The MX Coachseiji.com Training Ranch MX track is finally in working order! Thundering exhausts and riders flying over the hay fields stop locals in their tracks. Property values plummet. Cows run amok. Sheriff contacted.

Check the first pictures ever here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24457018@N04/sets/72157604684822120/show/

Check back for track improvements and changes. This is only the beginning!

This track would not be possible without the contributions and help of some very generous people:

Xtreme Amateur and Pro Lites, Empire Countertops, Tracey and Tonya Mock, Randy Poulter, Extreme Dirt, Russell Potter, Turf Specialties, Nick Morris, ACM Services, Matthew Tallon, Red Rock MX Park, Da Fuzz, Will Hardeman, Rick Mull, Brad O’Neal and Pinnacle Elite Fitness.

 I consider myself very lucky and blessed to have these people and companies helping me out with my dream project.

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I was super excited when my first tractor arrived: green and proud, a John Deere 5205 killah tractor with bucket loader. I was so stoked to farm some dirt. No instruction manuals included and a quick 5 minute lesson by Dan your local neighborhood tractor man. If you have ever looked at a new tractor there are no less than 10 of those stick man warning stickers about the various ways you can painfully meet your end:

- tractor rolls over but you don’t have the seat belt on; you get ejected then smashed by your tractor

- tractor rolls over and the roll cage is down; you do have your seat belt on this time but you cannot escape therefore you are crushed by your tractor

- you are rolling across your pasture with a load overhead in your bucket; the laod bounces out and crushes your head, killing you instantly

- you are rolling across your pasture with the bucket overhead, it clips a live power line and you get electrocuted to death

- for some reason you are standing under your bucket and it drops on your head thus killing you in a millisecond

- you are standing behind your tractor and it rolls back and flattens you and ends your life instantly

- you get caught up in the PTO drive shaft and according to the stick figure, your entire body gets wrapped on the shaft ending your life in a horrible, painful death

Like all warning stickers, they were promply ignored and I fired that sweet diesel engine up for first time. I dropped my water bottle and leaned over to pick it up, resting my elbow on an innocent looking lever. The bucket plummeted out of the sky and smashed through my cedar split rail fence. Great. I turned the tractor off and had to temporarily patch my fence with a gate that was laying around so the cows wouldn’t wander off. That was enough farming for me that day.

The next day my new disc harrow arrived and I was super amped to finally disc up my outdoor track for the first time. I fumbled around for an hour and crushed my fingers a dozen times trying to figure out how to attach the thing to the back of the tractor. After much confusion and frustration I was off to farm my sweeet soil. I got safetly out to a track lane, dropped the disc and happily creeped forward watching my sweet discs tear up the ground. 10 yards into farming I heard some metal creaking and one of my discs snapped. Dang. 5 minutes of work and I broke a disc. The thing was brand new. I continued discing up the lanes until well after dark. I gave it some gas to get back to the house before it rained on me (still slow by normal standards); pretty rough ride with no suspension and the weight of the disc harrow out back. I pinned it through my gate and hit a gopher mound and swapped sideways. The disc harrow made some metal to metal noise and for some reason I smashed the throttle to the floor. The disc harrow was hung up on a barbed wire and I promply ruined a section of cross fence. Awesome. The rancher I share that fence with will be excited for sure that his foreigner goon farmer neighbbor tore up his fence.

I have used the tractor twice and have broken three things. I did all that on a tractor that goes SLOW. They just don’t go that fast. I promised myself to slow down even more, pay attention to what I am doing, look around, concentrate on the task at hand. I will think of the warning stickers. I don’t want to be the stick man. Good thing I didn’t realize until just now there are two gear ranges. I have been in the low one whilst wreaking havoc on my land and property.

Nothing runs like a Deere…..clear through your fences.

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After a month of dedicated work the dirtmeister extraordinaire Randy Poulter of Extreme Dirt turned part of my hay pasture into a world class supercross/outdoor training compound. I got a sweet lake out of the deal as a bonus.

