So you ride for days on end, catching three hours of sleep here, another few hours there, fearing the mental fog that can cause you to leave your personal rally towel hanging on a roadside marker 400 miles behind you, rendering your efforts moot. You’re lashed by Midwest thunderstorms and baked by Southwest deserts, teased by sadistic rallymasters who try not once, but twice, to convince you that passing through Key West is a perfectly good idea when traveling from Sacramento to Pittsburgh. Or even from Pittsburgh to Pittsburgh.
You do it all for nothing more than the recognition of hearing your name called as a finisher in the Iron Butt Rally. You limp to the finish line disheveled, dingy and dazed. Then you find you arrived a minute after 10 a.m. and you’re time barred. Or that you didn’t score enough points to be an official finisher. You crossed the finish line but you didn’t finish.
Oh the cruelty.
Since I wrote about the start of the 2013 Iron Butt Rally, I thought I should follow up with a final report.
Cruel fates were in abundance, as always, in this year’s IBR.
First, consider the Hopeless Class. Robert Koeber, riding his nearly 30-year-old air-cooled single, lost the functioning of parts of his gearbox, but returned to Pittsburgh by tinkering with the gear shift lever to keep forward motion of some nature taking place. He’s not an official finisher. Kurt Worden on his bare-bones Kawasaki Ninja 250 made the finish line, but without enough points to be a finisher. Having even worse late-night thoughts of “what if” will be the Hopeless Class’ Scott Thornton, who rode an ancient (by IBR standards) Yamaha XS1100 and would have been a finisher. Except that he lost his camera on leg two and thus all the bonus points documented in it. All the work, none of the glory.
Then there was Steve McCaa, running his rookie IBR, of whom I’ve written before. A solid but unspectacular first leg put him in 56th spot. An inspired second leg moved him up 24 spots and left him within view of the top 10. But by that point, his Versys was having electrical problems. Steve opted to have a friend ride his other motorcycle from his home to the checkpoint in California and switched bikes for the final leg. The rules say you lose half your points if you switch bikes. But he was riding well and still could be an official finisher, at least.
That’s until he sliced a deer in two with his replacement motorcycle on a West Texas road. Thanks to the abilities of high-quality riding gear, he wasn’t significantly hurt. Just hurting for luck.
Even more than the rider who ended up in the hospital with cracked ribs and a broken collarbone (his second experience crashing in the IBR), maybe most of all you have to feel sorry for Eric Jewell, a multi-time top-10 IBR finisher. Leg two of this year’s rally called for riders to get from Pittsburgh to Sacramento in 65 hours. Two big bonus opportunities loomed: hitting a series of nearly three dozen Pony Express-related sites or riding to the top of Pikes Peak. Long debates took place among armchair long-distance riders over which was the better choice. Jewell surprised everyone by doing them both.
Then, after that cross-country epic ride, just moments into leg three, at 35 mph on a city street in San Francisco, his rear tire slid out from under him for reasons he can’t explain, even after returning to the scene of the crime against all that is just and fair and looking for an explanation. Long after the sprained ankle heals, he will remain perhaps the man most likely to win an IBR who has never won an IBR.
So who did not suffer a cruel fate? Well, topping that list would be Derek Dickson, who won the 2013 rally, riding 11,799 miles and racking up 92,524 bonus points. And by the way, J.P. Mountain, the only rider to hit Key West on the final leg, finished second, proving that going to the end of the road isn’t always a sucker bonus. Just usually.
With riders of Yamaha FJR1300s sweeping the podium, the celebration is especially raucous over at the FJR forum, perhaps the most avid followers of the rally anywhere on the net. Their server was literally slowing down from the strain.
And now: two years to catch up on sleep, repair wounded bikes, mend a few bones before the next one.
Postscript: For the full account, see Bob Higdon’s daily reports on the 2013 Iron Butt Rally.
