THE IMPOSSIBLE RIDE

by Jim Reynolds

It’s September 18, 2021 in Bartow, Florida. It’s a brilliant sunny day, so hot and muggy you could work up a sweat without thinking about it. On a remote farm outside town, about fifty trail bikes are lined in the sugar sand waiting for the blast of the starting horn. When it blows, riders jump on their bikes, feet slam down on kick starters, engines roar, a cloud of black dirt fills the air as bikes scream away to take on the seven-mile dirt track. But a few have been left behind. Their engines won’t cooperate and they are still back at the starting line.

Mark Ames is on one of them. In a frenzy he stomps down on the starting lever time and time again. About the sixth try his engine comes to life, he rolls on the throttle, his bike flashes by and he disappears in the first turn. But the engine that had performed flawlessly in the practice run is now giving him fits. As he heads down the trail it stalls when he hits the brakes. It takes about ten kicks to get it going. Then he roars off, weaving and turning on the narrow trail dodging low branches where it cuts through the trees, going airborne over the jumps and slamming back down on the dirt. After five or six miles and six or seven restarts, he is drenched in sweat, and his body aches. He waits for a break in traffic and rides off the track.

He looks like just another rider having a really, really bad day. But you and I would be wrong. We have just seen something approaching a miracle. Mark has no left arm below the elbow…no left hand. How can he ride like this? It sounds impossible. A while back Mark would have agreed with that.

NO PEDDLING

Mark’s love affair with trail bike riding began long before the accident that would take half of his left arm. He grew up in South Florida. As a youngster he watched races on TV and some of his friends had bikes. “I loved the sound of the engine and the speed…the idea of turning a throttle instead of peddling.” When he was old enough, he bought a motorbike and raced at tracks close to home. He won a few first and second places. After high school Mark began working on cars and would become a master mechanic at a Ford dealership. In 1993 he would marry Dawn, his high school sweetheart. They would have two healthy children, Amanda and Jake. Life was good. That brings us to 2012.

LIKE A RUBBER BAND

Mark had left Ford to go to work at a private shop because he wanted to work on all types of cars and trucks. He is standing below a car that is on a lift above his head and is about to finish replacing the transmission. He hears tires peel out but he doesn’t give it much thought. “I worked with a lot of young people so that was kind of a normal sound…I heard somebody yell and I saw an Expedition heading in my direction. I took just two steps to make it out of the way and I just didn’t make it in time.” The Expedition charging straight towards him has handicapped controls and somehow as another mechanic tries to manipulate them, they have gone to full throttle, in reverse gear.

The Expedition slams into the lift, and the car tumbles onto Mark. He remembers, “It spun me around like a rubber band.” But the nightmare is still not over. The accelerator in the Expedition is still jammed and with Mark under the car that had fallen on him, he is pushed with it, through the shop wall part way onto the grass outside the shop. His left arm is gone two inches below the elbow and some of the muscles in the upper arm are gone too. The workers in the shop

give it everything they have got, to lift up the more than 7,000-pound vehicle by hand, just high enough to get a jack underneath it. Then they carefully pull Mark out. Remarkably he is both calm and conscious through the entire incident. Even when he looks at his arm, “I didn’t freak out, I just realized this is more serious than I thought.” A quick-thinking coworker wraps a tourniquet on his arm, saving Mark’s life.

Ambulance and helicopter rides rush him to the hospital. And it wasn’t just his arm. His pelvis and scapula are broken, but he has survived. It will take a long time to heal. In the first week he remembers, “Well I won’t be riding dirt bikes…ever again… and I was okay with that because I was still alive and I had my family.”

YOU’RE RIGHT…YOU WON’T

But it wasn’t long before the loss started to sink and, in his words, he, “started, getting sad.” He told me that Dawn surprised him when he told her he thought his bike-riding days were over. “My wife said with that attitude you’re right about it; you’re never going to ride a bike or work on cars again.” He remembers that at first the conversation made him mad but it also made him think about the chances of riding again. How could he manage a left-handed clutch control with no left hand? Would he have the strength to stay on the bike as he raced down a dirt trail? He would have to learn to ride all over again and teach himself how to use his tools again so he could modify his bike to fit his new situation. It was a tall order. Could he do it? There was plenty of time to think.

In the next year there were nine surgeries and a series of prosthetic arms were fitted and discarded as the shape of his remaining upper arm changed. When his arm stabilized, he convinced his doctor that he needed an adapter for his prosthetic lower arm so he could ride a stationary exercise bicycle. But that wasn’t the real reason. “Needless to say, it found its way to my dirt (mo-

torbike) handlebars first, before anything else.” Opening his toolbox, he would do the installation. One part of the adapter is a small cup that he attached to the handlebar. The other is attached to his prosthetist arm, with a ball on the end. It snaps into the cup on the handlebars. It has to be tight enough to lock on so he can ride, but loose enough to release his arm in a crash so he can tumble free of the bike. And he would use his tools again to yank his transmission and put in an automatic. Only his family and a few close friends knew what he was doing.