Randy moved more sand and clay than he would have ever imagined but now I have a most awesome supercross track. The layout is from Indy SX of this year and man is it killer. This week #178 Phil Nicoletti of the Motosport Xtreme Kawasaki team became the first rider to ride the track. After stressing about all the money I was pouring into this project, as soon as Phil rounded the first bowl turn it all became worth it. I was outside in the awesome weather, hobby = job and I was AT HOME. One of the better days of my existence.

The outdoor track is 99% done. All that needs to be done is for me to get my first tractor and tiller and till up the lanes to connect all the HUGE obstacles. I cannot even begin to describe how huge the double lane step up/step down is. It is easily the highest point in my town. It about 130 feet long, 45 feet wide and 35 feet tall. It is the largest track obstacle I have ever seen. The track is also VERY LONG. A B rider would take about 3 minutes to get around it. As a bonus, my two dismal ponds were connected to form a beautiful lake (well it’s still a pond but I like to call it a lake). The track has TONS of sand so it is going to get super rough. Randy also mixed in some dirt on one area of my track so that I will have rutted turns as well as sand berms. Both track surface and obstacle material change throughout the track; I think that is such a great feature for a training track. I can tell that the outdoor track will be a continously changing work of art. It’s not even completey finished yet and i have already begun to plan the additonal things I would like to try here and there.

Also, I am trying to think of a name for my new training facility…I like the word ranch so getting that in there would be cool as well as coachseiji…if you think of something let me know!

Pictures of my little piece of SX heaven in Harwood, TX:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24457018@N04/sets/72157604063304507/show/

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Well the track project is hitting some major snags and the result is some SERIOUS cost overruns. I mean huge. To the point where I had to consider shelving the whole deal. I would be left with a supercross pad with dirt piles on it and a totally jacked up pasture.

“If you build it they will come…”

I talked to everyone involved and everyone is amazingly generous and cooperative. The track builder will hump it double time. I have very generous angel donators. Everyone working and wanting the same thing. The kind of cameraderie that makes me love sports. We are all wanting it to happen so I am going to figure it out and push on with the project, personal finances be damned.

“if you build it they will come….”

Every cent I have will be gone….expenses will continue to pour in….but I will be able to stay home more since the riders I work with can ride at my place at least some of the time instead of me being gone all of the time. That is all part of the dream…work from home.

“If you build it they will come…”

Well, somehow, I will build it. Just like the movie Field of Dreams I will do it no matter what happens to my bank account. Maybe the bank will come out just like the movie and warn me about losing my place. Maybe Joel Robert’s ghost will come visit. Maybe some old school GP guys on Maicos or Huskys will jump out of my woods and blitz my sand whoops. They will roll up to me, pull thier aviator goggles off and ask me with a bewildered look, “is this heaven??” I will look around at my track, grin ear to ear and reply “no, it’s Harwood, Texas.”

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After stressing, worrying and scraping to get into my new house on 50 acres in Harwood, TX i have decided that I just couldn’t wait…….I have been in my new home for just a month but I am looking for change in the couch and under the truck seats as well as receiving generous support from interested parties, and I am having tracks built to complete the dream!! I thought maybe in a couple of years…..but it’s happening now! Today was the first day that Randy Poulter of Extreme Dirt (www.extremedirtinc.com) put a blade to my harrowed hay and sandy loam and started creating my dream MX and SX tracks. I am nervous (financially) and excited (everything else) at the same time!!

It is 11 pm and Randy is still out there on the D6 dozer cutting the pad for the SX track. In 8 hours 4 dump trucks with drivers will show up and the track excavator that got here this morning will start hogging dirt for obstacles. That track excavator is HUGE! it looked like a dinosaur coming down my driveway! I can’t wait to get home tomorrow from the office to see what Randy has done. I can just picture huge mounds of clay and dirt in the rhythm section. Maybe I will be able to make out what the track layout will be. I am stoked for sure!

