Jim’s Beemer Blog

I’ve been to John Day three years in a row now, twice for the rally and once on my first long trip on my old K75RT-P, so I’m getting to know the place pretty well. But one thing I wasn’t aware of is that in John Day, they put meat in their cocktails.

The first night of the rally Dave, Curt and I went to the Hitchin’ Post for dinner. I ordered a habanero bloody mary and when it arrived I was surprised to find that not only was it huge but it was garnished with two gigantic olives, a whole stick of celery, and two big hunks of salami! It was a meal unto itself, and a first for me. And boy was it HOT!!

The next morning we decided to do the loop I’d done last year, through Sumpter, Granite, and Ukaiah and then back to John Day down 395. Dave wanted to find an ancestor’s grave in the Sumpter cemetery, so our first stop was there. We rode east on highway 26 out of John Day and turned onto highway 7 for Sumpter. Along the way we passed quite a few bicyclists on the “America By Bike” tour who were on their leg from John Day to Baker. Dave, who is also a bicyclist and veteran of many Cycle Oregon events, gave the cyclists a thumbs up when we encountered them on steep uphills.

The day before at the rally I’d found a really cool camera mount and had my point-and-shoot mounted for action on this loop ride. Dave liked the pics so much that he bought one too when we got back to the rally. Here’s a pic of Dave on highway 7 on the way to Sumpter:

Dave and his K75RT on highway 7 to Sumpter.

When we got to Sumpter we had a hard time finding the cemetery until Dave asked at the store. We rode about 2 miles down a gravel road and finally found the cemetery. It seems like the only paved road in Sumpter is the highway going through town. All the side roads are dirt or gravel, and there were a lot of people getting around on quad cycles.

Most of the graves in the Sumpter cemetery are unmarked. We fanned out and checked all the marked graves but couldn’t find Dave’s ancestor. If City Hall had been open we might have been able to check the cemetery records but it was closed. We decided to move on.

A headstone in the Sumpter cemetery.

We headed toward Granite and the serious twistys began. Yesterday had been clear, sunny, and hot but today was overcast and we’d already been sprinkled on a bit. We stopped in Granite briefly to wait for Curt and chatted with a group of riders who were worried that one of their group might run out of gas before Ukaiah. I offered some out of my GS Adventure tank since I had plenty, which led Dave to dub it the “KC-135″ (the KC-135 is the US Air Force’s tanker plane used for aerial refueling). Fortunately there was gas in Granite so I didn’t have to siphon any from my tank.

About three quarters of the way to Granite we pulled over for a break and Dave checked out some damage a rock had done to his fairing. Dave liked the K75S belly fairing but it was never offered on the RT package. He found one and did a great job of figuring out how to mount it on his RT. But the road from Granite to Ukaiah can have a lot of rockfall on it, and Dave’s front tire had kicked one of these rocks up into his custom belly fairing and put a 3 inch gash in it. Crap…

Curt and Dave gassed up in Ukaiah at the only gas station and we headed out to 395 and back to John Day. Dave and I were pushing it pretty well and we stopped again in Long Creek to wait for Curt. As we were moving our bikes out from under a bunch of mud dauber nests Dave’s helmet fell and hit the asphalt, breaking one of the visor connectors. We spent some time trying to fix it and finally gave up and asked the Long Creek store for a piece of duct tape to get him back to John Day. It wasn’t a good day for plastic.

When we got back to the rally we chatted with some people that had done the same loop we had in reverse, and they got soaked. We must have been just ahead of the rainstorm. But we didn’t miss out completely becuse we got hit with a good thunderstorm Saturday night. Lying in my tent I saw a huge flash of light and then heard Dave start counting in his tent: “One thousand one! One thousand two!” BOOOOM! Then again from Dave’s tent: “Cool!” Guess you can’t take the weather out of the weatherman…

The conclusion to follow in part 3. Stay tuned!

