Trail Rider Magazine

May 2024 29 item - free wifi. My Bri sh friends/teammates/ sponsors are very into Supercross, so we watched the previous round while ea ng lunch, as music I recognized from home played in the background. I felt very American. (*pop quiz item 2 – true or false – did McDonald's in Portugal have black bean soup as a menu item, and if so, did Rachel eat it, yes or no?) How to drive a s ck shi – I had to fly home earlier than my dad for a race. This meant I had to drive myself to the airport in a manual transmis- sion vehicle with very limited experience. Every spare moment I had was spent idling around park- ing lots, trying to master the clutch pedal. Only minor property and vehicle damage ensured, but I was s ll swea ng bullets in the stands ll traffic near the airport car return. I honestly think this was more stressful than 95% of the racing (more on the other 5% later). Don't forget to impound: The prologue Supertest is a fun li le EnduroCross track thing that hap- pens Friday night before the race and counts as a scored test for the following day. I pulled off the track a er, excited to have made a statement by winning my first ever EnduroGP test! Okay, what do we do a er EnduroCross? We go back to the van, undress, and load up. I'm almost out of my gear when teammate Nieve comes around the side of the motorhome and yells "What ARE you doing you (insert Bri sh slang for idiot that I don't remember here)?? You s ll got to impound the bike! Right. Because this isn't EnduroCross. It's a completely different format on the other side of the world. Right. If not for Nieve I would have houred out before the race even really started, which is unbearably tragic to think about. (Side note: Bri sh accents are s ll lovely even when they are yelling mildly rude things at you) Don't be too confident: I went into the extreme test for the first me on day one feeling like a hero and came out feeling like a zero. I had never ridden extreme terrain on a bike not set up for it at all, and was very confused when things (such as my bike) went sideways unexpectedly. I lost a full minute to the leader in that test, that I spent the rest of the day clawing back. Gummy res: On a related note – if everyone else in your class is running a gummy, so compound re, (or doing anything else that you aren't doing), at a format of race you've never done, perhaps you should inves gate why that is so rather than shrugging and going "oh well already bought these ones." Definitely fixed that for round two. Mud in Portugal: "Hello mud my old friend,.. I've come to ride in you again." I thought Portugal would be dusty hardpack, so the muddy condi- ons on day one and the muddy-ish condi ons on day two of the Fafe EnduroGP were a pleasant sur- prise. If not for the mud I never would have go en my minute back and taken that win at round one. Sliding on a shrimp sandwich: This is a Scandina- vian expression taught to me by Emelie Borg Niel- son, one of my compe tors. It's similar to "every- thing keeps coming up roses", and has the general meaning of waltzing through life with everything working out. It is my new favorite expression; I have been delighted by it for weeks. Given that I went 1-2 in Fafe, Portugal, I think it suits the first leg of my racing adventure just fine. Don't trust the dirt: At round two in Valpaços, Portugal, I hit the deck hard in the Supertest. Not even doing anything cool, I nailed the obstacles. I just forgot that because we aren't inside, in an enclosed stadium, perhaps the dirt might not be perfect… I squared up for the corner like I was racing Shelby Turner into turn two in Vegas, then tried to turn on a gravelly, loose patch. I pushed the front end nearly to France* before high-siding myself into oblivion. Luckily, I mostly protected the bike from the ground with my head and body, but we think that get-off might have ended up being part of the reason for my mechanical failure the next day (*pop quiz item two – how many coun- tries did my front wheel push through to get to France from Portugal?) I need to be a be er mechanic: Mid-test on day one of round two, my electric start suddenly quit working. We had a backup bu on already mount- ed to the bars, but not connected. Rather than take the headlight shell off I just felt around for the wires and found a loose plug. "Ahhhh it's come undone okay" then spent several minutes failing to find the plug, trying to bump-start the bike just to get out of the test, failing to bump-start the bike before giving up on that too, and angrily ripping my headlight shell off to see why I couldn't

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