Check back for updates. Yup that’s all my money out there…..which I will forget about the first time I throw a leg over my bike and head out to my own tracks. I can’t wait to ride out there with my clients and friends!!! 

 Trying to make Yodi take a ride in the track excavator’s huge bucket. Yodi came with our house. He won’t leave but he’s cool. He will guard the tracks.

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I and two trail and desert riding buddies Stpehen Beal and Mike Brecher left Austin, TX the day after Christmas for our annual pilgrimmage to Baja. This would be our first year without our fearless and very experienced Baja leader Bill Kasson of Kasson Yamaha. Bill was suffering from the after effects of an old Baja injury to his shoulder and would have to sit this one out. This means we couldn’t mindlessly follow his memory through the remoteness that is Baja. What do guys do when knowledge is not present? They rely on machismo and technology of course. We loaded some maps into a GPS and pumped ourselves up on the drive west about how smart we were and that our manliness could overcome anything Baja could throw up at us.

We home based out of Rancho Santa Veronica and planned to head to San Felipe on the Sea of Cortez side, up and down the mountains stopping for a night at Mike’s Sky Ranch, ride the Pacific coast to The Old Mill and back to the Rancho throuh Ojos Negros. Seemed pretty straight up and we had our rugged manliness and technology on our side. It was colder than usual at the Ranch where I accidentally let our OSHA approved fire inside our “hotel” room go out and the temperature overnight inside was just shy of freezing the toilet water. Woke up cold, started out riding cold. The GPS seemed to beam our intergalactic coordinates correctly. After some killer riding around Laguna Hansen and some casual fence jumping our excitement turned into fear when a Mexican rancher pulled up in a camoflauged Bronco with his amigos in tow. We played the dumb non Spanish speaking gringo card until he blurted out in perfect English “there is a sign in English that says absolutely no trespassing, what happened?” i kept babbling in Spanish, pointing in every direction, looking confused and asking where the National Park went. Eventually we turned around and I have never seen Stepehen ride so hard. I think the recent stories of riding groups being raided, raped, and beaten by locals were making his imagination run amok which in turn caused James Stewart like speed.

After high tailing it back to the fence and perfect english warning sign, we were essentially off the route we had planned and downloaded into the GPS. Lost. After some not angry riding being completley lost, we found Ojos Negros three days early. Mike cruised through town in the lead as night fell. He went right on through, seemingly on a mission to ride the highway at night to I guessed Ensenada. I was freezing, shivering, slobbering and couldn’t see squat. I just gritted my teeth and gathered up as much grrr as I could for the long haul through the dark, cold night squinting as hard as I could to see. Mike stopped about 10 minutes up the highway wondering where Ojos was. He must have been unconscious when we went through town. We turned around, I dodged a semi by jumping off the road into a ditch but we eventually got to town and a hotel, which again was freezing inside. Crisis averted. Day one. NOT at Mike’s. At Ojos. New plan.

We headed to the Old Mill the next day, what a great day. Seeing the Pacific at the end of a long day in the saddle is pretty awesome. We had a great time there, good food, and good conversation with some great folks. The Old Mill is my favorite spot in Baja so far.

We headed up to Mike’s Sky Ranch the next day, taking a new route completley via GPS up and over the mountains. It worked perfectly and the trails were some of the best I have been lucky enough to ride. Somewhere Mikey lost all his tools. He and Stephen were on Spanish Gas Gas two strokes and my tool kit was for my Yamaha WR. If something went wrong with either of their bikes for the rest of the trip we would pretty much be hosed but we marched on. Satellites and GPS got us cleanly to Mike’s Sky Ranch where we had our usual excellent time and food.