I’m going to divert from the John Day rally for this post but I’ll get back to it next. I want to talk for a bit about something integral to motorcycling: “the wave”.

If you’re a motorcyclist you already know and participate in “the wave”. If you don’t ride, I know you’ve seen motorcyclists waving at each other as they pass on the road and probably wondered “do those dudes know each other?” But then you noticed it happens quite a lot and realized there’s probably something else going on.

I don’t think anyone knows why motorcyclists wave at each other, and not all riders wave. Some riders only wave at people riding the same brand of bike that they do. I wave at all other riders if I’m not busy with the clutch (if I am I give them an exaggerated nod of acknowledgement). I think waving is our way of saying “Hey, still alive?” “Yup, nobody in a car killed me yet.” It’s a shared experience thing.

I’ll wave at anybody, and in my experience since I’ve gotten back into riding most people out West wave back. The most common riders who don’t are guys on sport bikes and guys on Harleys who are in full “bad boy” mode and usually have ape hanger handlebars (maybe there isn’t enough blood in their arms to wave back, but that’s another rant), but even a lot of these guys wave too. Waving at each other is one of the things I like about motorcycling.

Lately with gas prices so high I’ve been commuting a lot more on my bike. I commute 30 miles one way and half is rural and the other city. I’ve made a personal rule that when I start getting into heavy traffic in the city I’m not waving anymore, simply because I’m in traffic survival mode. So if anyone out there reading this has seen a red and white GS Adventure in or near downtown Portland during the morning and evening commutes and I didn’t wave back at you don’t take it personally. I’m just concentrating on not getting killed by the cell phone wielding, makeup applying, breakfast eating cagers who are late for work.

After all my stated good intentions about being more consistent in my blogging I’ve completely ignored this site since March. Many friends and coworkers have bugged me about my lack of updates here. That finally must have hit critical “guilt” mass this week because here I am endeavoring to get caught up. So Stephanie, I’ll give you a few entries to read while you wait for opening ceremonies in China since I know you’re not busy at all over there in the NBC compound

I’ve taken three trips since my last blog, so I’ll try and get caught up in order, starting with the BMW Riders of Oregon 2008 Chief Joseph Rally in June. This year I went with my brother in law Curt and my buddy Dave from work. We left from Dave’s house Friday morning and headed up highway 26 to Mt. Hood. We were testing out some new TriSquare digital radios on this trip. They worked OK, but Dave and I were wearing Navy SEAL type throat mics that were unintelligible above about 35 mph. Curt has a J&M system on his R1200CLC BMW that includes a nice boom mic and speakers in his helmet. Curt was crystal clear; Dave and I were a mumble fest.

We turned off highway 26 onto 216 and headed through Pine Grove to Maupin. We were basically using the same route I took to last year’s rally and my other John Day trip the year before that. But hey, this route leads to one of the truly great Oregon motorcycle roads (highway 218 between Shaniko and Fossil) so why not? Curt has started to ride slower since his accident a couple of years ago when some stupid lady pulled out in front of him in a blind corner and he broke his ankle, so he was bringing up the rear. He told Dave and I not to let him spoil our fun so we didn’t. Dave and I can ride pretty aggressively through the twistys when we want to. We’d ride hard for 20 or 30 miles and then stop for a few minutes and wait for Curt. For all his talk about being slow though he was never more that a few minutes behind us the whole weekend.

Highway 218 was as great as ever. This was Dave’s first time on this road and his one word description is apt: “phenomenal!”. I would come to ride this road two more times in the ensuing month, but that’s for later entries. At the end of 218 we stopped in Fossil for lunch. A nice couple in the cafe warned us about 26 miles of chip sealing being done between Dayville and Mt. Vernon but we were planning on stopping in Dayville so Dave could get a picture of the city hall for his wife and daughter. His daughter had been on a trip there recently and their school bus had brokend down. The Dayville school district rescued them, so a big kudos to them!

