Iron Butt Rally: Day 5

West Texas
8.30.97

The Things They Do

  If Mike and I were competing in the rally this year, we'd be in 62nd place
right now.  We've made both checkpoints on time (3000 x 2), have all our
gas receipts (1000 x 2), and have visted two bonus locations (26 points for
picking up a copy in Portsmouth NH of the oldest continuously operating
newspaper in North America and a whopping 48 big ones for visiting the
racist Pedro statue in the hopelessly cute tourist trap of South of the
Border).  That's 8,074 fine points, Bubba, ahead of Bill Weyher and Martin
Hildebrandt at 8,000, Fritz and Phyllis Lang at 7,679, and, of course,
Manny Sameiro at -7,000, who will really have achieved something if he can
get back to a score of zero.

   Weyher, on a BMW R1100GS --- a bike that's faster than our rental car ---
hasn't gotten a bonus point yet.  I don't know why.

   Hildebrandt has no bonus points either, nor will he get one unless it
happens to fall into his tankbag, but that's because he's on a 175cc
Zundapp, the smallest displacement motorcycle ever ridden in the Iron Butt
and the second oldest bike in this year's event.  Martin came from Hanover,
Germany to torture himself on that slug.  With a top speed of perhaps 65
mph downhill with a tailwind, simply making checkpoints on time is more
than anyone can reasonably expect.

   The Langs, on a BMW (he) and a Harley (she), are on their third Butt with
nary a finish yet.  They actually have more bonus points than Mike and I
do, but they also took a 470 point late penalty in Florida, avoiding a miss
by just 26 minutes.  It seems that the relationship of time, speed, and
distance goes out the window when Fritz finds someone to talk to or to
help.  On the way to Daytona he spent ninety minutes looking for someone
else's lost car keys.  That accounted for all but four minutes of their
late appearance at the checkpoint, thus proving once again the wisdom of
Leo Durocher's observation that "nice guys finish last."

   So Mike and I are feeling pretty comfortable right now.  We were
considering making our move up the leader board on this long leg, but we
decided to hold off for another day or so.  We don't want to peak too
early.  The bonuses always grow larger as the rally wears on.  Saving our
strength, that's the motto of the dynamic duo.

   Now if you're thinking, "Hey, is it really fair to compete in an
air-conditioned battleship with a Chrysler logo, two people driving,
against a field of solo motorcyclists?," I admit that you have a tiny but
partially valid point.  But I would note that 1) we almost always leave a
checkpoint after every other rider has departed; 2) we have to arrive at
the next checkpoint four hours before it opens; 3) all but a handful of the
bikes in the field are faster than our car, accelerate more rapidly, brake
in a shorter distance, and are less visible to radar than this hulking
steel wad; 4) not many of the bike contestants are cranking out 750 words
every day, as your esteemed war correspondent does, under conditions that I
modestly submit would make Sarajevo look like a playpen at the Beverly
Hills' McDonald's; 5) we spend eight hours each day cross-checking documents
and scoresheets, coordinating the efforts of rally workers, and tracking
the movement of riders as they wander off the map into areas described only
with the ominous phrase "Here dragons be;" and 6) I'm getting old.

   Minor jests aside, I don't know how, much less why, these riders do the
things they do.  Mike and I had not spent more than eight hours in a real
bed during the first 4.5 days of the rally.  I doubt many of the riders
were doing better than we were.  The last couple of days, with higher speed
limits in the west, have been somewhat easier for us, but the pressure on
the top riders is cranking up.  This is the twilight zone where the
ultimate Iron Butt equation appears: Pressure + Fatigue = Bunnyland.

   The giveaway bonus on the leg to California had to be Wilk's restaurant in
Atoka OK.  It was worth 860 points and was reachable by any competent
biker, even a tired one.  A rider wishing to get credit for this bonus was
required to check in with the restaurant's owner, the wife of one of the
contestants, between 2300 and 2400.  The instructions further stated: "Stop
for 60 minutes (requires sign-in and sign-out, see below) and purchase the
Iron Butt Special Meal."  The sign-in/sign-out section had this message:
"WARNING: Your stay at Wilk's must be one hour or more."

   For an Iron Butt rider this has to be an irresistable bonus: you
get paid to rest for an hour.  There are clean opportunities for sleeping before
and/or after you have 860 points in hand.  No one could pass this up,
right?  No one could misunderstand those simple instructions,  right?

   Mike called the restaurant just after midnight this morning.  He spoke to
Boyd Young's wife, who was running the bonus sign in.  They talked for a
few moments.  Then I saw Mike sit straight up.

