Dakar Rally 24

So who am I? Highly intellectual, intense, artistic and a fantastic biker – are a few words, nobody would use to describe me!  

I’m a 37 year old (at the time of posting) IT consultant and project manager, married to my wonderful wife -Lucy, who I met at Cardiff University. We’ve lived for 8 years in Borough/London Bridge before moving to Dulwich in South East London last year due to the kids being at schools here. We’re very lucky to have 3 great kids who are adorable although aged 5, 4 and 3 they are quite a handful!   

I took up/returned to biking  in 1997 when number 3 came along. Call it an early mid life/mid third? crisis or a selfish act of denial but it seemed like a good idea to revisit the dream of doing the Dakar Rally or at least get out and do something extreme once a month and join 300 to 400 other bikers (mostly unfit and in denial like myself) trying to slog/rip/survive their way around a 6mile cross country course for 3 hours at a time!  

I’d messed around with bikes as a kid but never owned or raced a proper off road bike, so getting back into it and learning how to race in my mid thirties didn’t give me to many advantages! 

A few highlights of my biking CV reads as follows: 

  

But for the full version we should start at the start (not something I always did in the subsequent races but we’ll get to that….)  

The Early Years…. 

As a small kid of about 5 or 6 growing up in an Essex village I can remember being pretty scared of the vicious snarling and red-hot monster of my first bike - a Puch 50! For those that know bikes you’ll know that this was no demon of the dirt, for those that don’t, this was the pee wee kiddie bike (for the time) you might now get at adventure centres (or burned round suburban parks and urban wastelands!) but I suppose size and experience is relative so after crashing and burning (literally) several times I never formed a great bond with a motor and two wheels.  

Now three wheels – that was a different story!  

My older brother Kirk was into it first – being 6 years older he must have seen the James Bond film Moonraker or spied them in US dirt bike magazines but he recognised that they would be a lot of fun – Honda ATCs! – All Terrain Cycles - the big balloon tyre 3 wheeled trikes that were the grandparents to modern quad bikes but are now extinct/banned. 

We used to spend all day racing a Honda 110 ATC round our field with our family friends the Garners who also had one. The term ‘all terrain’ was accurate – those things could (and did!) go anywhere across fields of mud, over 6ft mounds of excavated dirt, through streams, ponds and bogs – my love of off road was born.  

In fact it needed little encouragement – growing up as a son of a scrap metal dealer with a penchant for self-renovating period properties in rural locations there was always some heavy duty plant equipment, tractors or four wheel drives around. So even if there weren’t motorbikes there were usually dumper trucks or something else to drive and that’s before we even mention the big playground that a scrap yard is to an 8 to 12 year old boy, driving cars about or jumping in a tracked grab crane and moving piles of scrap around!  

Teenage Kicks….. 

But I digress – the ATC lasted a good number of years, Kirk did upgrade from the entry level 110 to a full on beast of a 250 2 stroke ATC! (Which I had to approach with extreme caution for a year or two before taming!) When I was 14 and 15 a few friends had trikes or motocross bikes, but then time took its toll – the 110 past on to the great parts bin in the sky and Kirk took the 250 with him to Val D’Isere for a ski season (with the idea of hiring it out but it was banned,  being so noisy it was an avalanche risk!) and my attempts to get a motocross bike and start racing with Russell Garner never got off the ground and after that our family circumstances changed as my parents moved abroad and my biking carer was put on hold.  

In my early 20s I was also into Land Rovers and off roading generally. Lucy and I went on an expedition with 10 other Landys to Morocco over the Atlas Mountains and down to the Sahara before returning solo through Marrakech and up the coast. 

The Big Bad Corporate World….. 

