I was hit by a Land Cruiser the first time I ever rode a motorcycle. It was late spring in Seattle, when an absentminded mother of two teenage girls failed to yield at a red light, tagging the front wheel of the 1989 Honda NS-50 I’d borrowed from my friend, Joel, with the front bumper of her beige colored Cruiser. I was thrown headfirst into the driver’s door of the Toyota, leaving a watermelon sized dent. I had just turned 25, and aside from a few rips on an old Suzuki RM80 when I was eight years old, this was my first proper motorcycle ride.
I was fine, but Joel never let me live it down.
I turned 40 years-old this summer. I was supposed to enter two enduro races in Washington while I was up there this past June, but the world has a way of slowing you down just as you get going, you know? But with some help from my friends at Kawasaki who’ve loaned me a 2025 KX250X to race for remainder of the season, I’ve signed up for the Coconino Trail Riders’ Flagstaff Enduro, which takes place on October 4th. This will be my second ever race, and one I’ve been told is “rocky as hell.”
How did I get here, though? From leaving watermelon shaped imprints in the side of overland vehicles to signing up for off-road races in Arizona? Am I having a mid-life crisis (read: probably), or is this the culmination of fifteen years spent searching for my place in the motorcycle-verse? I'd like to think it's the latter. That I've grown as a rider and am seeking some kind of validation, as egotistical as that sounds. But every journey starts somewhere, and mine began with a bang, literally.
In an effort to right my wrongs, I bought the little two-stroke NS-50 from my friend, Joel, and rode it a handful of times after the accident. Soon I felt the need for something a bit bigger and exchanged the bespoke baby sport bike for a 1980 Kawasaki KZ440 B-1. At 25 years old, I was about as green as they come, with only a few rides under my belt. But the fire had been lit, and even though an inattentive soccer mom had tried to kill me on my first foray, I was undeterred.
The KZ440 was my gateway drug. Donning a racing helmet I’d acquired during my days as an auto scribe, along with a cheap leather jacket I picked up in Italy earlier that year, I was the Café Racer cool kid I had dreamed of being - only I didn’t know what I was doing behind the handlebar. The bike was a perpetual turd and my ambition far outweighed my ability. Soon, though, I found myself working for Touratech-USA, an adventure motorcycle outfitter based in Seattle and was thrown into the ADV world headlong.
I had a desire to ride off-road, but didn't know where to begin. A dirt bike would mean I needed a truck to take it places, and an adventure motorcycle was cost prohibitive. The dual-sport segment appealed to me, but I didn't know much about those type of motorcycles, save for the fact that most of the people I had seen riding them didn't look nearly as cool as I thought I did on my vintage Kawasaki.
I was at an impasse.
During my first week at Touratech-USA, I was asked to join a scouting party headed for the newly opened DirtFish Rally School about an hour from our office. It was January in the Pacific Northwest. Slate grey stretched across the sky, the sun all but a distant memory. I showed up to work that morning in my Italian leathers expecting to ride the sixty miles into the mountains wearing nothing but jeans and a jacket.
My co-workers soon had me in an old touring suit, two sizes too big, but weather resistant and substantially warmer than what I’d arrived in. Out front was a BMW F650GS Dakar, outfitted with everything you’d need to circumnavigate the globe. It was tall, heavy and more motorcycle than I had ever ridden. Little did I know that scouting trip would comprise of a few laps of around the DirtFish property, which included what I saw as an obstacle course laid out to test my off-road riding skills (Spoiler Alert: I had none).
Ten minutes into our ride around the property I had managed to bury the back tire of my GS in two feet of mud. Standing at its side looking woefully incompetent, waiting as my boss turned back to un-fuck the situation, I quickly realized I was in over my head. And although I survived the scouting mission unscathed, I was aware that my skills on a motorcycle, particularly off the pavement, needed to improve. Enter Iain Glynn.
A member of Team USA that competed in the 2010 GS Trophy - a 2000-kilometer-long adventure race across South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique put on by BMW Motorrad - Iain was acting as ‘Chief Riding Officer’ for the ADV outfitter I was working for. Although he wasn't there for that scouting ride to DirtFish, and didn't see how much I had struggled, he saw the excitement in my eyes - that dangerous flash of dumb that hits a man in his mid-twenties who (finally) found motorcycling.
So, he took me under his proverbial wing and nurtured my desire to ride in the dirt.