Finally, the day came to see if he could ride again. He chose a time when there wouldn’t be anyone else on a track near his home. His goal was to just putt around but even that was a challenge. As he rolled in a little throttle and pulled away, he was uneasy. “I didn’t trust what the bike was doing; what I was doing.” One of the things that surprised him was getting used to the automatic transmission. He said it was easier in some ways, but it felt strange riding without a clutch and shifter. “I just kept going and going until I was more comfortable with it.”

His persistence paid off. “Slowly I got a little bit faster and faster…(it) just took a lot of track time.” As he gained more confidence, he tried some jumps but that didn’t go well. “I would do a jump and my arm would fall out (of the socket) and I would be landing with just one arm and two legs balancing the bike.” Getting the tension on the unit dialed in, would take months and numerous practice jumps. With the bike ready, he began riding the track time and time again and then he started racing again. He would do it for seven years.

HARE SCRAMBLING

After those years of track racing, Mark was ready for a new challenge. Longtime friend, and motorbike racer Jason Miller was now doing what is called, “hare scramble”. Three years ago, Jason told Mark about it and he decided to give it a try. You don’t really chase a rabbit in a hare scramble but you are racing down trails in open country that any rabbit would feel at home on. And it’s bigtime demanding for the racers, both physically and mentally, because a three-lap race can be more than twenty miles long. Only one practice lap is allowed before the race and it’s nearly impossible to memorize all of the jumps, tree cuts and hair pin turns on several miles of trail. So, in a sense, every race is an all-new event. And Mark loves this different freestyle form of racing even though he says it’s more difficult than track racing.

Florida Trail Riders (FTR) is the group that organizes the races. After each event, it changes the location to a new trail somewhere else in the State. Getting there can mean more than a 200-mile drive. So, it’s not unusual for Mark and Dawn and their son Jake (who is also an accomplished rider) to be on the road early in the morning, towing a cargo trailer with the bikes inside, as the head for the race. (Dawn has been at every one of his FTR races.)

When they arrive, they look for a group of four or five racing buddies. They set up chairs

under a shade tent and catch up on what has been going on in their lives. The conversation is punctuated with jokes, often aimed at each other. Mark is just one of the guys and they call him the one arm bandit. For his buddies, the nick-name is just a hint of the respect they have for him.

Pete Reynolds, a police sergeant, is one of the group. He rates Mark as, “…a skilled rider. He pushes himself. He’s not afraid of the jumps. He likes to get dirty, just like anyone else.” Waiting for the race a youngster may come by and ask Mark about his arm and he is comfortable with that; happy to answer questions. But if someone stares or acts uneasy around him, Mark admits he is uncomfortable too.

FALLS

Danger is a fact of life in motorbike racing and the paramedics truck is a familiar site at the events. Mark says he races as carefully as he can to minimize the risks. He is particularly wary when the trail cuts between trees and multiple riders are trying to squeeze through. In that situation, he stays on the left side of the trail so he will be passed on the right, to avoid getting his prosthetic arm from being clipped by another rider.

Despite the precautions, he has taken his share of tumbles. “I’ve wrecked quite a few times and two of them hurt pretty good. I haven’t broken anything. Sometimes it happens; you just can’t control it.” His wife, Dawn acknowledges the risks, but says, “I’m comfortable with his judgement and as long as he stays off the streets, I’ll support him. I’ve never been a big fan of street bikes.”

TOO MUCH FUN

At his next race after Bartow, Mark’s bike performed well in the practice run but let him down again in the actual race. So, he says he will tear the engine down on his Suzuki RMZ 250 to see what the problem is. And he will do that in style. He will work in a well-lit, auto and truck repair shop, he has just finished behind his new home in Georgia.

He already has a waiting list of customers to fix cars, trucks and lawn mowers. He tells them it will take him longer to finish because of his arm, but people who have seen his completed work say it is top notch; he is still a master mechanic.

Mark says he isn’t trying to prove anything to himself by racing but he hopes that what he is doing will encourage others to think about overcoming the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their own lives. He is now in his fifties, which raises the question of how much longer he will continue to race. Despite the now much longer distances to travel to the races in Florida, he says he will make those trips. He has no plans to quit anytime soon. He is having way too much fun doing what he once thought was impossible.

MILES BOYER