X MEN BY JOE WUEBBEN BROKEN BONES, ROCK-HARD ABS AND SCARRED FACES…THE HELL MEN OF MOTOCROSS PROVE WHY IT TAKES A LOT MORE THAN KEVLAR TO MAKE IT IN THIS SPORT RYAN HUGHES TEAM: ECC Honda HEIGHT: 5'10" WEIGHT: 180 pounds RECENT FINISHES: 2004: 125 MX, 15th* 2003: 125 MX, 2nd *Broke arm halfway through series. Ryan Hughes knows the answer. He started to figure it out after watching his dad, Bill, ride motorcycles in the desert near his hometown of Escondido, California, and his brother, Jeremy, compete in motocross in the late ’70s. Young Ryno was reluctant to give up his dream of being a pro American football or soccer player — until he won his first four races as an 11-year-old and was hooked. Twenty-two years later, he’s still riding professionally for Team ECC Honda in American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) races, has been since he was 16. Considering that motocross is arguably the most physically demanding sport in the world, this isn’t normal. Riders aren’t supposed to go until they’re 32. Travelling 100 feet in the air off three-story high jumps, making hairpin turns at 30 mph, managing the “whoop” section — a series of oversized speed bumps that some describe as “five seconds of the most violent shaking you can imagine” — five days a week, 32 races a year, breaks you down. It hurts. Case in point: two broken legs, a rod and two screws in one; no ACL in his right knee; three operations on each wrist, screws in both; compound fracture and torn tendons in his thumb, twice; broken collarbone, three times; dislocated shoulder; a collapsed lung; a lacerated liver; two cracked vertebrae; a broken jaw, mended with four screws and a plate. Let’s just say the guy’s sustained a few injuries. And yet Hughes keeps going, his training as rigorous as ever. He lifts 2–3 days a week, not necessarily heavily but always intensely. Every now and then he’ll go on a long bike ride with his buddy Floyd Landis, a teammate of Lance Armstrong’s in last year’s Tour de France, in which Landis finished 23rd overall. He also swims up to five days a week for a half-hour or so at a time. Oh, and he boxes occasionally, too, pounding away at a heavy bag, emulating the fitness level of boxers. All this on top of riding 30-minute moto sessions nearly every day in sweltering heat, covered head to toe in riding gear. So, yeah, Ryno knows the answer. The question? You don’t even have to ask. It’s the first thing that pops into your head when you buy a bodybuilding magazine with a 260-pound behemoth on its cover only to open it and see six pages devoted to skinny guys from Southern California dressed in tattoos and body armour. What are these guys doing in MUSCLE & FITNESS? Chad Reed TEAM: Yamaha HEIGHT: 5'10" WEIGHT: 162 pounds RECENT FINISHES: 2005: 250 SX, 2nd 2004: 250 SX, 1st; 250 MX, 2nd CHAD REED knows the answer, too. It’s part of the reason he managed to become the fourth-richest athlete in his native Australia, with an estimated 2004 income of £3.5 million. It explains why he bought a 65-acre ranch minutes from his home in Florida and put three custom-built tracks on it for his personal use, and why he has his own gym in his other home in Temecula, California. The goal is to beat Ricky Carmichael, the Tiger Woods of motocross, winner of nine AMA 250cc titles since 2000 (250s being more powerful bikes than 125s) and the guy who just loves to remind everyone how hard he trains. Reed’s getting close. He won the 2004 THQ AMA Supercross Series (“supercross” or “SX” is a more obstacle-oriented track contained in a stadium, while traditional “motocross” or “MX” tracks are faster and reside in rural areas) — only Carmichael was out with a torn ACL. Since then, Reed’s had his share of wins over the champ, like that come-from-behind victory in San Diego last February that RC seemed destined to win. Reed started off poorly — he was four, five seconds behind Carmichael for most of the race. Was three seconds down with three laps to go. Two seconds down with two to go. One second with one to go, then he passed RC on a turn on the last lap and grabbed the chequered flag. Great win and all, but Carmichael went on to win the season series, Reed coming in second. That’s where it stands now: RC’s No. 