13 Years

Thirteen years. It’s how long Ricky Carmichael has been retired. It’s the age of Jett Lawrence. It’s ¼ of Chad Reed’s motocross career and ½ of Martin Davalos’ 250 regime. However you dice it up, it’s a long ass time.

And that’s how long vurbmoto has been going. (Minus a brief hiatus when we all went to the beach and drank Mai Tai’s).

The reason I know this (other than because I can do the math of 2020 minus 2007) is because Facebook recently reminded me that my first ever tagged picture was with Wes Williams, during the summer of 2007 when I did my “Year in MX” trip. It was a whirlwind summer of driving to races, watching races, driving to more races and meeting a bunch of people that would later turn into lifelong friends. It was also the summer of vurbmoto’s birth.

Now I won’t delve too deeply in the origins because there is an excellent article in the pipeline explaining all of this, but I’d say that it was a life-changing experience for more than just me (and especially so for Wes). At the time, the internet was blowing up and getting “shown” on the internet was a lot harder than going to www.instagram.com and signing up for an account. Vurbmoto was one of the few places that allowed amateur motocross riders a chance to have photos of themselves on a legitimate (kinda) motocross media outlet and show off to their friends that they were cool.

Of course, times have changed and now it’s not quite such a big deal, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that motocross does allow all of us to meet a helluva lot of people, and being part of vurbmoto unlocked a lot of doors to a crazy life that I still can’t really believe has happened.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this article, but then I wasn’t sure where I’ve been going for most of the past decade and it hasn’t worked out too badly. I guess the moral of this story is that motocross is cool, vurbmoto is cool and that you should try and get yourself tagged in as many Facebook photos as possible because otherwise your “Photos of You” page will look extremely sparse and be an extremely underwhelming trip through memory lane.