The next day we headed down the mountain and back to Rancho Santa Veronica. It was a shorter day of riding, on some great dirt and I felt awesome. We were maybe 5 miles from then end of our ride and Stephen shot off onto a side trail. I stopped with Mikey to wait for him but he never showed up. Great. Stephen was on some trail, by himself, probably wadded up under his bike with temperatures dropping and winds picking up. We waited and waited where we thought we had the best chance of running into him. We then went back to where we last saw him and took off on gnarly single track looking for what surely now was his dead body being chewed on by buzzards and the chupecabra. We followed the freshest tracks we could see but no Stephen. We gave up and would go to the Rancho and call the authorities. On the road to the Rancho my truck was headed up toward us. Stephen. @#$%^ Stepehen had been at the Rancho the whole time. Mikey was pissed. I was miffed I had ridden those gnarly trails with visions of Stephen’s bike in the bushes with no body in sight. After getting warm and having some drinks at the Rancho, all was right with the world again.

When I get home from Baja I am grateful that there were no serious injuries and everyone involved is fine. I daydream about riding remote mountain trails and buzzing the beach on the Pacific. I mentally make plans for next year and look at pictures from the trip wanting to return as soon as possible. Reality eventually creeps into my life and I get back to the work that makes trips like this possible but when I need a lift, I just think of Baja. The riding, the scenery, my friends and the experiences in Baja carry me on until the next time. Hasta Luego Baja.

Seeing, smelling and hearing the Pacific after a long day rules.

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You hear this all the time…. 

Is it true? 

I have been working in motocross for about 5 years; I have trained competitive athletes for twelve years; I have been personally involved in competitive sports almost all of my life. In my opinion this cliché statement is at least partially true in most competitive sports. You have to carry a certain amount of aggression, cockiness and selfishness to the line if you are actually racing for the win. I am not saying you have to raise the aggression level to the point of taking riders out on purpose but you have to fight for the start, fight for the lines, fight for every position out there and sometimes you can’t be nice about it. 

The traits that a rider must have out on the track to be successful are not necessarily the traits that make that rider a desirable member of society or a good friend. Aggressiveness, extreme self confidence to the point of cockiness, self centered focus and selfishness are all traits that are required to be a winner in racing. Take those traits outside of the track and you can end up a lonely cowboy. Think about it; do you want to be friends with someone that acts those traits out in your presence? Those traits pretty much describe a person that most people would not want to hang out with. It also is a list of traits that a sponsor would not appreciate. 

Racers must live a dual life. You must be aggressive, cocky and self centered on the track but then be passive, humble and generous off the track to be not only successful but also to co-exist with everyone else and have friends. I have seen younger racers that are anywhere near each other in their respective classes unable to be genuine friends outside of the racing scene. As these riders grow older they must develop the ability to turn off the traits of the winning racer not only to attract and keep sponsors but more importantly have a high quality of life. 

Some of today’s motocross stars have it all: They line up at the gate knowing they are going to win and tell you so; they launch into the first turn with aggression and they take lines with selfish abandon. Within minutes of winning they are smiling at the top of the podium, surrounded by their abundant friends. They give a pleasant and courteous interview and genuinely thank their sponsors. They wave to their thousands of fans as they exit the arena. They successfully exercise their dual personality and not only won the race but their sponsors are happy, the fans are ecstatic and they lead a high quality life full of friends and family. 

So….nice guys can finish first!

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I have had the awesome opportunity to go to several amateur national events over the last year and to hang out with some pretty great motocross families. I have seen these family “teams” share successes as well as failures all while enjoying a life experience that would be really hard to get any other way. As a coach to several of the racing members of these family teams I wanted to share some of my observations and thoughts that have stuck with me the most in hopes of providing a different point of view. I don’t have kids of my own yet but I am sure I will soon and I hope that in the future someone else will be able to provide a outside observer’s view to me as I struggle through things myself.

 1) Pressure: the kids feel it. They may not say it and at times they may seem ungrateful for the sacrifices parents make to get the kids to the races but trust me they feel it. My point here is that there is no reason to verbally shove these sacrifices in thier faces after a bad result. Too much of that type of pressure makes racing not a lot of fun to them. The kids can see the parents spending money, time and doing endless tasks to make racing possible and they have no other form of repayment other than verbally saying so and getting good results. Most kids are not going to be good at the former so that leaves the latter and that’s it. There are so many factors that go into a good race result and a lot of them are out of the racer’s direct control. A LOT of things have to go right for a good result so keep it all in perspective. The only thing that the rider can totally control is their effort level. If they give it 100% then the result that it brings is all you can ask for. I am almost 40 now and have been through quite a bit (I swear) and the most crushing pressure I have felt is the pressure of my father on my performance.