From Fossil we went through Kimberly and Spray, and came out on highway 26 right before Dayville. Dave’s motorcycle jacket ingested a critter and he was stung three times in the back. I saw Dave and Curt pull off in Dayville but I missed the turn. I went up the road and turned around at what I thought was a paved intersection but it turned out to be 6 inches of pea gravel. My GS Adventure fishtailed quite a bit, but I managed to keep it upright and get turned around.

Parked in Dayville. From left: my R1200GS Adventure, Curt’s R1200CLC, Dave’s K75-RT.

After making sure Dave didn’t swell up like a balloon from his bee/wasp stings we were back on the road and into chipseal Hell. There was indeed 26 miles of chip sealing being done, and the road was down to one lane the whole way. We shut off our engines and ended up waiting 15 minutes in the 96 degree heat for the pilot car. After a slow, annoying ride we reached the end of the chip seal in Mt. Vernon and the remaining 8 miles to John Day was clear sailing. We checked in at the rally entrance, set up our tents, and got down to the important work of finding beer. Fortunately the rally beer garden was open and we were good to go!

The rally site. There were over 700 attendees this year, down from over 800 last year.

I’ll continue the story in the next post. If you’re interested in Dave’s take on the whole trip he posted a blog entry about it here.

To steal a line from an old Boston song, “it’s been such a long time” since I’ve posted to this blog. I started this primarily as a chronicle of my motorcycling adventures, and I haven’t really had many of those lately. There have been a lot of significant changes in my life since my last post and those have kept me pretty busy. I thought I’d talk a bit about those changes and the plans I have for motorcycling in 2008.

First off, I changed jobs (again). I left KGW last year about a month before my trip to Moab. After seven months at Thomson Grass Valley I realized it wasn’t for me. The people I worked with there were all great, but I wasn’t real happy with the company or the work I was doing. KGW offered me more money and a manager gig, so how could I say no? Being back at KGW has kept me too busy to blog or ride though. We converted the newscast to high definition in January, and then a few weeks ago my boss left and I’ve been partially filling in for him. We’re also building a new studio in the old Powell Travel Books spot in Pioneer Square, and our morning and noon news shows will be done from there. That will probably suck up a lot of my time over the next 6 months or so.

I also picked up another hobby in the last few months (gee, didn’t he just say he didn’t have any time?). I was looking into a GPS tracker for the bike so I could put a Google map on this website that would allow readers to see where I was at in real time when I’m off on a long distance adventure. I was talking to my boss at KGW about it (not the one that left) and he mentioned amateur radio and APRS (automatic position reporting system). So to make a long story short, I jumped into the deep end of the geek pool and got my ham radio license. I’m not really much one for BSing on the radio (hams call it “rag chewing”) but APRS interests me, and so does the emergency communication aspect. And it’s something I can do when the weather is too crappy to ride!

Getting back to motorcycles, I somehow found myself webmaster for the BMW RIders of Oregon (http://www.bmwro.org). I’ve redesigned their website to make it simpler and cleaner, and added a photo gallery that has become fairly popular. The club is having a quarterly meeting this weekend at Silver Creek Falls so if anything gets my butt back in the saddle that’ll be it. It’s bad form to go to a motorcycle club meeting in a car…

I’ve also sold the K75RT to a friend at KGW. He’s also a returning rider after a twenty-something year hiatus. I told him (much to his wife’s gratitude) that he couldn’t have the bike until he took and passed a safety class, which he’s going to in the next week or so. Until then it’s still sitting in my garage. I guess I better fix the power windshield on the K bike for him then!

I’ve got a few trips planned for this year. I’ll be going back to the Chief Joseph Rally in John Day again. Since they made me the webmaster I feel kind of obligated. The big trip is going to be to the BMW MOA national rally in Gillette, Wyoming though. Hopefully my buddy Dave S will be able to go as well. While in Wyoming I have to make a pilgrimage to Douglas where my dad was born. Douglas is just south of Gillette and is famous for the giant jackalope statue in the middle of town.

