Sometimes Baja Bites!

#33 Crash Induced M.I.A.

Happy 2014 to everyone and I hope your year is starting out just as you planned, Fantastic!  I have been missing in Action for a couple of months now due to…………wait for it….a crash. Doh!

Let us rewind to November and the Baja 1000. Our team was on top with wins in the 250 and 500 events, so heading into this race was not a must win scenario. It was more of a ride using your head and get the bike to the finish scenario.  The first two riders, Steve Williams and Marc Prince, did their part and handed the bike off to me at mile 193 at about 5:30 am. I rode at a reasonable pace and still caught several riders in the infamous San Felipe whoop section. No issues, no swaps, no almost crashing anywhere. I made the scheduled pit stop and continued on south toward CoCo’s corner to hand the bike over to Doug Smith for the next section. I had pre run this section and raced it several times in the past few years so I knew exactly what to expect.

That is exactly what bothered me. This section starts out as a very fast (almost 100mph) mixture of dirt and sand road. I actually don’t mind this part too bad, but then it deteriorates very quickly into a whooped out mess with some deep ditches and scattered rocks. Then it turns REALLY UGLY by becoming some of the worst rocky whooped out crap you would ever not want to ride a motorcycle on. I was well aware of this and had voiced my concern out loud several times to anyone willing to listen to me snivel. So I actually approached it a bit more cautiously than usual since we didn’t have to win to secure the series.

So now I had slowed considerably (40 to 45 mph) and was feeling like it would be a decent pace to balance safety and speed. Let me point out a quick side note here, the previous day I had done my last pre run in this section. I had used the Liquid Image goggles that allowed me to record and verbalize what I thought of this nasty section. I made comments on camera that this was the worst and scariest part of my ride since you could hit an unseen rock and get into serious trouble at any time with absolutely no warning. So take a wild guess at what happened while I was just riding along minding my own business. Yup, I hit a rock I never even saw. All of a sudden I am heading off the course while being tossed from the bike at the same time. I landed in a large pile of boulders and actually saw the big boulder that stopped my forward momentum……..Instantly!  

I impacted the boulder squarely with my FLY chest protector and knocked the wind out of myself for what seemed like a full minute. I couldn’t even take a breath! So as I waited to catch my breath I made sure everything else was in working order, like legs and arms. Good news was that I could move and feel everything, but I still couldn’t breathe. Then I felt pain in my left hand and thought, oh great I have broken my wrist. When I finally did breathe and got to my feet I saw that my left hand had been smashed into this pile of rocks and had damaged the fingers by the looks of what I saw in the glove. It wasn’t pretty but I decided since I couldn’t do anything about it at the moment I would not investigate any further because it didn’t look good.  (All four fingers were broken with the ends of two of them being pulverized beyond repair). Although unknown, the wrist was also dislocated. But I would not know this until two months later in January.   I know what you are thinking and I will try to explain later.

Right now I needed to get the bike up and get it going to hand it off to Doug at the next exchange spot. The reality of how damaged I was hit home when I tried to pick the bike up and couldn’t use the left hand at all. I got it up and restarted, which surprised the heck out of me after such a violent crash, but realized I couldn’t use the hand to pull in the clutch. The bike was off the course and in a very rocky area so pushing one handed was pretty much out of the question. I took a deep breath and used what was left of my fingers and my shoulder strength to pull the clutch in, ONCE! With the bike underway I got back on the course and was making a plan as to how I would cover the next 80 miles to hand off the bike while riding with one hand, since the injured left hand was held in my lap.

Part two will cover mechanical issues, good Samaritans’, helicopter ride, Mexican hospital/clinics and getting back to the good ole USA.

Typing one handed is wearing me out.

#33

“Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”