   "You're kidding!" he said to the telephone mouthpiece.

   I watched him as he continued to listen.  Then he turned to me.

   "Hoogeveen and Crane didn't show up."

   As I write this, some sixteen hours after that telephone call, I don't
have a clue where those two motorcyclists --- in first and fourth place at
Daytona --- went.  As far as I can tell, they have gone to where the
dragons be.  If I could have placed a bet on the one bonus location where
every potential winner would absolutely show up, it would have been Atoka.
 Then it got worse.  We were told that one rider checked in, left the
restaurant on his bike for some reason, then later returned to sign out.
Maybe some explanation for ignoring two specific instructions to sit down
and shut up will be forthcoming.  I hope so.  We'll know tomorrow when the
next whirlwind erupts at the Orange CA checkpoint.

   We'll cross two time zones today, do 1,105 miles in 15 hours, run through
100F temperatures part of the time, and have a late lunch at Chuy's in Van
Horn.  It's my favorite Tex-Mex restaurant.  My opinionated friend Jeff
Brody says that Chuy's isn't even the best Tex-Mex spot in Van Horn.  I
don't care.  I'll get #2 on the menu with iced tea and maybe an extra
gordita, buy a T-shirt, and say hello again to a truly nice guy.  For a few
pleasant minutes I'll be able to stop worrying about why people do the
things they do.

**************************

     Iron Butt Rally: Day 6
Orange, California

8.31.97

Just Another Day At The Iron Butt Office

   Misery is in everyone's saddlebag on the Iron Butt, a companion as
constant as the fuel receipts the riders keep.  But for outright
disaster, however, it would be hard to top the events of the last three
days.  Eight of the top ten riders at the Daytona checkpoint went into
the pits, four of them out of the rally altogether.  Only Canadian Peter
Hoogeveen and Texan Ron Ayres maintained their places with steady rides.
For every tale of success, there were six of utter failure.  If an Iron
Butt can have a Black Leg, this one was it.

   Most motorcyclists will never ride across the United States.  Of those
who do, 90% of them will do it in ten or twelve days.  These contestants
were given seventy-six hours.  That's one of the reasons the rally bills
itself as "The World's Toughest Motorcycle Competition."  But "tough"
didn't begin to describe the war zone that was waiting to hammer these
riders:
 

 ----- George Barnes (2nd): holed piston - out.

 ----- Fran Crane (4th): => 28th.

 ----- Morris Kruemcke (5th): rear-ended - out.

 ----- Gary Johnson (6th): => 17th.

 ----- Herb Anderson (7th): => crashed - out.

 ----- Ken Hatton (8th): engine failure - out.

 ----- Shane Smith (9th): => 14th.

 ----- Mary Sue Johnson (10th): => 15th.
 

   It didn't stop with the top riders.   Joan Oswald called in and reported
that she was down and out from a minor accident near Gallup.  There was
nothing broken, she said, except a dream.  She wanted to know where to
send her entry fee for the '99 Butt.  Ron Major, '91 IBR winner, did not
appear at the California checkpoint.  Several riders reported seeing
Ron's bike, moderately damaged on its right side, on I-8 near Yuma but
its owner was nowhere to be found.

   Also high up on the list of Things We Didn't Want To See Happen was the
retirement of '95 IBR champ Gary Eagan.  Broken wrists are a dime a dozen
among motorcyclists who've been around any length of time, but Eagan's are
so trashed from an accident last year that he cannot flex and extend his
right wrist to twist the throttle.  He has to rotate his shoulder to
accomplish the maneuver.  Despite that, by Florida he'd been knocking off
better than a thousand miles each day and picking up bonuses as well.
Pain and horrific swelling have finally driven him out of a rally that
few motorcyclists in his condition would have even tried to enter.

   Bob Grange's transmission went belly-up.  Don Wescott, a Canadian
obstetrician with a rotten fuel pump, delivered himself to the checkpoint
two hours after it closed, though he will be able to continue.  Fifteen
of the starting seventy-eight riders are now either at home on their way
there, an attrition rate that is high even for the IBR.

   Sometimes you don't even see it coming.  Houston's Morris Kruemcke was
having the ride of his life.  On track and rested in Daytona, he had
picked a route to California that seemed guaranteed to have him breathing
down Peter Hoogeveen's neck.  Already having taken in big points in
Oklahoma and at the top of Pike's Peak --- that in blowing snow and
sub-freezing temperatures --- he was sitting at Dante's View overlooking
Death Valley just before sunrise this morning, ready to circle around for
the rest of the jewels in the area: Badwater (201), Whitney Portal (310),
Manzanar (240), and the leg's killer bonus, the Bristlecone Pine forest
(1,001).  He didn't know it, but with all those bonuses in hand he would
have finished the day in first place with a thousand point lead.