I’m sure there will be other trips here and there. And the way gas prices keep shooing up I may end up being a full time motorcycle commuter like my brother in law. I really hate riding through downtown Portland on a motorcycle though, and now Portland has those huge new “bicycle boxes” at intersections. One thing the city didn’t consider is how dangerous those big swatches of paint are when they’re wet. I hope I never have to turn as I cross one of those things in the rain.

Well, that’s about it for catching up. Watch your RSS feeds and hopefully as the weather improves so will the frequency of my blogging.

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I’ve just been added to Motorcycle Bloggers International, a collection of (you guessed it!) motorcycle bloggers around the world. I applied last year at their website but my blog hadn’t been around long enough so they turned me down. A year and thousands of miles later and I’m in!

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I’m kind of proud of this: Saturday I’m taking my R1200GS Adventure in for it’s 6,000 mile service, and I only just bought it in March with 1 mile on the odometer! Now it has a little over 6,200 miles. And if you read my Iron Butt ride report you’ll see 1,000 miles of that was in one day…in fact, in 18 1/2 hours!

Speaking of the Iron Butt, this year’s rally ended last Friday. This year there was a major change in that you had to score a minimum number of points to be considered a finisher. In years past all you had to do was make all the checkpoints and you could say you finished an Iron butt rally. In addition to having enough points to finish, bronze and gold medals are awarded to riders who score a certain number of points over the minimum to finish. Then of course there are trophies for the top 3 finishers. The final results from the 2007 Iron Butt rally and some interesting stories from each day of the 10 day event can be found at http://www.ironbuttrally.com/IBR/2007.cfm.

I have to send out a special congratulations to 18th place finisher (in his first Iron Butt!) and gold medal awardee Paul Peloquin from Oregon. Paul is the endurance rider I met in June in Susanville, California as he was returning from the Utah 1088 rally (and I was returning from my trip to Moab). Paul planted the seed in my head that led to my Saddlesore 1000 ride a couple of weeks ago, a seed that is still growing and might get me in the Utah 1088 myself (maybe an Iron Butt in 2009??).

One thing I’ve realized as I’ve written this blog is that I’m not taking enough pictures. I thought about this quite a bit after my trip with Dave on the Aufderheide, and a ride with my neighbor recently back up the Clackamas River where I didn’t take ANY pictures.

My problem is that I hate to stop for photos–I just want to keep riding. So I decided to get a RAM gooseneck mount for my point-and-shoot camera. I’m going to mount it somewhere in the cockpit (on the handlebars maybe) and then when I want to take a picture I don’t have to stop and get my camera out of the top case or tank bag or wherever else I put it at the time. The gooseneck allows me to keep the camera safe behind the bike’s windscreen but easily move it out from behind for clear shots.

This also means I can take some more dramatic shots while riding. I promise to only do this when it’s absolutely safe to do so. Did I mention my point-and-shoot also does video?

This post is a bit late, I apologize. I thought Dave was going to blog about this on KGW.com and I didn’t want to post before I got a chance to read his account, but I don’t think he’s going to write anything.

One of the Oregon roads I’ve been interested in checking out since I started riding again is the Robert Aufderheide Memorial Drive. Designated an Oregon Scenic Byway, the “Aufderheide” as it’s called winds from highway 58 just west of Oak Ridge and east of Eugene northeast to highway 126, passing the Cougar Reservoir. TheAufderheide is also known as Forest Road 19.

I’d been planning on doing the Aufderheide sometime this year, but hadn’t decided on when. Then my friend Dave I used to work with at KGW called and said he wanted to check out some of the legs of this year’s Cycle Oregon (a bicycle event, not motorcycle!) before he actually did them in the event. Day 6 of Cycle Oregon is the Aufderheide, and day 7 is highway 242 from the end of the Aufderheide to Sisters. Perfect!

