Few sporting events are more punishing than the Enduro motorcycle races through the deserts of the American West. Tyler Adams, senior art director at indie agency Boathouse, grew up hearing stories of his father’s off-roading exploits in the 1970s and ’80s. But he didn’t start riding a motorcycle himself until a couple of years ago.
“I had a breakup, bought a motorcycle—as one does,” he said. “The initial draw was there is no room in your brain when you’re riding a motorcycle. You have to focus and you have to forget about everything else going on in the world, or you’re going to die. And that’s so freeing to be 100% in anything.”
That bike, a Ninja 400, did help with the heartache—until Adams had a head-on collision in the canyons near his hometown in Southern California. “Then I got another motorcycle, got into another accident, and was like, ‘Hmm, maybe this is kind of dangerous,’” he recalled.
Instead of giving up the hobby, he found a safer way to ride. Adams is now a supermoto racer, where modified off-road motorcycles compete on tracks that combine paved and dirt sections. Which sometimes means riding through 4 inches of mud if a rainstorm comes through the night before: “That’s just the way it goes,” Adams said with a shrug. “You deal with it.”
The NASCAR-style competition involves doing a set number of laps that last between 30 and 90 seconds depending on the course, with the bikes reaching speeds of around 90mph.
“One of my favorite things is how quickly you can realize and improve on your mistakes,” Adams said. “In life, you mess something up and you might not get a chance to try again. At supermoto, you’ve got a chance 45 seconds from now to do the exact same thing and try to improve.”
When he first heard about the sport, Adams found a supermoto riding school on Google. “I took that class with my dad, actually,” he said. By the end, “we both were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the most fun I’ve ever had on a motorcycle.’”
He immediately bought the same model motorbike that they trained on and started going out to tracks. The people he met there encouraged him to enter races, but Adams wasn’t sure at first: “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m just here having fun,’ and they’re like, ‘No, you can only get so fast on your own.’”
So about a year ago, he completed his first race. “It was awful, but I had a blast,” he recalled. And his new friends were right: The experience helped him figure out how to get faster. Adams bought a new bike, started working out more—the rowing machine has been especially helpful—and analyzed where he was fast and slow on the track.
