I Trained like a Marine Combat Rider

These are some of the most elite, deadliest riders you may have never heard of. These are military combat motorcyclists. And then there's me. No one saw that. Is airsoft literally air? Okay. For the next 24 hours, I'm going to train like a combat motorcyclist. This is the man who has been teaching marine combat dirt bike riding at his training facility, Sedlock Off-Road School in San Diego. He has traveled all around the world racing professionally in motocross, supercross, enduro, and desert events. And somehow, he agreed to train me like he trains the marines for the day. I'm Daniel Sedlock with Sedlock Off-Road School. We're here in San Diego. I've had my off-road school here for 10 years now, working with all sorts of riders from enduro, adventure bike. We also do motocross training. And the last few years, I've developed a training curriculum for the recon marines. And today, we're here. Doodle on the motorcycle. We're going to run through some of the drills that we do with the marines. Get her ready. And hopefully, by the end of the day, have her ready to go on the mission herself. They have ones that are lighter now, but this is what men wear. Okay. How come I'm a man today? You're a man today. So we're going to see if a civilian like me were to train like a marine combat motorcyclist for the day. Will I improve enough that I'll be accepted into their elite group of riders? We'll find out. We'd start off the day with the first exercise. Balance. Riding one-handed. Besides forcing you to perfect your body position, sometimes combat riders may need to reach for something like a map, a weapon, or if they're riding to draw enemy fire away from other soldiers. That doesn't exactly leave much time for stopping. All right, so first thing we want to focus on is slow stand-up bike control. That's sort of like what you want later in the technical terrain. You need your left hand to be able to, you know, operate. To grab things. Exactly. Okay, here we go. Right into it. It's kind of surreal to be here because there was a time in my life when I seriously considered joining the military and I kind of always wondered, what if? Yeah, I did. Yeah, and then I went to art school instead. Man, that was, those were some advanced basics. Those were some gnarly, one-handed basics. I ain't never seen something like that in my life, let me tell you. Military basics. Military basics, yeah. I'm Master Sergeant Retired Randy McElwee. I spent 23 years in Army Special Forces. My primary focus while I was in the military with Army Special Forces, I spent a lot of time doing desert mobility operations, which included use of the motorcycles, some tactical exploration of how to employ the bikes, how to use them for different scenarios, and how we could incorporate them into a lot of the missions that we were doing. Primarily, we wound up with the Kawasaki four-stroke, the 250s, the two-stroke engines. It was much quieter, which worked better, especially for any type of reconnaissance missions. That's kind of the idea is, you don't usually see them, but once you get on the ground and the bikes go out, they're probably the first to get fired upon, because they're the first contact. That was one of the reasons that the speed of the bike was very important. The reconnaissance part was much more important, and most of the time, initially, you would go in at night. You know, that's why the bikes would go out first, see if they drew fire, and then that way you could get everybody back on the helicopter and leave. Hi, I'm Jeff Bramstad, former U.S. Navy SEAL, and right now we are here at Skydive San Diego, the happiest place on earth. You probably thought it was Disneyland, and you were wrong, because it is here at this place, where we have civilian skydiving, we do tandems, we do AFF instruction, and we also have SEDLAC off-road schools, trains here as well, and we get awesome people coming through here, like Miss Carolyn of Doodle Land Motorcycle. Next, we'd practice riding in the terrain that military convoys find themselves in the most. Number two, we want to focus on that transition from tarmac into gravel into sand. I did not know this bike was going to be so tall. Yeah, that was a big one for us, was the sand and gravel, especially this deep sand, because you get out into the desert and you hit like an area of soft sand or whatever. It's a pretty big difference, so it was kind of important to spend some time for the guys to get some experience in actually doing that. I had discovered a couple of what they call wadis, which is like a little air depression that got wet or has mud on it, and then the sand is blown over it, so it looks like flat sand when it's actually very soft. You don't drop into it, you sort of sink into it. Once your boot's in it or your tire's in it, it just sort of holds on. Probably the most serious one was during an artillery barrage that I was riding through, leading a couple of columns of vehicles through a minefield into Kuwait City. There was one night after we were starting to get into Kuwait where the oil fires were so thick that at night you couldn't see two feet in front of you, but we were riding through it and leading people back and forth into mid-black areas. So now you're stuck, right? And this is something that happens a lot. So that bike's properly buried, and that was something that we would come across, right? You're out riding, you get stuck, you're by yourself. Now I will show you how to get this bike back out so you can get back on the trail. Step up from the basics to this. All right, yeah. So yeah, I think you're ready for a little bit more. Whoa. The first thing I want you to do is grab the end of the handlebars and rock the bike back and forth a little bit so that you can break the rear tire loose. So like, yeah, probably, yeah, really get in there. Yeah, lean back