Dave met me on his K75RT at the 7-11 in Canby at 8am Saturday. We rode south on highway 99E initially, but by the time we got to Salem we realized we needed to superslab it the rest of the way to Eugene or we wouldn’t have enough time to do the whole trip. So we hopped on I-5 and rode at breakneck speed to Eugene. We stopped for gas at the first station we saw after exiting the Interstate onto highway 58.

I’d been to Eugene many times, but never east toward Oak Ridge. It’s a beautiful area, and a great one for motorcycling. As we flew past Lookout Point Lake I vowed to come back and explore this area more.

Just before Oak Ridge we saw a sign marking the turnoff to highway 19 and the Aufderheide. The first 16 miles or so had a lot of construction. It looks like they’re replacing or installing better drainage so every mile or so there was a strip of gravel across the road that looked like a spot they’d installed culverts into. The crew had generously marked each location with orange cones though, so we had no trouble slowing down for these rough spots.

After we were through the construction we were able to open it up. The Aufderheide is a fantastic motorcycle road: twisty, well maintained, and very little traffic. We saw a few bicyclists and a couple other motorcyclists but not much else. Let me recount Dave’s description of the Aufderheide: <spoken rapidly>”4th gear, 3rd gear, 4th gear, 3rd gear, 2nd gear, 3rd gear!”

Dave taking a picture of a section of the Aufderheide Memorial Scenic Byway.

We stopped for a quick bite to eat in Rainbow, which is basically a spot in the road with a store on highway 126. The woman who owns the store asked us where we were headed and we explained our recon of the Cycle Oregon route. “Well, 242 is closed. But you guys are on motorcycles. Let me call my friend at the Forest Service and see if you can go through anyway.” Her friend wasn’t working that day but insisted we’d be able to get through if we simply stopped at the ranger station and explained what we were trying to do to whoever was working. Unfortunately the working rangers said “no way.” We decided to take 126 into Sisters instead.

We stopped just outside Sisters. Dave tanked up again and we both grabbed something cool to drink. After a bit of a rest and a nice chat we were back on the road. Rather than heading back via highway 22 to Salem with all the traffic we decided to turn off at Detroit Lake and go past Breitenbush along the Clackamas River to Estacada before going our separate ways. I hadn’t been up the Clackamas River since my buddy Scott and I went backpacking around Olallie Lake over ten years ago. I forgot how beautiful it is!

The road was light on traffic, but in a lot of spots between Detroit and the Ripplebrook ranger station there were big sections of gravel where the road was being repaired, kind of like parts of the Aufderheide. After one particularly large strip of gravel we met a guy on a Harley headed the other way. He asked us how far it was to highway 26 and Dave explained it was about 21 miles to that highway and about 25 to Detroit and highway 22. The Harley rider looked like he couldn’t make up his mind which way to go. Props to him for riding that far out in the back country though!

Dave and I continued on as the forest road turned into highway 224. We pulled into the parking lot of the convenience store in Estacada and said our goodbyes. Dave’s a fun riding partner; he’s one of the faster people I ride with so I tend to push myself more when riding with him. He headed home and I hopped on highway 211 back to Molalla, at a slightly faster pace than I usually ride that road…

Let me begin at the end: my buddy Jim Lash and I rode 1,059 miles yesterday in eighteen and a half hours, successfully completing an Iron Butt Association Saddlesore 1000. We have documentation in the form of time stamped receipts from each place we stopped along the route from Hillsboro, Oregon to Bliss, Idaho (just west of Twin Falls) and back.

I met Jim and his Harley Heritage Softail at the Chevron on 185th in Hillsboro, just off of highway 26. This would be our start and end point. We set out just after 5am yesterday and headed east. This was no sightseeing trip–the goal was 1,000 miles in under 24 hours, so we were going to take Interstate 84 to just short of Twin Falls, get our time stamped receipt, turn around, and head home.