   Death Valley is aptly named.  It was about to kill Kruemcke's rally.
Just as he was leaving, Herb Anderson rolled up and asked if he could
follow the Texan to Badwater.  No problem, Morris said.  "Follow me."
That was the worst advice Morris Kruemcke ever gave to anyone.  Thirty
miles later Anderson inexplicably crashed into the rear of Kruemcke's
Gold Wing, sending both riders and bikes into a ditch.  Miraculously,
Morris wasn't hurt.  Anderson, with a hip contusion, was taken to a local
hospital for an examination and quickly released.  Both bikes were total
wrecks.  Kruemcke was able to ride his to the checkpoint, if only to
advise that he could not continue.

   Every story of an early departure from the rally is an unhappy one, but
this seems harder to accept than most.  Kruemcke, an intelligent and
brilliantly-prepared endurance biker, really was at the top of his game.
Only a handful of riders ever had a serious chance to reel in the awesome
Hoogeveen on this rally, once the Canadian began to pour it on, but
Morris led my short list of those who might .  And now he's gone.
 Hoogeveen and Ayres took different routes to the Death Valley mother
lode but wound up with similar scores for the leg, thus holding on to
their respective first and third place positions.  So with all the other
big dogs dropping like stones, others had to emerge from the pack to fill
the void.  And one of them came out howling.

   A couple of days ago, I stuck a mathematical function in the scoring
spreadsheet to see what kind of prediction the computer would make about
the final standings, based upon the results of the first two checkpoints.

   It hummed for a moment, then cranked out a name.

   "Who's Dale Wilson?" I asked Mike.

   "He did the California 24 last year.  And 1,500 miles in 36 hours with
his son as a passenger for a Bunburner Award.  He might also have done a
Saddlesore.  Why?"

   "The computer says he's going to wind up 66 positions ahead of first
place."

   We both chuckled.  There's no real limit to the speed at which a
hot Pentium chip can dish out bullshit.

   Tonight Dale Wilson is in second place, 210 points behind Hoogeveen.
And the computer, not me, is doing the chuckling.

  He was 54th in Maine, 24th in Daytona.  The computer liked that sort of
rate increase, I guess.  Then in the last three days he did as nearly a
perfect ride as could be done on this leg, nailing 4,107 points in bonus
locations, 323 more than second-place bonus hound Marty Jones (still
recovering from a miss in Maine) and 810 points better than Hoogeveen.
Wilson had ridden a huge arc north and west from Daytona to Los Angeles
via Oklahoma, taking in a large number of back roads which experienced
Butts tend to avoid like wormwood.  It worked, though, and now Mr. Wilson
is heading to the northwest, his home turf.  The computer still likes
Dale as the eventual winner, tonight predicting he'll finish 51 places
ahead of first overall.  You heard it here first.

   The tank job of the leg goes hands down to the fastest, most skillful
scooter pilot in the entire pack, Fran Crane, a woman who could destroy
any other contestant in the rally, man or woman, on any race track in the
world and who has done everything that could be done in endurance riding
--- including once holding the record from New York to San Francisco and
still holding the record for the shortest time through the contiguous
states --- except win the Iron Butt.

   It's not Fran's fault.  It's that . . . er, thing she rides, a Buell.
Even with what amounts to factory support waiting to rebuild the bike
from the frame up at each checkpoint, she was whacked on the last leg,
taking a pathetic 524 bonus location points.  Forty-nine other riders did
better.  That Fran had managed to kick the pig --- I don't know what else
to call it since it oinks at everyone who walks near it --- up to 4th
place in Daytona was due exclusively to her incredible talent and not to
a single dime of the megabucks that Erik Buell is probably throwing down
the storm sewer on this embarrassing promotional effort.  One thing is
certain: if Fran were riding any BMW or Honda, even a 450cc Rebel, Peter
Hoogeveen wouldn't be smiling so much.

   With California behind them, the field is mercifully on the downhill
slope as they head north.  All but a handful of them were looking surprisingly chipper today, especially for people who are cranking out an average of 928 miles every day and who'd just come through the fireball of the Mojave desert in late summer.  Maybe it's the prospect of visiting the checkpoint in Yakima, the garden spot of Washington, that's putting the gleam in their eyes.

