Earlier this year I wrote a story about my friend who almost sliced his dome off his head with his snowmobile. I was getting worried because I was starting to run short on ideas to write blogs about, but just like always Mason prevails at the last second to give me a great topic.
It’s Spring!
As you all most likely know and hopefully have been outside to feel, the weather is slowly warming. Although we are all stuck in quarantine, we can go outside a little bit and feel the weather. Mason and I have a hobby that involves Dirt Biking. For us, quarantine is just a great excuse for us not to go to school and ride as much as possible. Although I can’t ride with him, it still is a great time for use to ride.
This picture is of me getting a ride session in during quarantine.
This little story I am about to tell you is not documented on camera because of circumstances I stated before. We are all stuck in quarantine, but it still gives me a funny story to tell and hopefully entertain the people reading it.
For years and years competitiveness has played a huge part in any sport ever played. I want to focus on Motocross though, because I specialize in Motorsports. But motocross makes the best example because the want and will to win is worse than in any other sport. When you play a game of basketball, you have a team of winners, could be up to 15 players that get to celebrate a win. When you race motocross, only one person stands atop the podium triumphant at the end of the night.
When you think about fighting in sports there always seems to be a reason, or provoking action. In motocross it happens every race. When you have to spend time with your competition constantly there is going to be “beef” with other riders so the tensions are already high going into race night. But besides the competitive spirit, words, or body parts, can be exchanged after races. I want to focus on that and what might cause that.
Block Passing
When you think about a race, there is 22 riders, pushing as hard as they can to win. When you are in the moment, you must do whatever is necessary to win at any given moment. One thing that the riders might do to pass another rider is a block pass. Where you come into the inside of a corner and block the other rider from making it around the corner like so.
This is an example of a rather clean block pass. Not much contact but it caused number 21 to alter his path and he was not able to stay in front of number 7, who happens to be the fastest rider of all time. But when you are fighting for a victory on any given night, you might be a little too aggressive, looking like this.
If you take a close look at this photo, number 12 is making a block pass in a much more aggressive manner. He has made enough contact to cause number 51’s bike to come off the ground. This was played on live TV and number 51 wasn’t able to regain balance or leverage and he blew off the track and hit a tough block and crashed, which caused him to drop from 2nd, to 9th place. As you could guess, he wasn’t happy with this to say the least.
This is why we get fights in motocross. Because riders fight fight fight to be able to win a race and someone makes a “dirty move” and causes them to fall back in the race. Although to the naked eye it might look dirty, it is far from it. Making a pass that takes another rider out is a fine line between dirty and aggressive. So not much action can be taken. But riders can still get mad over this. This is just the competitiveness in racing.
Right above you can see that these two riders aren’t happy with each other at this given moment. In this instance, Bradshaw, number 8, was not happy that number 15 made a pass that caused him to get pushed off the track. But Bradshaw thought that his pass was legit and clean. Which causes a little bit of an exchange in words between the two of them that was entertaining to watch at the least.
Here you see number 28, Peick, throwing a punch at another rider. This caused both of the riders consequences, but throughout the race you could seriously tell that there was some underlying hate going on during all of this. Number 55 had taken out number 28 many times that night. It was almost as if he had a target and all he wanted to do was sabotage Peick. After a couple times of this happening, Peick was fed up and he decided that he wasn’t taking this anymore. So he decided to throw a couple of hay makers at number 55 to get his point across.
In conclusion
Competing in sports has been around for centuries. Most of which you see in sports like football, or basketball, and conditional sports like that, but people don’t get to see competitiveness in racing much.
I raced motocross for a lot of years. When people look at motocross, or any sport that is raced or played professionally or at a competitive level, all they see is sunshine and rainbows. No one really takes into consideration the mental stress and physical stress that these people are putting on their body. Just last week, I explained about the young rider who broke his collarbone after racing with much success. This takes a toll on these riders. Although I could talk about any sport, my blog is oriented around Motorsports so I am going to talk about motocross.