Riding through the Columbia Gorge as the sun rose was beautiful, but just before our first gas stop in Arlington it shone right in our eyes and made it very hard to see. Jim’s Harley has a tank about half the size of the one on my GS Adventure, so we planned on stopping every two to three hours for gas and a quick stretch of the legs. After topping off in Arlington we hit 84 again.

It was a little chilly at the summit on I-84 on the Blue Mountains, and both Jim and I were wishing we had put in our jacket liners. We stopped again in La Grande at about 9:30am and I remember thinking “I used to think La Grande was a long way from Portland, but I’m already here and it’s not even 10am!”

Jim Lash and the bikes at our outbound stop in La Grande, Oregon.

Our next leg was from La Grande to Boise. On this segment of the trip Jim’s Harley must have felt this long distance trip was challenging my Harley stereotypes too much (they’re not long distance bikes, they break down all the time, and other myths) because it decided to chuck it’s chrome swingarm cover at me at 80 miles an hour! All kidding aside, it wasn’t anything serious and I’m incredibly impressed with the stamina of both Jim and his Harley. Maybe most Harley riders barely ride their bikes 1,000 miles in a year, but Jim is definitely not one of them.

We had a very quick lunch at a gas stop on the east side of Boise and soldiered on. We were getting close to the turnaround point, which we had originally planned to be in Twin Falls. I did a little calculation with the GPS and realized that, since we’d started in Hillsboro and not at the Shell in Portland on MLK we had originally planned, we had enough margin to turn around sooner. I sped up and passed Jim who had been leading the whole time (since he knew when he would need gas) and signalled to pull off at the Bliss, Idaho exit.

Halfway done. We gassed up at “Stinker’s,” a Sinclair station in Bliss (Sinclairs are the red and green gas stations with the little dinosaur logo you find in some parts of the west, but not Oregon) and shook hands. It was 2pm. Now all we had to do was turn around and ride home. Simple, right? I snapped a few pictures and marvelled at “Bob’s Museum” before we hopped back in our respective saddles and hit the road.

Me relaxing with a bite of homemade beef jerky at our turnaround point in Bliss, Idaho.

“Bob’s” Museum in Bliss, Idaho.

Our next stop was in Fruitland, Idaho, just before the Oregon border. We met a cool BLM agent who chatted with us a bit about the Iron Butt and the dirt bikes his agents used on BLM land (BMW F650s, it turns out) and we were on the road again. Fruitland was where I started downing a Red Bull at each stop to make sure I would stay alert for the last half of the trip. But we were both still feeling pretty good at this point.

As we approached Durkee, Oregon it looked like there was a huge weather system ahead of us. But when we finally got to where we were expecting rain we found it was the smoke from a huge wildfire. It was so thick you could look directly at the sun, which was blood red. It was like driving on another planet for about 30 miles. The fire hadn’t been there this morning at 10am when we passed through. When we finally stopped for 5 minutes at a rest stop just east of La Grande to get the smoke out of our eyes we saw that about half the streaks on our windscreens weren’t bugs, they were ashes.

We were making good time so we decided our return stop in La Grande at 6:30pm would be a full hour so we could have the luxury of a sit down dinner. We’d had enough home made jerky and power bars and needed something more substantial. With bellies full and more Red Bull coursing through our veins we were on the road again. It was starting to get dark. We were settled into a groove, just munching away at the miles trying to get home. According to my GPS we would arrive back at the Chevron in Hillsboro at 11:45 at the pace we were on.

Endurance riding is a very solitary endeavor, and even though I was doing this with my friend Jim we only really were able to talk briefly at our short stops. As the sun finally faded away the sense of isolation only grew. I concentrated on watching Jim’s tail light and the upcoming curves while we ran for Arlington and our last stop before the finish.

We arrived at Arlington at 9:21pm. I topped off the tank, noted the time for my log, and downed another Red Bull. My neighbor Eric called me (good timing!) on my cell phone to check on our progress. Eric was our start and finish witness so he wanted to know how we were doing and about what time we thought we’d make it back.