 2) Mistakes. Hey you racer kids, when you make a mistake out on the track recognize what caused the error and learn what to do to avoid it next time but that’s it. Look forward to the next moto or practice session. Try really hard not to dwell on it and repeat the error over and over in your head. That will only cause you to repeat the error. You want to focus on the opposite thing, you want to repeat in your head the correct way to do something if you are that kind of rider that needs to do that. I have seen riders hours later sitting there depressed repeating the mistake over and over. That does zero good. Move forward in your riding, not backwards or staying still. Look forward always! Learn from the error and move on! It’s really hard for me to watch a kid ruin the rest of the race day over one mistake.

3) Kids are kids. You can put the racer in the kid but you can’t take the kid out of the racer. No matter how serious your program is, no matter how good the rider may be, if they are kids they need to be kids. They need to socialize with their friends and do the same things that you smile about when you think of your own childhood. I really get surprized when I hear a parent tell thier kid who spends all day training and practicing that they can’t do a normal childhood activity when I know that the parents did the same things when they were kids themselves. Having girlfriends or boyfriends, playing video games, staying up late with buddies at times, etc. all these things are what make being a kid so great. If you deny that for the sake of motocross results what do you think will happen to long term motivation to stay in the sport? I am not saying to let them screw around all the time, I am saying when it is an appropriate time to stop and think about what being a kid is all about. I honestly believe that being a kid like this will happen no matter what. If you are denied that when you are say in your teens, well guess what? As soon as you are able, you will do those things. I missed out a lot racing bicycles seriously when I was very young. The end result? When I went to college it took me 10 years to get out becuase I started being a kid just then. 10 years of college for just a Bachelor’s Degree!! I went every sememster and summers too! But man did I play a lot. I caught up on all my playing and when I was done I put my head down and did 4 straight years of nothing but A’s when before I could hardly pass a class. You get the point.

Well that’s enough from the soap box. Those are some of the most poignant observations that are sticking in my head right now. I am sure more will come up. Hope this helps some and provides a different point of view that is at the very least interesting. Good luck out there and keep it fun!

-Seiji

Cody    

May 10th, 1991 - February 28th, 2007  

My best friend and the best part of my “childhood.”   

Forever Young.

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Right after Christmas every year I make my yearly pilgrimage to the beaches, mountains and deserts of Baja to enjoy riding simply for the sake of riding. The usual cast of suspects includes Bill Kasson (www.kassonmotorcycles.com) - an old school motocrosser and Baja rider with more experience in dirt biking than anyone I know; Sean Ahmadi, a fellow trainer and friend from my cycling and climbing past, and two other trail riding buddies named Mike Brecher and Stephen Beal. Each trip dissolves into a streaming flow of experiences that only adds to what I consider the fortunate texture of my life. A smile effortlessly spans my face whenever I reminisce about the riding, the camaraderie and the happenstance that always occurs in the sand, wind and dust that is Baja. Baja 2007 was no different.
 

We started this year’s journey in San Felipe, a quaint beach town on the Sea of Cortez. On day one we scouted the trails around this town for future route planning. Awesome trails, awesome riding. Nothing but space and time. It was the perfect start to say hello to our friend Baja again. The next day we planned on leaving San Felipe and making it up to a very unique tavern/hostel in the mountains called Mike’s Sky Ranch.  We always exit San Felipe with a “warm up” of a four mile stretch of sand whoops followed by a high speed blast across a dry lake bed. I and Sean took the sweeper role through the dry lake bed and we inadvertently ripped right past the rest of the group whom had all stopped at a shack that serves as a watering hole in the middle of the dry lake bed (Who expects a store operating out of a tiny shack in the middle of a dry lake bed? Only in Baja.) Stephen had to pin it wide open on Mike’s 450 to finally catch us and the tranny on Mike’s bike promptly locked up….40 miles from nowhere (well except the “store” in the dry lake bed). We eventually towed him out the end of the dry lake bed to a dirt road where two of us took the highway back to San Felipe to retrieve a truck to get the bike back. A very long day, one bike down, one rider out and we still had not made it out of San Felipe. But, we were in Baja and life was good.
 