But then the life of work and corporate conformity caught up with me and the fully spec’ed Land Rover 110 with roof rack, roll bars and winch just wasn’t the best tool for an aspiring IT consultant to commute up and down the M4 in (although I thought it looked cool in the car park my bosses might have disagreed!) But commuting was a good excuse to get back on two wheels. I had several road bikes all with a trail/adventure bias  – you can also find me on www.adventurerider.com as DakarDreamer – (I’ve never been interested in knee down racing bikes as I’d probably kill myself on one and would look ridiculous in leathers anyway!) from the gentle BMW F650 funduro that got me back on two wheels to the big BMW GS1100 and big fun KTM950. I’d rack up the miles on these up and down the M4 between Cardiff, Swansea and London or commuting an hour and 15minutes through London up to Milton Keynes everyday for 9 months.  

Mountain biking became the late 20 something weekend warrior, escape/keep fit/adrenaline fix of choice. Which then led me back to motor biking in my thirties (easier to twist a throttle than loose a stone or so to get up the hills!) After a taster off-road day in Salisbury with Lucy, my star of a wife got me a fantastic 30th birthday present, spending several months secretly trying to get her bike licence (taking a few attempts bless her!) she took me to New Zealand for a 10 day BMW Experience off road tour of the South Island. It as wild and to a newbie like me pretty extreme (but just do-able so probably not so extreme in hindsight!) Despite Lucy coming off and breaking her wrist on the third day and having to ride in the support truck (something she says she was thankful for after seeing some of the stuff we did later!) it was one of our best ever holidays and really great riding – I was hooked on adventure/dirt biking again!  

Getting Back to the Dirt.… 

Getting back into motor biking whilst living in a central London flat with a corporate 9-5 job that may mean staying away from home all week didn’t make dirt biking an easy choice! I knew motocross probably wasn’t the way to go – for those that don’t know – a quick intro (my own definitions/interpretations) to a few biking disciplines follow:  

  

  

• Dirt biking – Any/all off road biking activity (not necessarily on dirt of course!)
• Motocross – the common conception of dirt biking  - racing around an outdoor track with a mass start of 30-40 bikes, with a wide track and (with these days) large/long jumps and banked (bermed) turns. A lap might last few minutes to 5minutes and a single race (or moto) will be between 20-40minutes (2 or more motos over a couple of days make the overall results), no pit stops or time for repairs. (The equivalent of the 200m or 400m running race).
• Supercross – motocross in indoor stadiums – tighter courses with high (but short) jumps and the new poster child (read- commercial!) of off road racing. Laps last a minute or so and races between 10-20minutes (the equivalent of the 100m sprint) 
• Hare and Hounds/Cross Country – Cross country courses (looped) a mixture of open terrain, motocross like track, hills, single track, sometimes with small jumps/obstacles. Between 4-8miles long taking between 10-20 minutes per lap for 3 hours. Pit stops allowed to for you alone to fix anything and refuel. (The new enduro – now more popular as easier to enter and more competitive racing). (The 1500m running race).
• Enduro  – Timed cross country usually natural course (not looped) lasting between 4-8 hours. Starting in pairs riders follow a route (usually to certain time limits) on the liaison sections. Then go for it at the timed ‘special sections’. No pits but can fix problems yourself if you have time and the tools you carry. (The 10k of running races).
• Rallying  -Usually Cross Countries, (not just cross country!) timed race over hundreds of miles a day for days on end (usually 5 or 6 but up to 16 for the Dakar). Requires navigation experience and usually equipment on the bike as well as tracking and sometimes satellite comms. Will cover a variety of native terrain, local tracks or pistes (and usually includes desert/sand) and consistent high speeds (as opposed to slower but technical riding). Dirt biking generally is niche – this is the niche of the niche! (Equivalent to running a marathon – or several for the Dakar! – Marathon DeSables anyone?)
• Trail riding – Off roading on public rights of way – not racing but ‘green laning’ on public roads. Typically a bunch of mates or club going out to get muddy navigating with OS maps between bits of trails using public roads to link them up. (The country ramble to carry on the analogy!)
• Not to be confused with the similar sounding Trials riding – that’s very slim bikes with no seats used to slowly hop up and over obstacles without putting your feet down. It’s marked on points for skill/technical ability although indoor speed trials are now more popular as well! (Stretching the analogy here! – This is more like dancing or acrobatics than walking or running!)

