantified.

Before I get to that, a few words about... something else. Anything else.

And it's completely off the hook, isn't it?