Motocross riders have some of the most grueling training in the world, out of any sport. Each race can consist of 20 minutes and a full lap of riding. At your top pace. The bikes these riders ride, are averaged around 240 pounds and can make up to 60 horsepower. Muscling around that much bike for up to 23 minutes is the most grueling tasks one will ever see.
You can look at it this way. Imagine carrying around 240 pounds. Now, muscle it around and imitate going over jumps and through rhythm sections and through a set of whoops. All while listening to fans scream, and having the pressure of other riders right on your tail. This would degrade someone in the most extremes of ways.
Training Programs
This is a photo of a training facility for some of the top riders. Before I go further, no those are not pools, they are bodies of water to be able to collect and wet down the track. Back to the point, in order to train a rider, you have to work on things like, cardio, strength, stamina, mental capacity, mental strength, and all while maintaining good form and keeping from getting hurt and, also, you have to do maintenance to your bike almost every day. This can take a toll on a person quick. A lot of training programs consist of biking extensive amounts and then jogging or running farther. Then there is a lot of gym work to build the correct muscles to be able to ride. Then there is peculiar riding with timed sessions to make sure you can ride at a fast pace and keep riding hard through the whole session of a race.
How is riding mentally, and physically, demanding?
Racing dirt bikes is a crazy sport to participate in. When you are traveling at that high of speeds, and jumping that far, and competing that hard. You are going to get hurt. I personally, broke multiple knuckles, a rib, two fingers, my tibia, my tibia, and had 3 concussions. And all of these, but 1 I rode through and continued to race being injured.
An example I would use is pictured at left. This rider crashed in a corner, and got his arm caught in a competitors wheel and it tore almost every ligament and muscle in his arm and did much more nerve damage etc. The surgeon recommended amputation. There is thousands more examples but this kick starts me into my next point. It is the mental game.
Imagine sitting in the hospital and the doctor says “we recommend amputation”. As a professional athlete. That had to just destroy him as a person. He doesn’t know if he will ever ride again. Or every even win a race again. He decided to fix his arm, which was over an 8 month recovery process. But he got it done, and now he is racing. On another note, you can imagine a rider who trains all week and goes as hard as they can, and they know they are faster and better than other riders but they can’t win. They just keep losing. They are cutting family out of their lives, and losing friends because of how busy they are to train and train but they just fall short every time. That is the most degrading thing to a person’s soul and mental game. In my opinion, the winner is the strongest mental rider.
In conclusion, I just wanted to bring forth to peoples attention how much work and effort goes into riding motocross. And for that matter, any sport that is ever played. Trying to keep healthy and keep stable while trying to impress people and keep making money and win your events while balancing family and friends but still keeping time to train and train is a very difficult thing to do. I just wanted to bring that to people’s awareness.
I talk a lot about my experiences as a person who loves the sport but I wanted to take a minute to talk about the sport itself and the people in it. With that being said, the first person I want to talk about is Jett Lawrence. Jett is 16 years old and has had a more successful career than some of the veterans in the sport already.
Early life and Career
Jett Lawrence growing up had always lived in the shadow of his older brother Hunter, who is also a professional in the sport. No one really knew who Jett was and Jett didn’t make much of a name for himself in his early career. Until his amateur career, Jett was not a well known rider in the sport yet. Besides winning races here and there, the only name that was heard was Hunter Lawrence, his older brother.
Emerging from the shadows.
When Jett turned 14, he started his amateur career. Which is basically the step you take before going pro. It would be the equivalent to playing college basketball. When he started racing at the amateur level, he emerged and made a huge name for himself. The kid couldn’t be beat, winning multiple area qualifiers and winning one of the biggest events in the sport, Loretta Lynn’s. (Compare it to winning a college championship). At this point, Jett was getting offers all over and riding for professional teams just waiting for his age to turn right to be able to ride in the big leagues.
