22 Trail Rider www.TrailRider.com
2026 Northeast 24 Hour Challenge 2026 Northeast 24 Hour Challenge
A Quagmire it was! A Quagmire it was!
By Keith Taylor, Ted Hicks & Liam Hicks By Keith Taylor, Ted Hicks & Liam Hicks
Photos By Tiffany Merritt Photos By Tiffany Merritt
The Northeast 24 Hour Challenge is always a race
I look forward to every year. We hit the road at 6
am for the 5-hour journey from Boston to NY. We
got there on Friday to find awesome weather, got
a good night's sleep, and woke up to impending
doom for the start of this insane challenge. I say
insane because you have to be insane to take on
a 24-hour race, but we are dirt bike racers, so we
have some screws loose!
On the star ng line, the rain started, making
condi ons slick in the fields and woods. As soon
as I hit the woods, I caught a slick root that sent
me flying, and as I tumbled across the ground, my
first thought was that the challenge had begun.
I remounted almost 2 minutes behind and got us
back to 12th from dead last. I had a few dabs of the
foot, which tweaked my knee pre y badly, but I
powered through it for my first session. The short-
manned team made it through one rota on, then
it was me for my second go-round, and as soon as
I got back on the course, the skies opened up, and
the rain came down in buckets. This is where I feel
like I ride my best, in terrible condi ons, and I felt
like I was riding well with a banged-up knee, but lo
and behold, another root gremlin grabbed me and
dabbed my foot again, and that was it for my knee,
but I s ll pushed through the pain and kept going.
Every uphill and downhill was now a fast-flowing
stream.
