Six Ways to Sunday Code word: discomfort
Words: Kyle Smith
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Photos: Kyle Smith and Casey Maxon
t’s worth discussing one important part of this story up front. The people I interact with seem to fall into two camps: those who embrace discomfort, and those who want nothing but comfort. In this modern society, it has never been easier to stay inside your comfort bubble. I am one of those who seeks out discomfort … and also revels in making it back to the “safety” of the known. Lately, I’ve been trying to discover where on the discomfortembracing/comfort-seeking spectrum I actually fall, and my trek to the American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association’s Heartland Motofest was a telling time. My best stories never begin with an explanation of how comfortable I was. The whole scheme of Six Ways to Sunday is campaigning one motorcycle in six different kinds of racing. In itself, this is a recipe for being uncomfortable, and I nominated myself to do it. How bad could it really be? “You need to drive faster” were not the words I wanted to hear, hours into a day-long odyssey from Traverse City, Michigan, to Topeka, Kansas. Together 38
WWW.AHRMA.ORG
with Kyle Bowen, who manages Hagerty’s motorcycle insurance program, I was rumbling down the road in a fully loaded pickup: three motorcycles, gear, and two people in a regular-cab, short-box ’99 Silverado. Such trucks have surely worked harder, but I’m not one to tax my equipment on the first leg of a journey. If we were late, so be it. We blew through the gates of Heartland Motorsports Park right as the wind began to pick up. After affixing plastic bracelets around our wrists, the kind couple who stayed late to check us in gave us our first bit of bad news. “The space for off-road camping was supposed to be over there,” they said, with a vague gesture into the dark sky that meant nothing to our road-weary minds, “but with all the rain in the last two weeks, it is just a swamp.” Tent camping in a gravel parking lot it is. Time to embrace the discomfort. After 14 hours together in the truck, the one-person tents felt all too cozy—an illusion that was rudely shattered when massive raindrops began to pelt the blue poly taffeta. As a native Kansan, I wasn’t surprised by the storm’s sudden, severe onslaught, but the gravel lot we were calling home was not
AMERICAN HISTORIC RACING MOTORCYCLE ASSOCIATION
JULY 2021