Racing in the Pro’s
Jett Lawrence started in the pros and he was underrated. People didn’t expect him to win. I mean you can’t blame them, he was 16 and barely had experience because it was his rookie year and is was his 1st race in the pros ever. But the gate dropped and he was leading the race and no one could catch him. He was proving everyone wrong and at 16, he was about to make history. That is until, about 5 minutes left in the race and he made a mistake and crashed. Second place passed him and Jett wasn’t able to make the pass again. Although it was heart breaking, you can only move forward and improve from it.
Week 2 of the Monster Energy Supercross.
Moving into week two, Jett had something to prove. He was still in the championship race and still was in the position to be very successful. As the race started it was just how it was the week before, Jett was out front and couldn’t be caught. Everyone was just hoping and praying that he could keep the race under control but later in the race he started to lose stamina, and his lead went from 13 seconds to just about 2 seconds. On the last lap of the race, he crashed again, this time breaking his collarbone and knocking himself out cold. Therefor, he didn’t finish the race.
Moving forward.
Moving forward is easy. Jett is the fastest rider out there. He just needs to heal up and get his stamina up. When that happens, he will be unbeatable. People have to remember that he is only 16 years old. Most likely, he has more than 16 years of riding in his life yet. But I do think he is fast enough and smart enough to do great things in the sport of motocross and supercross.
Earlier this year, around February, northern Wisconsin got hit with a lot of snow that seemed like it was never going to stop. For most people, that is a burden, but for me and my friends, it was the best thing that could have happened. I am a huge Motorsport fan. So when it comes to snow, I am always happy to break out the snowmobiles. This year, at one point, we had upwards of 2 to 3 feet of snow with no drifts. Areas where the wind pushed it had snow that was over my head. This is every snowmobile rider’s dream. So, we went riding.
We found a lot of snow, some spots were too deep to ride, which doesn’t make sense right? Like they are snowmobiles, they should be able to ride in the snow, we were brutally mistaken.
The Field
We were out exploring spots, we knew we didn’t have much more time in the day before we had to go in. We needed to find somewhere to ride that really got our adrenaline pumping. I had a spot in mind but I didn’t think that it was going to be as good as it was. I convinced the guys to come take a look and we were thoroughly impressed by what we found. Drifts that were over my head! Snow that stood naturally to my waist, jumps to be hit, we knew that this was the “Mac- daddy” spot we had been looking for all day.
There was one spot in particular that really caught our attention. There was a snow drift that stood about 10 feet in height. It was more of a cliff than a drift. I hit it with my snowmobile and jumped about 20 feet off the ground and I knew I didn’t want to touch it anymore. It was just too big to hit as a straight jump
If it was too big to jump, then what could we do?
I am going to give a little background information about snowmobiling in the mountains. there is a very skilled maneuver called a “reentry”. This move is very dangerous and hard to do. You go up the snowbank, or drift, or ramp. Facing the upward direction. You hit the jump and start to rotate the snowmobile back down into the landing. When you land, you rotate your snowmobile about 180 degrees and tip your skis back down into the landing and ride away. Although this sounds easy, it is extremely hard and takes a lot of skill and focus to do.
If you notice here, the rider came off the jump and is starting to make his rotation back into the landing. The picture somewhat helps to show how hard this really is.
So how did my friend mess up
Although it took some encouragement, we got my friend to try it. He rode away confident as could ever be. But his confidence ran short when he pulled up to the jump and had a total lapse in mental capacity. He took one leg off, and swung it over the snowmobile which is a NO-GO. That pulls your weight back into the bottom of the jump and pulls the snowmobile off the ramp and causes it to roll right over top of you. Which is exactly what happened to Mason (my friend). I watched in horror from the top of the drift as he disappeared into the bottom of the valley being sucked under his snowmobile, listening to the track shred at whatever it could.
A snowmobile track
For those who don’t know, a snowmobile track is made of vulcanized rubber, which is extremely hard chunks of rubber, also there can be metal studs. These are to get better traction. They are basically just nails in your track that help you catch ground when you ride. Mason had these. So I was extremely worried when I watched the snowmobile roll on top of him.