  Or maybe it's just a hope that Dr. Jack Kevorkian will show up there to
examine Fran's bike.

------------------

The Top Twenty Plus One Other (147 elapsed hours):

Rank     Rider               Bike  Miles  Points
 1 Hoogeveen, Peter  Honda  7,055 17,618
 2 Wilson, Dale  Honda  6,413 17,408
 3 Ayres, Ron   BMW  7,063 17,293
 4 Kruemcke, Morris  Honda  6,686 16,981
 5 Stewart, Mike  Honda  6,398 16,895
 6 Stockton, Michael  BMW  6,535 16,521
 6 Morrison, Rick  BMW  6,720 16,521

 8 Hogue, Brad   Honda  6,417 16,129
 9 Loftus, Tom   Honda  6,319 16,074
10 James, Eddie  BMW  6,265 16,013
11 Kugler, Heinz  BMW  5,980 15,962
12 Brooks, Harold  Honda  6,160 15,959
12 Clemmons, Jerry  Honda  6,134 15,959

14 Smith, Shane  Honda  6,704 15,938
15 Johnson, Mary Sue  BMW  6,935 15,884
16 Young, Boyd   BMW  6,220 15,812
17 Johnson, Gary  Honda  6,327 15,406
18 Ray, Bob   Honda  5,994 15,374
19 McFadden, Asa  BMW  6,720 15,365
20 Keating, Keith  BMW  6,060 15,344

....

78 Sameiro, Manny  Honda  4,096  -2,929

Go, Manny!  Zero is within reach!

**************************

     Iron Butt Rally: Day 7
Bend OR

9.1.97

The Roads Not Taken

  [Note: the opinions expressed in this report, as in all of the other
reports recently submitted concerning the progress of the rally, are
solely those of the Iron Butt Association and not those of the author.
Even if they were the opinions of the author, he wouldn't admit it.  If
he admitted it, he was lying.]

   The shortest, quickest route from Los Angeles to Yakima is straight up
I-5, a highway of such staggering ugliness that its own designers disavow
any knowledge of it.  I won't set tire upon it absent a court order,
especially since one of the most beautiful roads in the country, U.S.
395, does the same job to the east of the Sierras.  The 395 may be the
second prettiest road in America; certainly it is no worse than third.

   There is a beautiful section of road back home that I enjoying riding,
Maryland state route 67, running in part from Rohersville up to
Boonsboro.  It reminds me of the 395, except that it's about 13 miles
long while its big brother in the west runs for more than 1,300.  Still,
if you're a motorcyclist condemned to live east of the Mississippi, you
take what you can get, even for just fifteen minutes at a stretch.

   All United States, as Julius Caesar would say, are divided into three
parts: everything to the east of the Mississippi; everything between that
river and the Rockies; and everything to the west thereof, except that
Julie would have said it in Latin.  Your view of what constitutes a good
bike road depends upon where you live.

   East coast riders are understandably self-conscious about their lack of
decent motorcycle-friendly roads, principally because compared to other
parts of the country, 97.4% of their routes, by actual measurement,
stink.

   Sure, the Blue Ridge Parkway is a fine 45 mph ride over towering
3,500-foot ridges.  But that's about it.  Lists of Top Ten Bike Roads
always pump up the virtues of Vermont 100, U.S. 50 in West Virginia, and
Deal's Gap.  I do like Vermont roads, but only because I can legally
overtake Ichabod's mule train on a double yellow line.  Anyone who wants
to head west of Gore WV on the 50 had better stencil his blood type on
his helmet; there isn't a dirtier road this side of Islamabad.  And I
once counted the "319 curves in 11 miles" on the Deal's Gap.  Assuming
that an arc of one-fifteenth of one degree constitutes a curve, I came up
with 210 of them.  I call it No Big Deal's Gap and have said for years
that if it were west of the Mississippi, no one would bother to ride it.

   As for the midwest, I'll take the homeliest thing they can throw at me
over most of the roads in the east.  The problem in that wonderfully
relaxing blank land isn't the roads; it's the wind.  If you can overcome
that, you can overcome anything.

   But when God wants to ride a motorcycle, She heads west.

  Riding the Iron Butt is a lot like having your finger on the switch that
will launch a nuclear missile toward Yeltsin's dacha on the Aral Sea, a
job that is 99% boredom and 1% pure terror.  It is point-to-point riding
with a vengeance, Point A being the last bonus location you visited and
Point B being the next one on your list.  Almost without exception, big
bonus spots aren't sitting at rest stops on the interstate.  They're
hiding in nasty little holes down a bad road or in the middle of a city.
Usually the farther off the straight-line route they are, the more
they're worth.  Frequently they're down a dead-end road, which means
you're going to pay to get there and you'll pay to get back out.