On day three we headed back out of San Felipe for another shot at tipping a beer back at Mike’s Sky Ranch. I and Sean were roommates and we had discussed at length a personal rule I have in Baja. I call it my 60% rule: I don’t ride past 60% of my ability or my engine’s ability. I leave hanging it out and twisting the throttle back to tracks that are in a one county radius of my home and the nearest hospital. Sean seemed to agree in retrospect of the yearly big crashes he has had in Baja in which he has luckily escaped uninjured. No scars and big stories to tell but he knew the laws of probability could soon get mean on him. After much head nodding and uh huhing he quipped “when we get to the whoops %$#@& you and your 60% rule!” Well, Sean stuck to his word and toyed with probability in a sand whoop section leading up to the same dry lake bed that had claimed Mike’s transmission the day before. This whoop section probably had a thousand whoops and Sean made it to the last three. Those last three threw him into an embankment where Sean’s Baja 2007 came to an abrupt and violent end. After an extended session of uncontrollable moaning and the customary limb/blood/bike check Sean had to bear what must have been an impossibly painful ride to the aforementioned store in the middle of the dry lake bed where….Mike was meeting us with his truck since his bike had been claimed by Baja the day before. That was a VERY fortunate series of unfortunate circumstances considering we were at least 40 miles from anywhere. Mike hauled Sean’s carcass to the hospital in San Felipe where the score was read: broken collarbone, two broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. Day three of Baja 07 and we had a broken tranny and a broken Iranian (Sean) and we were STILL in San Felipe. Outside forces were telling us that Mike’s Sky Ranch was not to be but we were still in Baja and life was good.
 

We took the cosmic hint and everyone except Sean spent day four of Baja 07 sticking to the trails around San Felipe again. Mike got to ride since Sean’s bike was OK so that was cool. We had an awesome day exploring new trails; you can literally ride for a week just around San Felipe and not ever hit the same trail twice. We actually rode a lot that day and it was the most memorable ride day of the trip for me. Until you experience it yourself you have not felt what has to be one of the best feelings you can have on a motorcycle: to be pulling into your last stop of a Baja trip, bike still purring underneath you and your body all in one piece. Sean had a relaxing day back at the El Cortez hotel where we base in San Felipe, no doubt reviewing the 60% rule. Ah, we were in Baja and life was VERY good.
 

Baja isn’t just a place to ride. It’s an opportunity to live in the moment, the exact moment that is happening. The consequences of not paying attention are extreme so you ride only in that moment. There is not enough mental capacity left over to worry about work, money, task lists. An entire day of riding becomes nothing other than reactions and corrections on the bike. No thoughts, no planning, no worrying. Just being and riding. Maybe that is why you ride motocross.
 

Baja also gives you an opportunity to be a better person, a better friend. Really. Mike’s transmission seized up while Stephen was riding it. Mike could have been mad but he wasn’t; he understood that it was Baja. We all could have been mad at Sean when his date with the dirt caused a group to change plans but we understood it was Baja. You have to trust the person riding right next to you in the whoops. You have to trust the others to get you out should you get hurt or you have a mechanical failure. You have to forgive things and allow for differences in beliefs since you are constantly together and relying on each other. You will help each other …no matter what. Our group has a very diverse background: ethnically, religiously, economically and in different stages of life. But, for that one glorious week every year in the magical place that is Baja, none of that matters and we are just friends, just riding, just being in Baja.

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