“It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there” – Bob Dylan

By day, Tim Hilton is a lanky, longmarried, 49-year-old guy with three sons. He loves his family. He goes to church on Sundays. He builds custom doors in a roomy shop behind his rural Monument home.

But once or twice a week, come early evening or on a weekend, Hilton is transformed into a lanky, devil-may-care 23-year-old with a bad attitude.

Hilton becomes his alter ego when he pulls on a sun-faded pair of blue padded pants, a chest protector and thick, well-worn, knee-high boots.

His weapon? A well-used, orange KTM two-stroke dirt bike. With a twist of the throttle, Hilton whips his KTM through a series of intimidating obstacles he’s built behind his home. The blat-blat-blat of the bike’s exhaust marks his high-speed progress around the homemade track.

Family man becomes Endurocross Man, able to leap big logs and massive tractor tires at high speed!

Endurocross, for the vast majority of folks unfamiliar with the fairly new sport, combines the gnarliest aspects of several off-road motorcycle disciplines.

The events, held indoors in stadiums and civic centers, require competitors to sail over jumps, negotiate water holes, judder across numerous logs and massive boulders and blast over large tires – all at hair-raising speed.

Dirt Rider magazine calls it the “toughest racing on two wheels.”

It’s an unlikely scene for Hilton, who quit riding dirt bikes in 1986 to raise his family. Still, sometime after buying the then-knackered KTM in 2006, he read a magazine article about endurocross and watched a video of the sport.

Despite his age and responsibilities, Hilton’s reaction: “‘Ah, I can do that, man.'”

And he did.

He signed up for the Denver stop of the Maxxis Endurocross series last September. He competed in the veterans class, ages 30 and up.

Most of those who lined up at the start line were a heckuva lot closer to 30 than to his age, though.

He says he did “terrible.” “Physically, it just wasted me,” he said.

The course was so tough he couldn’t finish the third lap.

Battered but still game, he entered a similar event in Rapid City, S.D., last winter and finishedfiifth in his class (out of 16 riders).

He came home stoked and immediately set to work building his own track with $65 worth of logs, tires, cinder blocks – and a 16-inch-wide, 40-foot-long plank crossing Monument Creek.

He deliberately made it grueling because he plans to again compete in the Maxxis Endurocross competition, Sept. 27 at the National Western Sports Complex in Denver.”This year, I’m going to finish,” he vowed after making a couple of bone-jarring laps recently on his homemade track.”It’s an ego thing. I’ve been doing this in the snow. This has made me not scared.”It’s also taught him where to put pads in his riding outfit, since he occasionally takes spills no 49-yearold body was meant to take.”I have the perfect wife,” Hilton said. “She watches me out the window, and I lift my arm if I’m laying on the ground to let her know I’m OK.”His understanding wife, Dawn, thinks it’s pretty cool that a competitive fire still rages in her husband.”I don’t mind,” Dawn Hilton said as her husband shed his protective gear after the practice ride. “At least it’s not a ‘Vette and a woman. I just give him a Vicodin and a bandage and we’re good to go.”Tim Hilton knows his new pastime, at least superficially, is just another midlife crisis story.”Some guys golf,” he said. “Some guys clean their car and just look at it. I just have this old, beat-up dirt bike.”But to him, blasting around the track – getting the timing just right to lift a wheel over a big log or negotiate a minefield of broken cinder blocks or taking a fall the right way to avoid serious injury – is really about finding a new challenge in life.And maybe it’s a reward for working hard for 20 years to build his business and raise his family.”It’s a new thing,” he said. “I know I’m 49. But I don’t feel it when I’m on the bike. I’ve never had so much fun.”Dawn Hilton, as wives often do, knows there are deeper things afoot when her husband throws his leg over his KTM and puts the bike and himself on that fine line between control and disaster:”When you give up, that’s when you get old.”

Practicing on the track he built at his Monument home helps Tim Hilton, 49, keep up with younger endurocross racers, says the husband and father. Photo by