I’m pretty excited about this year’s upcoming International Six Days Enduro scheduled for October. The race will be held in Portugal this year, and as I start looking forward to getting prepared to ride my fourth ISDE, I thought it would be appropriate to take a few minutes and look back at how I got to this point and give everyone some insight into my racing background.

For me, motorcycling goes way back, you can pretty much say it’s in my blood. My grandfather was a Harley guy going way back to the ‘30s. He owned a H-D dealership in the early 1950s and my dad grew up in that shop. My dad’s first bike was an Aermacchi-produced Harley 125 Hummer. Back in those days there weren’t dirt bikes, they were just motorcycles and you adapted to go wherever you wanted.

Like myself, my dad didn’t start racing until relatively late, and after a few years of local scrambles racing he turned his attention to the ISDT qualifiers. In the mid-1980s they changed the designation to ISDE to change the word “Trial” to “Enduro” to make help people understand the racing concept better.

For me, those early trips to the ISDT qualifiers held in the west, known as Bad Rock, Trask Mountain and The Rattlesnake, shaped my ideal of off-road racing. As far as I was concerned, even at that young age, riding the Six Days was the greatest thing that a racer could hope to accomplish. While I did start riding a dirt bike pretty early, I got sidetracked by street bikes for nearly 10 years. It wasn’t until 1997 that I got back on track and started off-road racing with earnest.

For a couple of years I concentrated on AMA District 37 desert racing. I had ridden desert quite a bit when I was young so I felt at home here and progressed pretty fast. I became an expert in 1999 and thought I would expand my horizons. In the spring of ’99 I rode my first ISDE qualifier in Idaho City. Wow, what an eye opener that was! All that time I spent in the Dez didn’t amount to squat in the mountains. I managed to finish the event, but it was one of the hardest things I have ever done. The previous year I had gone to Australia to watch the ISDE and I had really gotten the bug to race it, but after this first attempt I was having serious doubts about my abilities.

It would be another three years before I would actually qualify for the ISDE. I got my first chance to compete in 2002 in the Czech Republic. If my first qualifier had been one of the hardest things I had ever done, this was in fact the absolute hardest. It rained most of the week and large parts of the course became nearly impassable. We actually raced up and down a ski hill in ruts that were so deep you would “ski” with your legs along the edges of the ruts because the bikes pegs were way below. When my bike had sunk so deep that my knees were “skiing” higher than my bars, I actually just let my legs trail behind me while I was basically just laying on the bike. The ruts were so deep the bike couldn’t fall over. It was crazy, there were people stuck all over the place. In the end, only half of all the riders entered in the event finished and I was one of them. I am more proud of that bronze medal than anything I have done before or since.

Since then I’ve had the opportunity to ride the Six Days twice more, finishing on silver in Poland, 2004 and again last year in Greece. I missed out on qualifying in ‘07 for Chile so I went along to do the pre-ride for the US team and as chase rider for the Trophy guys. We also helped sponsor club team riders for a couple of years. I have continued racing in the Desert winning two class championships in the AMA National Hare & Hound series, along with a district 37 enduro title. Technical desert terrain remains my favorite thing to race. Last year in Greece was somewhat like that, although it was very dusty and no one likes that much. I think Portugal will be rocky and mountainous also, so I am looking forward to the challenge.

We have some pretty exciting things planned here at MotorcycleUSA to cover the event. I have tons of stuff to get cracking on, as the container with all of our stuff leaves in just a few weeks. I am still working on getting a bike for the event and we should have some news on that shortly. We are doing a fundraiser T-shirt along with my club teammate Jeff Fredette and the design is coming along really well. We will have those available very soon as well so stay tuned to the  MotorcycleUSA.com ISDE Racing Page all the latest updates as we prepare to go Six Days racing!