Back to the story…
I saw the snowmobile roll atop him. I jumped up from the snow because I instantly though the worst. Knowing how the track works and seeing past injuries I know what could have happened. I took a video of the incident, but I didn’t catch what my eyes saw when I first peeked over the hill. I saw him crawl out from under the snowmobile. To say the least I was spooked. I saw him crawl up from under the snowmobile and look at me and we locked eyes and he threw his hands up in the air like he just won 2 dollars on a lottery ticket. He was okay but surely wasn’t excited.
The Aftermath…
So obviously he didn’t get decapitated. But he very well could have. When I jumped down to help him I knew he was okay, but wanted to make sure nothing was wrong. He escaped with minor injuries, he had a cut on his hand. But he destroyed his jacket. The track did its number on the right arm of his jacket. Also, his helmet looks like something with big claws scraped across the lower part, near his neck. The track had came down and landed on him scraping his arm and hand along with his helmet. He threw his hand up in fear to try to stop the snowmobile out of instinct. Although we can look back on it now and laugh. In the moment it was kind of scary. Needless to say, I think Mason should leave the big stunts to me. I hope you look forward to hearing new stories from me with each blog post. I made a list of pictures with captions explaining each step of the process and how it happened.
If you look, you can see here he flung his leg over the snowmobile. This is where things went wrong right away. Right here the snowmobile goes up the drift, but because his leg is slung over the side, it pulls the momentum of the snowmobile down and to the left rather than up. Starts to roll, and you can see him get sucked under. This is after he rolled out of under it, he managed to tip it up a little bit when he went to jump out. Here is his jacket. You can’t see much but you can see his helmet broke and wasn’t in good condition.
All my life I have lived around dirt bikes and riding motorized vehicles. I raced dirt bikes for a vast majority of my life. When you are younger, buying bikes is easy because you have very few options of colors and sizes. But when you get older and into racing, you can choose from many different colors and sizes of bikes. So when the opportunity came up to test ride this bike, I jumped all over the opportunity.
The track was extremely muddy but it really was still fun to ride.
Why it’s hard to choose a bike.
Choosing a bike is a really hard task. There is a lot of information that you need to know about going into buying a bike. Nowadays, bikes are not cheap by any means. If I wanted to spend 5,000 dollars on a bike, I would not be able to buy a very nice one. New bikes are upwards of 10,000. That is insane. So I always want to make sure I get the bike that I want and to put myself in the best position to win. You can normally break dirt bikes into 2 categories. Four strokes and 2 strokes.
Four strokes
Four stroke dirt bikes are becoming extremely intuitive. These bikes have electric start, digital tuning and mapping, and even traction control on some. These bikes are a lot easier to ride, but are also much harder to do maintenance to and a lot more expensive to fix as well. This is what makes it a hard decision.
Two Strokes
Two strokes are crazy bikes. These are a lot harder to ride and take much more skill. These can make it a lot harder to win because you get extremely tired quicker. But, these are very cheap and easy to fix. Both bikes have their ups and downs but is very hard to make a decision.
My experience on the Ktm
When I first got on the bike, I was almost overwhelmed by the amount of power that was put to the ground on the bike. It was insane how the bike wanted to just pull out from under me. The track was muddy but still fun to ride and this is also very good for testing because you can really feel how it handles the mud and how well it rides in those bad conditions.
I instantly felt comfortable though. Like I belonged on the bike. I started to pick up speed and style very quickly. The bike really fit me well too because I am a lot taller and the bike is a little bit taller. Two strokes are also a little bit lighter so they sit up taller which helps with my height and being more comfortable on it. If I am being honest. I have never really picked it up that quick on a bike before. I could scream around the track no problem and it felt completely comfortable and not sketchy at all. It was a very good feeling.
This bike retails for about 8,500 dollars. With the right sponsorship the bike wouldn’t be too expensive. I definitely will be looking into moving forward with purchasing this bike in the future. This bike was crazy fast and felt very good. All in all, I give it a very good rating and I had and amazing time riding it!
Full Throttle or No Throttle 