There’s more than one route to 100,000 miles. You can get there by being the commuter warrior, intentionally taking the long way home each day, plus hitting the track a few times a year like Philippe Gouamba. Or you could ride to work weekdays, ride with your friends in your local motorcycle club on weekends, and add in an 11,000-mile trip to the Arctic Circle, like Dave Hagans.
Philippe Gouamba on a ride to the Delaware River Valley in upstate New York.
Modern motorcycles are more than capable of racking up big miles, so really all it takes is a rider who loves to ride. And does it.
Gouamba and Hagans are two riders from the New York and New Jersey area who have seen their odometers hit six figures, and parts of their story might surprise you. To ride big miles, you need a comfortable motorcycle that’s a rolling sofa, not a committed sportbike, right? Don’t tell Gouamba and his 100,000-mile-plus Ninja ZX-10R.
To ride to Alaska and reach the Arctic Circle you have to have a dedicated adventure-touring machine, right? Don’t tell Hagans. He’s been there on his ZX-14 sport bike, which is now working on its second 100,000 miles. One thing these two men have in common is that they don’t listen to what others say they can or cannot do. They just do what they love, which is ride, just about every day.
Sport bikes aren’t just for sprints. Phillippe Gouamba put well more than 100,000 miles on his Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R.
Phillippe Gouamba took a photo when his Kawasaki ZX-10R reached 111,111 miles.
Gouamba, the vice president of human resources for a specialized window company in the Bronx, commutes daily from his home in Old Bridge, N.J. It’s a 54-mile trip one way, but he loves riding so much that he intentionally takes a longer, 84-mile route on the way home most days. Some wouldn’t consider the busy highways of New Jersey and the cutthroat streets of New York City to be desirable riding, but to Gouamba, any day on a motorcycle is a good day.
“To me, I love riding, so commuting to work is almost like cheating,” he says. “I get to the office and I’ve already had a good ride for the day.”
In addition to commuting, he has ridden 11 track days, including the first two levels of the California Superbike School and a day of riding at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, on his 2006 ZX-10R. Gouamba loves the Ninja because he feels it fits him perfectly and because it is so capable, whether he’s dissecting traffic on I-280 or aiming for an apex at New Jersey Motorsports Park.
“It does the commute, no problem. It does the track, no problem. It does the canyons, no problem,” Gouamba says. “It does everything I want it to do and it doesn’t even ask a question.”
So now that it has passed the 100,000 milestone, what’s next for the ZX-10R?
“I’m hoping to do another hundred thousand on it,” Gouamba says.
Dave Hagans stopped on a club run to take a photo when his ZX-14 was about to hit 100,000 miles.
Commuting to work is also a big part of Hagans’ daily riding, but as an active member of a Long Island, N.Y., club called Triple XXX MC, weekend runs and fundraising rides are an important part of the miles he put on his 2007 ZX-14 motorcycle. In fact, it rolled over 100,000 miles on the club’s traditional Saturday morning run to a Cracker Barrel restaurant. The group stopped alongside the highway in Connecticut to photograph the moment.
Hagans rides all year around and has taken trips to Florida and Las Vegas, but the highlight of his first 100,000 miles on his ZX-14 sportbike was his 2011 trip to Alaska. In one 11,000-mile trip, he hit a bucket list of great destinations: Mt. Rushmore, Beartooth Pass, Banff National Park in Canada and many more. His turn-around point was the Arctic Circle, proving once again that you don’t need knobby tires to handle Alaska’s infamously lonely and unpaved Dalton Highway.
Dave Hagans and his Kawasaki ZX-14 at the Arctic Circle. It’s a long ride from New York.
Not surprisingly, Hagans recorded lots of indelible memories along those 11,000 miles, from camping in the wilderness to bunking in a dorm room in a college closed for the summer, to being offered a family dinner and a guest room in the home of a dealership owner in Alaska, when he stopped to try to buy a new rear tire. Along the way, he also lost count of the number of conversations that included the phrase, “You rode from where and you’re going where?”
Hagans took up riding in 2004 when he bought a 1993 Kawasaki ZX-6 with a salvage title and he’s been a Kawasaki rider ever since. He moved on to a 2004 ZX-11, a 2006 ZZR600 and his current ZX-14 motorcycle, which he bought new in 2008. Four years, four months and two days after he bought it, the ZX-14 rolled over 100,000 miles on that ride in Connecticut and, appropriately, he celebrated with his fellow club members, many of whom are like an extended family to him.
“My club is very important to me,” Hagans says. “Most of my rides are visiting and supporting other clubs’ events. Although my club members don’t ride as much or as far as I do, they are very supportive of me and my travels.”
Think you need an adventure-touring bike to ride the Dalton Highway? Ask Dave Hagans about his adventure on his ZX-14.
Like Gouamba, Hagans loves his motorcycle because of its ability to do anything he asks of it.
“My ZX-14 is perfect because it can do everything,” he says, a statement he can easily back up by showing photos of the bike at the Arctic Circle. “It reminded me of my ZX-11, but lighter and nimbler and more power.”
These days, nobody is surprised to see 100,000 miles on a car odometer, but some still think it’s unrealistic to expect that kind of mileage from a motorcycle. But as Gouamba and Hagans have shown, hitting six figures is not about gritting your teeth and riding just to achieve a number. They didn’t set out to reach a milestone. They just were doing what they love to do, ride, and doing it every chance they get.
A version of this story originally appeared in Accelerate magazine.