First, a 2003 Suzuki DR-Z 400S would take the place of the KZ440 in my garage. Stripped of its unnecessaries, I spent weekends in the woods with Iain and other staff members, acquiring arm-pump and an assortment of bruises before returning to work on Monday. A proper dirt bike was the next logical step, and the DR-Z transformed into a Yamaha TT-R250 that had circled her way around our shop, settling in my lap with a license plate adorned to her tail. The TT-R served me well for a while as both dirt bike and dual-sport, but a renewed interest in surfing soon took up my free time, followed by a divorce and an exit from the State of Washington entirely.
Over the next ten years I owned a variety of motorcycles. A Yamaha XT225 was my weapon of choice for a month’s long adventure down the Baja Peninsula, followed by an Indian Scout that I put 26,000 miles on in the first year I owned it. Another DR-Z fell into my lap, then a Honda CRF250X followed by a KTM 500 EXC-F. But it wasn’t until I pulled the trigger on a brand-new Beta 300 RR that my desire to go from casual dirt rider to enduro racer began to take shape.
I’ve spent most of these last ten years living in Baja California, in the city of Ensenada on the peninsula's western coast. From my garage, a network of technical single-track trails was only a ten-minute ride up the road. I found a group of friends to ride with. Local boys, most of whom had been racing in Baja since they were sixteen. I was, yet again, in over my head. Now enter Jaffe Wilde.
Raised on the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana, Jaffe lives up to his last name. When I met him, he had recently come into some money and decided that spending it racing hard enduros and rallies around the world was the best use of his newly acquired coin. He came to Baja for a long weekend and joined me on a dual-sport ride down south.
We became fast friends, as often happens when people experience both pleasure and pain together behind the handlebar of a motorbike. Like Iain, he shepherded me into enduro riding, encouraging me to increase my seat time, tackle trails that I would otherwise have avoided, and would circle back to walk me through (sometimes literally) the technical parts of our “la vuelta,” a 26-mile single track loop that he and the locals had carved out over the course of a year. My skills increased, but how could I be sure?
So, last summer, during a stint in the Pacific Northwest visiting friends and family, I opted to put a few miles on my Beta in the backcountry where I began this off-road journey. I quickly realized, though, that the tires that had served me well in the rocky, desert terrain outside of Ensenada, weren’t going to cut it in the woods. A quick internet query located True North Motos, a Beta dealer about 45-mintues to the south of Seattle. When I stopped in for a fresh set of IRC tires, a flyer for the Cascade Family Motorcycle Club’s (CFMC) Black Bear Enduro caught my eye.
Hosted by the CFMC since 1992, the enduro would prove to be the assessment of off-road motorcycling skills that I sought. I entered myself into the “VET C” class, prepped the bike as best I could, and took to the trails at the foot of Mount Rainier in the interim to acclimate myself to the often wet, densely wooded and root-ball laden landscape I would be racing through in a few weeks’ time. Aside from a local Poker Run in the Pacific Northwest ten years prior, and a narrowly completed effort at the LA-Barstow-to-Vegas in 2014, this was, effectively, the first time I would race a motorcycle.
“After you do all that you should be really nervous, but once the gun goes off, you can scream like a child for the rest of the race.”
Jaffe’s words of encouragement (?) lingered in my mind as I set off on the first ‘Special Test’ of the ISDE style Black Bear Enduro. I would race two laps, each about 30-miles in length, augmented by transit sections and ‘Special Tests.’ I finished dead last in my class, and 52nd out of 64 racers overall.
Although my first enduro race was a success by most measures - I didn't die, finished the race and was even awarded a pin for my efforts, my inabilities far outweighed, well, my abilities. I was slow. My overall fitness was akin to someone who'd just gotten off the couch. I struggled in the technical bits and couldn't make up time where I should have. And even though I had ridden from a green flag to a checkered one, I wasn't happy with my performance. But you've got to start somewhere.
So with that being said, here's a look at my tentative race schedule for the remainder of the year:
- Coconino Trail Riders Enduro - Flagstaff, AZ - October 4/5
- Jackrabbits MC Sprint Enduro - Johnson Valley, CA - November 1
- TRMC Hare Scramble - Laughlin, NV - November 8
- FASTR Enduro - Wickenburg, AZ - February 14/15
I suppose my intention with this ‘Super Green’ series is to show you that racing isn’t something you have to be born into. That you don’t need a vinyl-wrapped Sprinter van, sponsors and a brand-new bike every other year. That even at 40 years old and with only one race under my belt, there’s still time. Time to learn the skills and techniques you see guys like Billy Bolt and Cooper Abbott exhibit almost effortlessly. That even though, like me, you might be behind the eight-ball a bit, that doesn’t mean you can’t give it the ol' college try, testing yourself in ways that only racing really can - because like Hemingway famously said, “there are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
