There's an old story about a workhorse...
Not the kind with a dramatic ending or a lesson wrapped up clean. Just an animal that woke up every morning and did what it was built to do.
Pull the weight.
Cover the ground.
Show up before the sun did and leave after it went down.
No applause. No podium.
Just the work, and the quiet belief that the work meant something, even when nothing around it confirmed that.
I've been thinking about that damn horse a lot lately.
Because that's what 2026 is for me. Not a comeback story or redemption arc. Just a decision to stop waiting for permission to belong to something and start earning my way back into it the only way I know how.
One event, road and one day at a time.
---
The dream didn't end because I chose to walk away.
Someone else turned the lights on.
When I was young, motocross and supermoto were everything. Not just a hobby. A world. A community. A place where I felt like I understood the language without being taught it. And then, piece by piece, the financial reality closed in. Decisions were made for me. Practical ones. Final ones. The kind you can't argue with when you're young enough to be overruled and old enough to never forget.
So you wake up from the dream... Or you try to....
You build a different life. You go through the motions. You watch from the window for years, telling yourself the glass doesn't bother you.
It bothered me.
Every f***in day.
---
2020 sent me over the edge. I stopped pretending.
I walked away from everything that wasn't mine. The life I'd been handed, the expectations I'd been suffocating under, the version of myself that had been built around other people's fears. No car. No conventional safety net. Just my wife, my mountain bike, and a direction I could finally call my own.
It wasn't clean. It wasn't cinematic.
It was just necessary.
And somewhere in the middle of rebuilding everything from scratch, I found my way back to the window, except this time I wasn't just watching. I was looking for the door.
---
The Work Horse doesn't ask if it belongs, it just shows up.
That's what I did at Olympus Rally. Showed up. No credentials, no camera, no title that explained why I was there. Just a volunteer application and three hours of travel from Centralia. By bus and mountain bike, the way I move through the world now.
I wasn't competing or covering it as press. I was just there.
And somewhere between talking weather patterns and stage conditions with drivers and lead mechanics, people who've spent their whole lives inside this world, something settled in me that hadn't been still in a long time.
I felt at peace with the chaos.
Not because everything made sense, but because for the first time in years, I was standing in the right kind of disorder. The kind that hums instead of screams. The kind that feels like home if you've ever known it before.
We talked like people who'd known each other for years. Shared what we knew. Speculated about the weekend. Stood in the uncertainty together.
Nobody asked what I did. Nobody needed to.
That's what the workhorse learns eventually: belonging isn't announced. It's just suddenly there, quiet and certain, in the middle of a conversation you didn't plan to have.
---
The bus ride home took three hours.
Centralia to Shelton. Mountain bike loaded. Body done.
I didn't feel triumphant. I didn't feel like I'd arrived anywhere.
I felt exhausted. And if I'm being honest, I felt angry.
Mad that it took this long. Mad that the path back into something I never should have left runs through public buses and volunteer applications and three hour rides home in the dark.
Mad that the people who made me believe I didn't belong here got so many years of being right.
But here's what the workhorse knows that nobody tells you.
The anger means it matters.
You don't get that tired over something that doesn't mean anything. You don't ride three hours home irritated about a dream you've already let go of.
The exhaustion was proof. The irritation was proof.
---
So that's what this year is.
Olympus Rally. Oregon Trail Rally. Every mountain bike event I can get to. Every volunteer role, every marshal position, every capacity in which I can be useful to a world I'm working my way back into.
Not for recognition or for access.
For the work itself. And for what the work is slowly confirming is that the dream was always real. The circumstances around it were just wrong.
I'm not watching from the window anymore.
And somewhere out there, past the stages, past the noise, past everything..
I can't name it yet.... but I can feel it pulling.
See you in Goldendale & Dufur for Oregon Trail Rally.
- Mr. Bonez