and then push forward. And while you're like jumping in, pushing forward, you aggressively let go of the clutch and just really get on the throttle. So you have to make sure that you do all three at the same time, right? Almost. I got it. Yeah, you're out of the rut. Oh no. That's why I didn't want you to ride my bike. Motorcycles are a valuable asset on the battlefield. They're quick, they're nimble, they can move in and out of places. When I first started, it was kind of, you know, a novelty thing for reconnaissance and special ops teams. Now they're using it in routine operations. The bike you see me on is the KLX-300, the slightly more powerful version of the KLX-250, which was used by U.S. Special Forces deployed in Afghanistan shortly after 9-11, as well as used by the Japanese military. Today, U.S. Marines are using black electric bikes, the Zero MMX, possibly due to the stealth advantage of their silent engines. There have been a lot of different military bikes used throughout history, from the Harley WLA during World War II to the KLR-650 in Desert Storm and the KLR modified by Haste Technology to run on diesel in the early 90s. In 2010, there was a shortage of bikes outside the Special Forces, and a Marine unit in Afghanistan wanted to level the playing field as the opposition was often on two wheels. So this Marine unit bought Chinese knockoff bikes at the Afghani Bazaar and spray-painted them in camouflage colors. So I spray-painted the KLX-300 to match today's Marines, since Zero didn't respond to my email to borrow an MMX. I used chalk spray paint since it was on loan from Kawasaki so I could wash it off, which is why you'll see bright green coming through in the video. Although if this was truly modified for combat, it might have to be totally black or camouflage colors, as well as all the lights blacked out. One of the things we used to do though is we would do downrider drills to where one of the bikes would go down and then you would have to take the other rider with you and move back to the main vehicle element. So we put the other rider on the back, maybe his bike had crashed and you're under fire or you need to evacuate the area. For any reason that you only had one operational bike to leave that location. I had never ridden with a passenger before. Having someone on the back felt very difficult to balance. It felt like I'd drop him at any second. On this dirt bike so tall that my feet couldn't even touch the ground, I could only put one foot down at a time. I couldn't imagine riding this bike in an emergency situation with a passenger if I needed to quickly drop off a shooter in enemy territory or even carry a downed soldier on this bike. Ooh, okay. Not bad. Nope. And braking. You good? All right. It takes some practice and a lot of communicating with the passenger if they were conscious. I definitely need a lot more than just a day to get proficient, let alone just getting used to having a passenger. When I'm just standing around, this feels so heavy. I think it's like almost 15 pounds. It's gonna hurt tomorrow. But when I'm on the bike, it's like a distraction and I forget this is even on. Oh yeah, you're calling me. The next thing we'd practice would be helicopter disembarking. Ideally, you're not landing a helicopter where there are enemy shooters. But sometimes you just don't know if they're there or not. And oftentimes, the riders may be the first ones out. As one of a combat motorcyclist's job is to search for the enemy. And one of the ways to do that is to attract their fire. A combat rider cannot afford to be slow in and out of a helicopter. It would fly in and then land later and allow us to come out first on the bikes and kind of, you know, do a quick perimeter search of the area to make sure there's no enemy in the area while the guys came out, got the vehicle ready. The tailgate of the helicopter has these fold-out ramps. Sometimes we wanted that extra second and we would just talk to the crew chiefs of the helicopters and tell them, hey, when we land to get off the bird, don't put them down. Just step out of the way. With the bikes, it's easy enough just to ride off the end of the ramp. That's some, that's some like Mission Impossible stuff I'm picturing right now. I don't know, back then, it didn't seem like Mission Impossible. Off-road riding. In order to simulate riding in and out of a helicopter, Braum found just the right thing with a tight space inside and a high, abrupt lip to simulate not having a ramp in a rush. You're gonna get stuck on that lip. But now we're gonna have like light fire out here, so people shooting at you, that will make it a little more... That felt really cool. I don't make these videos trying a new skill for the trolls that like to call me out on it. It's not about me. It's why I train with motor police officers, a tiny woman on big adventure bikes, and now showing you combat riders. It's to show those people that think of us as just hooligans or bar hoppers, that there's more to riders than that. There's even more to two wheels than that. That because of two wheels, our heroes can just be a little bit better at being a hero. So yeah, you can, you can ride the sand, you can ride standing up, you can have passengers, you can disembark. Yes. Mission ready. So much. That was so much fun. I cannot believe you do that for two weeks. Right. With the Marines. I can already feel bruises on the insides of my knees. My body's gonna hurt tomorrow. And it was so much fun. It was worth it. It was so, so worth it. Now you're like legitimately an off-road badass. Am I a volunteer Marine combat motorcyclist now? Would I be qualified? Comment below. Let us know. Now that you've gotten to know some of the deadliest riders in the world, did you know about the riders that train for the most dangerous race in the world? The racers who train for the Isle of Man. Watch that one next.