How it all came about

Ever since I can remember my father has always taken me to motorbike races. These mainly consisted of motocross meetings (or scrambles as they used to be known) throughout the 70’s and 80’s. So naturally I grew up with a passion for motorbikes. When I was 18 I finally bought an off road bike, all beit a trail bike, that being a Yamaha DT 175 MX. There used to be a practice track in my home town of Reading that was free for everyone to use and I used to regularly go down there and practice riding around against the ‘proper’ motocross bikes. I used to enjoy this especially when I used to beat a few of them on my Yammy trail bike!.
When I passed my car test I ditched the bike and never really went to any more race meetings for a good few years.
Now, I have always wanted to have a go at some form of off road racing (especially anything to do with sidecars) and I have always spoke about it with my Dad over the years, sadly he passed away and I would think secretly that he would have always liked to have seen his son have a go at it.
In the summer of 2006 and at the grand old age of 42! I finally decided to jump in at the deep end and buy a KTM 250 EXC, the reason behind this was that I just love the sound and smell of 2 strokes, and I just ‘fancied something orange’! now bearing in mind that I haven’t been on a motorbike for over 20 years it was quite a shock to ride a ‘modern’ enduro bike!
I have to admit to not knowing much mechanically about motorbikes in general but after only 2 weeks of owning it the clutch went! so I took it down to Mark Seward’s down at St Austell from seeing a advert in TMX to have one put in. Down there I met Mark himself who I found out was a very very good rider in his day, 2nd in the British enduro championship and past winner of the Weston beach race (sidecars) as well as being a very good trials rider. The other bloke I met was Mark Denslow who was a current championship class rider who worked there as well, so all in all these 2 guys have wealth of knowledge and experience.
So, I got the bike back and everything was fine for a couple of days and I was taking it out on the road to try and get used to it, but every time I opened it up it kept stalling and after replacing plug after plug it was back down to Mark’s again to find out what the problem was.
Oh shit! The crank seal had gone and that was going to cost a lot a bloody fortune so I decided to cut my losses and part exchange it for a TM 125.
The TM is a nice looking bike and I thought I’d probably be better off with a 125 anyway, all I needed now was somewhere to play on it so I could maybe enter a few races. Racing an enduro seemed fanciable as riding for anything up to 3 hours would be a challenge and being an ex marathon runner I certainly know what a challenge is all about!