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Little did Lisa Bode know when she sent AmSnow a photo of her 19-month old daughter Tabitha in 1996 that she’d be calling us back 15 years later to tell us Tabitha is an ISOC snocross racer.
We were surprised too!
But Tabitha Lauren Bode, now 17, is a racer. In fact, she’s in perpetual motion.
A typical day for the high school senior starts about 6 a.m. with some practice on the track the family has built on its 10-acre farm near Wild Rose, Wis. Then it’s off to school where she’s earning a 4.1 grade point average, and afterward either managing the Wild Rose High School boy’s basketball team, working her job at Dairy Queen in Wautoma, Wis., or back home to study and tune her Polaris 600 IQ with her father Russ.
Sometime in there, when she’s not sleeping or practicing, Tabitha also has a workout regimen to keep her in shape for a full season of the poundings that snocross dishes out.
Tabitha, now racing with the Fort Fremont Racing Team, runs both regional and the national ISOC circuit in the Women’s Pro division. Last year she finished 9th out of 21 racers and was 4th at the regional level. Her goal for 2011-12 is first and foremost to have a “safe and successful season.” Successful would mean a top 3 finish regionally and top 5 nationally.
She thinks that’s doable.
So far her best national finish is a 7th at Elko, Minn., where she says the sled was “really dialed in.” In regional racing she was second at Plymouth, Wis.
Tabitha and her parents have snowmobiled for years, although she notes that now that she’s racing the family trail rides have faded. At age 12 her dad asked if she’d like to give enduro lake racing a shot.
“I was always around snowmobiles, so I was not afraid at all,” Tabitha says. So she gave it a try, adding that it was something fun to do on Saturdays.
“It wasn’t just the time with the family, but the speed and the rush of it,” she says about why she got hooked. “There’s no other sport like it, the mix of nervousness and adrenaline before a race.”
But Tabitha says lake racing got boring to her and then she moved to grass drags, something she still enjoys on a limited basis each summer. Snocross was the next step, which she started three years ago aboard a 2005 Polaris 440 IQ in the Women’s Sport division. Year two she moved to the Pro ranks and applied for a Polaris-prepared race sled and was accepted. That’s the 2011 600 IQ she now rides and that she and her dad tune.
For snocross “the biggest challenge was understanding the sport. Some people think it’s easy, just going up and down hills, but it’s NOT easy. I had to learn when to brake in the air and how if it’s cattywampus in the air to straighten it out,” Tabitha says.
She’s still learning, but is happy with her progress and notes she’ll race nine weekends in a row this winter.
“I never thought I’d be at the level I’m at now,” Tabitha says, crediting her parents with supporting her in her race efforts and everything else she has tried along the way, including baseball, volleyball and even wrestling.
For this season she has a bevy of personal sponsors, from her parents and her dad’s business, Russ’s Carpet and Floor Care to Wisconsin Dells restaurants, Moosejaw and Buffalo Phil’s, to Wenzel’s Farm Sausages, and more noted snowmobiling backers such as Arctiva, C&A Pro Skis, Fly Racing, Stud Boy, Carlisle Belts and MoTul. Yes, and also Polaris. Plus there is her new team, which has five riders that race in various classes.
But after high school the racing may become a little harder to fit in. She’s off to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota to study meteorology and plans to be in the Army ROTC program. Still she hopes to run races that are easy to get to and fit into her schedule. She’s thinking Duluth and Lake Geneva will certainly be possible.
“I’ve got no plans to stop anytime soon.”