1, Chad’s on his heels. Closing that gap begins every Monday during SX season: an hour or two on the road bicycle at moderate intensity, followed by 45 minutes to an hour lifting weights to strengthen and lengthen the muscles, support recovery and minimise soreness from the previous Saturday’s race; adding bulk for bulk’s sake isn’t the point in motocross. Tuesday, Reed rides anywhere from 2–5 hours on the motorcycle (not continuous — maybe 20 minutes on, 20 off), then returns to the road bike for another hour or so. Wednesday is much of the same — weights, ride, cycle — and Thursday is a travel day with some stretching. Friday consists of a warm-up on a stationary bike, then practice rides for a couple of hours on location at the new venue. Saturday being race day, Reed goes through two practice rides, a qualifier and, of course, the main event. Sunday, he travels home and rests, finally. Since Reed begins the MX series right after SX, this is more or less his routine 30–32 weeks out of the year. JEFF SPENCER may not ride, but he knows. When Reed’s hulking Monaco rig pulls up to the pits at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego or the Georgia Dome on race day, Spencer’s in it. He’s the trainer, the guru, the injury prevention programme, the injury treatment programme, the man behind the answer. That seven-days-a-week grind of Reed’s, well, Spencer, 54 — a former Olympic cyclist with a master’s in exercise physiology and a doctorate in chiropractics — has a lot to do with it, seeing that he designed it and all. “You need it all to be a successful motocross rider,” says Spencer, who’s been Lance Armstrong’s chiropractor since 1999. “In cycling, you need a great pair of lungs; in the 100-metre dash, you need a great pair of legs; in gymnastics, you need coordination and strength; in yoga, you need flexibility. In motocross and supercross, you need all of that. If you’re imbalanced in any of those areas, your performance is going to suffer.” Unfortunately, when performance suffers in motocross, it’s not just your placing that takes a beating. If a track runner is out of shape, maybe he pulls a hamstring. In basketball, maybe a sprained ankle. “In a moto, we’re talking broken legs or worse,” says Spencer. “If you don’t have adequate strength and endurance and you’re in a compromised position, you’re going to get hurt.” Spencer likes to speak about his training philosophies in the abstract (or at least it’s abstract to laypeople like us), throwing out head-scratching rhetoric like “ever-changing circumstances” and “pattern identification”. (Huh?) In other words, any number of things — bad weather, the condition of the bike — can affect a rider’s strategy. The fact that the track is dirt changes things as well — in other motor sports the surface is paved and thus static. As Hughes points out, “You can go through one corner and after you go through it, 39 other guys do, too. The next time you come around, that corner could be completely different.” Even dry terrain is tricky. SX, for example, entails a shorter, more technical track. Unlike MX, aka “outdoor”, straights are virtually nonexistent, with riders forced to manoeuvre numerous double and triple jump combinations on every lap, launching themselves up to 25 feet above the ground. Body control in the air and landing is critical, not only to maintain momentum but to avoid crashing. As for the turns, the 90-degree corners are (relatively) easy, but there might be only two of those on a given course, 180-degree hairpins making up the remaining five or so. The whoops? Don’t even ask. The hairiest tracks, like the one at this year’s race in San Diego, have two whoop sections, each containing 10–12 three-foot-high, tightly sequenced midget jumps that riders are expected to traverse at full speed, skipping across the top of each, up to 20 times around the track. Says Spencer, “For 30-plus weekends a year, you literally need the strength of a powerlifter, the grace of a gymnast, the endurance of a marathon runner and the mentality of a Las Vegas poker player to succeed at this.” Nathan Ramsey TEAM: KTM/Red Bull HEIGHT: 5'10" WEIGHT: 165 pounds RECENT FINISHES: 2005: 125 SX (Western Regional), 2nd 2004: 125 MX, 5th NATHAN RAMSEY and those