IRONMAN

Eddie Meek first rode a motorcycle when he was 30, a year later he started racing, at the gruelling Weston Beach Race, before quickly progressing to desert races. From there he competed as a solo rider in the Ironman class at the feared and revered Baja 1000. Eddie is not your normal motorcycle racer.

Eddie Meek is hiding in his van from the builders, plumbers and electricians who ask him a thousand questions a day. The amateur motorcycle racer is taking a short break from his job, as a building site project manager, to answer some questions for Kriega. We already knew a little of his story, but we were confused when he told us that wanting to compete in the Baja 1000 was a childhood dream, but that he didn’t actually ride a motorcycle until he was 30…

‘I grew up in the Lake District, in Northwest England, when the Lombard Rally [a round of the World Rally Championship] would pass our doorstep once a year,’ explains Eddie. ‘I got hooked on watching rallying and all the videos, and from rallying I got into the Dakar and Baja, and it became one big motorsport addiction. I was into rallying all my early life. When I was old enough to drive I got myself a road rally car and built that up. Then I got my first proper rally car and did ten years of British National rallying.’

A divorce, when he was still in his late-20s, gave him the push to go travelling, and Eddie spent 18 months in Australia. It was there where he bought a Suzuki RMZ250 to head into the outback on an adventure with mates. ‘That was the first time I’d ever ridden a motorcycle.’

It was a pivotal moment. When he returned to England, Eddie bought a motocross bike and entered the Weston Beach Race. He blew up the bike in a dune, ‘But it made me hungry for more,’ Eddie says. He started practising at a local MX track, and entered more beach races in the UK and France.

‘After all that I wanted to go back to Australia and do the Finke Desert Race.’ It’s a two-day event, that’s been running since 1976, in Australia’s Northern Territory.  ‘I bought a bike over in Australia and my mates helped me out, as pit crew. That's when I met Lyndon Poskitt, the Dakar racer.’

Eddie went on one of Lyndon’s Race To Places adventures, down the length of the Rocky Mountains, along the Continental Divide, from Bozeman, Montana, to El Paso, Texas.  All this experience – crammed into a few short years, gave Eddie the confidence to fulfil that childhood dream of racing the Baja 1000, in 2017.

‘It was a “peninsula run” that they hold every two or three years, covering over 1100 miles,’ says Eddie. He had no contacts in the Baja racing community, so he built a bike at home and shipped it from England to California. Luckily, Eddie loves the logistical challenges involved in these huge races on the other side of the world.

Baja’s motorcycle race classes are open to teams of up to four riders, but Eddie wanted to enter the Ironman class, and race the whole thing as a solo, one-man team. This involves racing for over 40 hours non-stop. It sounds superhuman. Eddie has raced the Baja 1000 four times, and three of them in the Ironman class.

‘In 2023 I was on the bike for 45 hours,’ says Eddie. He came second in the Ironman that year, covering over 1300 race miles, non-stop. ‘It's not 100% off-road, because you come onto a road section and you might be on that for a few miles before you dart off again into the dirt. And that’s when I fell asleep on my bike. Luckily, I woke up when I went off the side of the road and it started getting rougher.’

Eddie has competed in several Baja’s and other desert races, and currently has a KTM 450XCF built by No Bad Days Racing, Canada, and maintained by Condor Baja Tours. That simplifies the logistics, but it’s still a huge effort. Just getting to the start of the 2023 race was a challenge, involving a three-day off-road drive down Baja to the start-line, because the race ran from south to north for the first time in history.

‘We travelled through the night for three days to get down there because you're only going 50mph towing your rig. Then you go through signing-on, and do any pre-running you have time for. Then, before you know it, the race is there. You've got no time to rest. You don't fly in, wake up with a nice breakfast and a massage and go racing. The race is easy compared to getting there,’ he reckons.

Being on the bike for so long, the rider needs a team to back them up, manning the pit stops for food, drinks, extra clothing, repairs or wheel changes. The first time he raced the Baja, in 2017, Eddie’s friends travelled to Mexico to help him. Subsequently he’s employed local specialists to be his team, headed up by Rogelio ‘The Captain’. This support is on top of the official fuelling pit stops that the race organisers supply at a charge in addition to the hefty entry fee (the figure depends on the exact length of the race that year, but Eddie says the average entry fee is US $5000).

‘The pits are like a scene from Mad Max. There's no spectator control. It's like going through a football crowd. Trying to find your pit crew, especially when the Trophy Trucks have caught you up, is really difficult.’ Eddie adds that some locals dig ‘booby trap’ trenches just to cause chaos and crashes for their own amusement, but even that is not enough to dampen his enthusiasm for the races, and he hopes to compete in the FIM’s International Six Days Enduro (ISDE) in Spain, held in October 2024, but right now he has to get back to work. There’s a plumber with a question that needs answering. 

When he races the Baja 1000, Eddie relies on a Kriega Hydro 3 hydration pack, with Hands-Free Kit, Harness Pocket (on his handlebars) and an R8 Waist Pack.

Follow Eddie on Instagram @eddie_meek

Photos: Eddie Meek personal archive