ODO: 315,043
Now that we’ve settled into our new lives in the Bay area for a bit, its time for a bit of reflection. We’re going to catch you up on our first few weeks on the road, pre-running and racing the Baja 1000.
We rented out the house and hit the road just over 7 months ago. The initial transition to our new life was a little bit fuzzy and muted, because the first course of business was to race the Baja 1000. Originally, our plan had been to leave in August or September if we could, but, well, you know how that goes. Getting to Baja in time to properly pre-run the race was our drop dead date, not to be missed.
Some people, some race teams, come to participate in the Baja 1000. Participating in the Baja 1000 is a bucket list worthy endeavor. Finishing that Baja 100, that is a HUGE accomplishment. And then there’s showing up to compete. To contend. To win.
You see, racing in Baja, when taken seriously is work. Of course, “we do it for fun”, but by no means is it all fun and games. I take it very seriously, WE take it very seriously. There’s a certain…gravitas. As a privateer team, we don’t have paid crew members. Everyone on our team is a volunteer. We don’t have mechanics on staff to re-prep our prerunners each night. We don’t even really HAVE prerunners! We are a group of like minded individuals taking time off work, time away from families, burning our own gas in our own trucks, all with a common goal.
Justin and I make a great team. We have raced several races together now, along with countless non-race related adventure miles. We both approach this in a similar fashion: as a job, as tasks to complete in a timely and orderly fashion, as work. You’re absolutely allowed to have fun at work, but at the end of the day, when you hop in the racecar and the visors go down and you dump the clutch, everybody gets to find out if you did your homework or not.
Lets get back to the beginning. We met up with Justin somewhere just North of the border on Nov 8th. The green flag dropped Nov 16th, just 8 days to get ready. Our section of the race started around Loreto BCS and finished up near the border of Baja states, between San Ignacio and Gurerro Negro, about 340 race miles. Point-to-point races in Baja are a logistical nightmare, not just because once the race starts everything has to move and go ‘somewhere’, but because the same is true for everything happening before the race. There is no home base, there is no “we’ll be back for dinner”. Our section in particular is tricky to pre-run, because not only is it 6 hours of highway from the end to get back to the beginning and start again, but it goes over a particularly rough section or terrain from the east side of the peninsula to the west.
Since we decided to start our new life living out of the Tacoma, its not quite as nimble through the desert as it used to be. This means that not only is Justin’s Dodge our only real prerunner vehicle this trip, it means that the Tacoma can’t really keep up chasing us in the dirt. So running the section from the East to the West, it would be extremely difficult to have KoKo meet us in San Juanico. We decided to plan and manage our pre-run much like we do when we’re out of adventure trips: have a loose plan, and sleep and eat whenever and wherever we can. No luxury hotels or 4 course meals for this crew. Lots of PB&J sandwiches…check. Jetboil for coffee in the morning and cup o noodles in the evening…check. One night after a particularly long and rough day we met up with KoKo and the Tacoma on a picturesque beach in paradise WELL after dark. Then, set up camp, build a fire, take a quick dip in the Sea of Cortez to wash the days silt off, and make some midnight spaghetti on the beach. Big shout out to Annie for making us spaghetti in advance, it saved us.
Allow me to explain this bit a little more. The Baja 1000 is a long race, this years was over 1300 miles in total. This is NOT a rally. There is nothing Gentlemanly about it. The green flag drops, and your official time stops when you cross the finish line. Based off of our expected start time, pace, and milage, we knew that most, if not all, of our racing was going to be done in the dark. Knowing this, starting 3-4 days before the race we started working on time-shifting our schedules to ready us for racing through the night. My personal preference, especially when I know we’re going to be racing through the night, is to do our initial pre-run during the day, and then repeat that at night.
The act, art, and purpose of pre-running: Obviously, during the day, its easier to see everything. The good, the bad, AND the ugly. If you’re racing to win, its all about prerunning. Yes, you can enter the Baja 1000, download the map, show up at the start line, and follow the purple line. You might even finish the race! But, on the other hand, if you want to go fast, there’s really no way around putting in the work. There is no substitute for knowing that if you take this corner a little wide there’s a cliff of death on the outside just out of view. There’s no other way to know that you can blast over this blind hill at the top of 4th gear with confidence, and you better scrub a little speed off and cheat slightly to the left over the next one to miss some tire eating rocks and set yourself up properly to drop into the wash that’s coming up. Copious notes and repetition. Find a section of course that’s confusing? Stop and look at it, make a plan, maybe even get out and walk it. Drive it, ask: how’d that go? Turn around and go back to the start. Now that you’ve seen it, do your notes make sense? Adjust, repeat. All of a sudden, the 3rd or 4th time through, you likely don’t even need the notes anymore, because you now know it. During the race, the simple act of reading that note will make you recall the experience of prerunning that section and you blast right through like it was nothing. Not because your notes were so good, but because you did the work.
Part 2 dropping next week, stay tunned!