It was pitch black now riding through the Gorge on our last leg. There wasn’t too much traffic so we only had the headlights from my Beemer and Jim’s Harley to illuminate the way. I normally kind of like riding at night and find it sort of peaceful, but the combination of wind, darkness, and fatigue was making this night’s ride an ordeal to get through.

Traffic started picking up once we got to Troutdale, and as we headed for the finish line through downtown Portland and onto highway 26 to Hillsboro it started sprinkling. It was raining just enough to slicken the roads but not enough to wash off the oils and other goo deposited by cars. In any motorcycle safety class they’ll tell you to wait out this kind of rain until the slippery mixture of water and oil has had a chance to dissipate, but we were on a deadline. I backed way off my speed and was very careful as I headed up the offramp to 185th street. The last thing I needed to do was drop my bike on the slick asphalt this close to being done.

We made it! It was 11:46pm when I pulled into the Chevron. Jim had arrived slightly before me. We had planned on celebrating a little and reveling in our achievement, but it was late, dark, and wet and we each still had to get home safely. I topped off the tank on my Beemer, getting the all important time stamped final receipt, and gingerly headed back out onto the slick streets for home. It was a nerve-wracking 45 miles back to Molalla since it never really did rain hard enough to get the gunk off the roads. It was very slippery everywhere right up to my own driveway and I was pretty tired at this point. I eased the bike into my garage and called it a night.

So my first Iron Butt endurance ride is complete. Now Jim and I just have to send in our forms, logs, and receipts for official verification and we’ll soon receive our certificates and the coveted “World’s Toughest Motorcyclists” license plate frame. I don’t really feel tough right now though, just sore and tired…

This Saturday a friend from work and I are planning on an attempt to enter into the Iron Butt Association (IBA). The minimum requirement to become a member is to do a “Saddlesore 1000″ which is 1,000 miles in under 24 hours. We’re planning on riding to Twin Falls, Idaho and back. We’ll be leaving from Hillsboro at 5am Saturday, me on my GS Adventure and my friend Jim on his Harley. The whole trip must be meticulously documented with date, time, and location stamped receipts from the start, turnaround, and end points, and affidavits signed by witnesses. We also have to log every stop we make and account for all our time. It’s all to prove that we actually did the ride, and the IBA has people who verify every documentation packet that gets sent in.

The Iron Butt Association has always intrigued me, ever since Mr. Rees who sold me my first BMW in Tennessee mentioned 1,000 mile days and “iron butts” years ago. The IBA puts on the Iron Butt Rally every two years (this year is a rally year so the next one will be in 2009) and it is a truly grueling competitive event. It’s kind of like an 11 day scavenger hunt across North America, with the entrants riding over 1,000 miles on EACH of those 11 days. You can read all about it on the IBA website.

Not everyone that applies to be in the IBA rally gets in. You have to prove that you have the endurance for 11 consecutive 1,000 mile days. A good start to proving you can handle it is to do one of these Saddlesore 1000 runs. My plan is to try and get into the IBA rally in ‘09 by doing one or more SS1000s and applying to do the Utah 1088 next year.

Now why would someone want to ride a motorcycle that long and that far? To see if they can hack it. It’s also one of the few competitive events us middle-aged guys have a shot at placing well in. Let’s face it: at 41 years old I’m not going to compete in the Olympics or climb Mt. Everest, but I can ride my motorcycle farther than most people are comfortable or willing to do. If you have read the posts from my trip to Moab this year you might remember me running into a Utah 1088 competitor in Susanville, California. After describing my 11.5 hour, 650 mile ride across Nevada he told me I was plenty fast enough to be competitive in endurance rallies. So why not?

I’ll do a complete write up of the Saddlesore 1000 attempt on Sunday (if I’ve recovered by then) so stay tuned.