Issue link: http://trailridermagazine.uberflip.com/i/1540851
November 2025 9 world having the exact experience of preparing for a major interna onal spor ng compe on by riding in a trunk. I listened to the raindrops pa ering against the trunk lid and felt my first lurch of un- ease, or maybe just mild carsickness. It rained every day. Years later, I s ll considered it the gnarliest race I'd ever done. Harder than TKO or King of the Motos. The ruts were up to my seat. The course workers had duct-taped ma resses to trees on the downhills, so when you bounced off them careening wildly down the greasy, ver cal descents, you wouldn't break anything too import- ant. I crashed hard on day three, giving myself such a bad bone bruise and hematoma that I walked with a limp for six weeks. I houred out on day three, back when it was s ll an hour instead of a half hour. Mandi Mas n, made me use our team's re-impound the next day and try again. I got stuck on a hill the locals nicknamed Teufelsberg ("devil's mountain, auf Deutsch) and couldn't get up. When I finally did make it up a er more a empts than I care to remember, they gave me sparkling water and then laughed when I spit it out in surprise and dismay. I houred out a second me. I hit a car. I thought I was going to German jail. Then that night I cried my lit- tle sixteen-year-old heart out, because I thought they'd never ever let me come back to the Six Days again. Well, they did let me come back. Despite the first, miserable experience, I fell in love with ISDE and racing in Europe. So I came back the next year, and the year a er that, and the year a er that, and now I'm ten ISDEs and four World Championships deep… but s ll, I always joked that if there's a heaven and hell, and I get sent to the la er (probably for the things I've done to C riders in the GNCC morning race), Germany is where I'll go… I'll be halfway up Teufelsberg, soaking wet and cold from the rain, crying, limping, trying to push my bike as the Germans honk their air horns in an effort to be encouraging. …but as the years have passed, a part of me always wondered. Was it really that hard, or did I just kind of suck back then? Finally, I might have an answer. The final round of EnduroGP this season would take place only a 20-minute drive from where the ISDE had been held 13 years earlier.