   Day after day is the same: you hump it down some interstate that is
interchangeable with fifty others until your eyes glaze over, ride some
number of tough miles on a marginal road, try to remember not to screw up
your photo, get back on the bike, and do it again.  The worst part is
that you have virtually no control over the roads you're going to be
riding for hours on end.  Mike Kneebone and Ed Otto know what the optimum
travel path is, though they leave it to you to figure out what it might
be.  If you don't follow it, you're wasting your own time, and that's a
commodity that is more precious during these eleven days than the gifts
of the magi.

   But that's only if you want to win.  If you don't care about points but
care only about finishing, then the rally takes on a decidedly less
malevolent tone.  Chuck Pickett, a man the size of a Pepsi vending
machine, has not been having a good week.  Being 23 minutes late to Maine
and more than an hour late to Daytona helped stuff him down into 59th
place.  He was going nowhere, and even there he'd probably have been
late.

   Enough, he said.  The different drummer he was hearing inside his weary
head was playing a back beat.  He showed up in California well before the
late clock started ticking.  I checked him in on the computer.

   "You went to Deal's Gap?  Why?" I asked, stunned.  It was a nothing
bonus, made worse by being totally out of the way.

   "Nice road," Chuck said, a comment that would have made fine sense to
any motorcyclist except one doing the IBR.

   "And Mt. Evans?  Tell me it's not true."

   "Nice road," he said.  It is that.  It's also a one-way trip up a
14,000-foot mountain in Colorado, the highest paved road in America.

   "These two bonus spots aren't worth much," I said.

   "After what I did on the first two legs, I'll settle for a pretty
ride."

   Chuck Pickett is probably coming up the 395 tonight.  For bonus hunters,
this road is an irradiated wasteland.  For Pickett on this golden summer
day it will be a memory that nothing can ever overlay.  He'll want to see
it again.  If he does, it probably won't be on the Butt.

-----------------

The Oddball Files: Part B

 -----  Riders who finish the event, depending upon their final points
tally, will receive a bronze, silver, or gold medal.  The people who have
opened up their businesses to host checkpoints on this year's rally have
already won a gold medal.  At Reynolds Motorsports in Gorham they had
sandwiches and soft drinks for the riders (and, perhaps more importantly,
for selfless rally workers like me).  More sandwiches and sodas showed up
at the American Motorcycle Institute in Daytona.  There we also were
given a large, air-conditioned classroom to check riders in.  We'd been
expecting a tent in a hot parking lot.  At Irv Seaver's BMW dealership in
California, we had the usual food and air-conditioning, but there was
more.  Electric clothes guru Pat Widder was there with a motorhome ---
complete with shower and bed --- and an electronic link to post photos to
the internet at seven second intervals.  Paige Ortiz, the rally T-shirt
designer, brought fruits and vegetables.  But the biggest applause went
to Jay Curry, the producer of the shirts.  They weren't clapping for Jay
or his shirts though, but for the half-dozen masseuses he'd brought with
him.
 -----  Phil Jewell, the only English-speaking (as opposed to
American-speaking) entrant, is uploading reports of his travels through a
wireless Motorola messaging device, including e-mailing data at each gas
stop to a relay station that converts Phil's progress into a map.  You
can check his web page at http://www.vrtisc.com/ibphil.
 -----  Our investigators have discovered that there is a spy for
Motorcyclist Magazine among the contestants.  We have narrowed his
identity to one of the riders in the 22nd to 61st places in the
standings.  Until we trap the individual, all contestants are advised to
watch their mouths.
 -----  Dale Wilson wasn't the only rider who took a giant leap forward
in the standings at the California checkpoint.  Mike Stewart went from
29th the 5th.  When Wilson is asked the reason for his meteoric rise
through the pack, he credits Stewart and Bob Ray for helping him plot
strategies for the coming leg.
 -----  Grandmother Ardys Kellerman is not just the oldest female rider
in the rally.  She's the oldest rider, period.  Now on her third Iron
Butt at age 64 and holding, is she slowing down a step or two?  Not a
chance.  For a 1,200 point bonus on the last leg, she crossed the country
from Jacksonville FL to San Diego CA, a distance of 2,350 miles, in under
48 hours.  My grandmother never did that.

Part 1   Part 3

Bob Higdon
higdon@ironbutt.com
http://www.ironbutt.com