guys riding the smaller bikes know too. Ramsey, like Reed, is No. 2 in his class, finishing runner-up to Ivan Tedesco in the US 125cc Western Regional SX series this year. Not much changes in how you train to ride the 125s vs. the 250s. Sure, SX 125 preliminary heats are only six laps compared to eight for the 250s, and its main event is 15 laps instead of 20, but in MX the distance is the same. Then there’s the threat of “arm pump” — yet another reason to train hard. Imagine you’re riding along, and suddenly your forearms are pumped and burning to the point that you’re unable to hold onto the handlebars. You’re finished. You literally can’t ride any more. Ramsey explains arm pump as coming from nerves and being too anxious on the bike, maybe squeezing the grips too hard. The arms take a beating when riding, constantly being pulled and jerked and bounced around, that added to the vibration of the bike, which doesn’t help, either. The less you train on the motorcycle, the more likely arm pump is to set in. “The worst thing that can happen to you on a motorcycle is arm pump,” says Hughes. “It’s worse than being completely tired.” Thus Ramsey, Reed’s neighbour and part-time training partner in Temecula, also trains under Spencer. He puts in practice sessions five days a week, the long bicycle rides and lifting mixed in; some additional cardio on top of that on the elliptical machine he has at home; the diet of organic foods and supplements like multivitamins and antioxidants, just like Reed — the bike’s different, not the training. “It’s all about how you control the engine and the motorcycle,” says Ramsey. “You use muscles you don’t even know you have in this sport.” Ryno sticks to outdoor these days, the more demanding sibling of supercross, which evolved out of MX in the mid ’70s as a way to recruit more spectators. An SX main event lasts around 15–20 minutes. Motocross events take more like 35 minutes. And you do that twice on race day. At 32, Hughes is something of an anomaly. Consider that he’s the only motocross rider sponsored by a supplement company, MRM, employing a strict regime of their vitamins, meal replacements and Driven, a product that enhances energy and mental focus, on top of eating 90% organic foods. And while Ryno’s not quite on Carmichael’s and Reed’s level, class-wise (he currently races 125s), he still rides against some of the fastest guys in the world — they’re just younger. The 125 class is where guys like Reed and RC start their careers, sometimes racing three years before moving up to 250s. Still, Hughes concedes nothing to those two from a training standpoint, despite being seven and nine years their elder, respectively. Says Ryno, “I feel I’m one of the fittest, if not the fittest, guy in motocross.” He doesn’t have a trainer like Reed and Ramsey have Spencer. Trial and error’s his thing. He’s tried something, it hasn’t worked and he’s broken a tibia or two. And he’s mangled a collarbone and a lung and a liver and so on. Ryno even admits that he overtrained “for many, many years”. But he’s also found what works, and now he trains smart, not just hard. Like the lifting circuits he does, his version of supersetting: 15 exercises, going straight through without resting, from a balance move to a strength move to a coordination to an endurance to a core. Maybe he’ll throw an exercise ball in, or a wobble board. That seems to work, too. Maybe he’ll balance on one leg while tossing a ball or lifting a weight to mimic what he might have to do on the bike. “On a motorcycle, you’re always doing two or three different things at one time,” says Hughes. “Sometimes one leg’s off the bike and you’re hanging off the side of it, or your hand comes off, or you’re hanging off the back.” Ryno says he’s raced for 45 minutes straight before with a heart rate between 185 and 195 bpm. Granted, he was probably working at more like 170, but the excitement and fear associated with riding MX bumped it up some. So he rides and lifts and swims and boxes and trains with his Tour de France buddy and eats right and takes his supplements — all to prepare for the jumps and whoops and turns, so maybe he can avoid the next fracture or concussion or laceration. Does that answer your question? M&F