 

  

  

So as you can see – motocross is more of a sprint and therefore a younger mans game. (Plus I never learnt to jump that big and don’t think I bounce so much now!).  In your 30s endurance events are the way to go  – your mental stamina is meant to be stronger than in your 20s and experience will help (or would if I had any!) So I thought 3hour enduros or hare and hounds would be the most suitable training ground to get back into biking and maybe work towards the Dakar.  

But how to do that from London with no mates into it? 

I saw an advert for a turn up and ride enduro day with the AJP Experience  in TBM (THE UK (non motocross) dirt bike magazine and got in contact with Martin Chappell who suggested I do a trail ride or two to get up to speed (as opposed to just doing a 3 hour event with several hundred bikes in my first ever race!). So after a couple of trail days where Martin introduces you to the basics (not a problem but the practise helps!) it was onto the first event in May 1997. I was using an AJP PR3 a 200cc fourstroke - a low tech but capable trails machine – with a mellow power curve, enough suspension and very small and light it’s a great beginners bike (or lightweight and low effort extreme enduro bike). Martin sorted everything out from entry to kit- so the turn up and ride was great!  

On Your Marks…. 

And what an experience! The adrenaline of that first Midwest Enduro race was awesome – lining up at the start there is 300-400 bikes (in 5 rows for each different class) revving the engines to warm up. Then the silence as they are all killed. The flag goes down – the first row (Experts) starts and flies off – then silence another minute and the process is repeated row after row. Until there’s no rows in front of you and your class is next!   

Flying for that first corner in the middle of the pack of 40 odd bikes in my class was A BUZZ! The race was hard, knackering beyond belief and I was fit (for me!) having been gyming it and training for weeks up to it. I went through 3 litres of sports drink from my camelback and sweated buckets, got stuck and came off loads of times but loved it! I didn’t do too bad either – coming mid pack in the clubman class!  

 

After that event I started doing a race a month with Martin at MWMCC events. Martin has been great – we had a deal to do several events on the turn up and ride basis and he would sort everything out. The races were on Sundays with registration by 10am, they were all based around Bath, Bristol or Stroud areas so were at least a couple of hours from home. Sometimes after a Saturday night this would be difficult (or even if it wasn’t a big night I didn’t like not helping Lucy with the kids in the mornings and got tied up) – so on more than one occasion I had got to the start line to find my bike the only one there – the others already have way round the course!  

Martin introduced me to John Birtley – another guy in a similar situation to me – just getting into/back into biking through the AJP experience with the idea of doing the Dakar. Since then John Martin and I have done a lot of events together – they’re great and a really big help looking after my own bike and always being up for it. 

I did my first season with Martin on his AJPs and then for my birthday Lucy got me an odd present – ‘a chat with Patsy Quick’. Patsy is a bit of a hero in the UK off road biking /International Rally worlds as the first British lady to complete the Dakar. She has done it 3 (or 4?) times most often with Clive ‘Zippy’ Owen who I’d met instructing at ORS. Lucy thought that if I met here she’d be able to pass on some tips and experience to do the Dakar. So we drove to her house in Sussex and she was great – we spent an hour and half with her and walked out with some boots and helmet (bought second-hand but as new) and a ride for the Son of Dawn to Dusk – a 6hr race in South Wales! 

Since then I’ve done more enduros and a proper rally – The Morocco Shamrock Rally in September 2008 with Patsy’s Desert Rose Team which was AWESOME but more on that with pics later. I met Phillip Noone, Gary Ennis and Stephen Norris on that who are all Dakar veterans and taught me a lot.

Actually a quick CONGRATULATIONS to Philip Noone and Tamsin Jones (who I met instructing at ORS) who just finished the 2010 Dakar!

Since August 2008 when my bike was stolen (along with 7 others from Martin’s Off Road Training School site) I haven’t done any events and the idea of doing the Dakar has lost focus – hence the 24 step plan and this blog to get me on the road to the start (and ultimately the finish!) line.