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The Iron Butt Rally (11,000 miles/11 days)

Higdon's Iron Butt Report - Day 5

Forwarded by Don Graling:

>Subject: Iron Butt Rally: Day 5
>
>Washington, D.C.
>August 16, 2003
>Day 5
>
>The Florida Checkpoint
>
> On the day after Paul Pelland learned that he had won a
> protracted, bitter, legal battle, he found himself in first place at the
> Lake City, Florida checkpoint of the Iron Butt Rally. Two years ago he
> dragged a Ural motorcycle in the Hopeless Class around the country,
> surviving disasters by brute force on an almost daily basis. He finished
> so low in the standings that it took miners to find him. This year he's
> on a BMW R1100RT and has better than a 2,100-point lead over Eric Jewell
> and Rick Sauter. Still, the scoreboard isn't quite as simple as it looks.
> The 110 riders who left the first checkpoint in Nevada split into
> two groups: 77 headed for Florida and 33 aimed for southern
> California. The latter group split again with 22 riders going to Florida
> and 11 chugging toward Canada. The pack of 22 now occupies 20 of the
> first 21 positions in the standings. Todd Witte, at 20th place and the
> highest ranked of the blue pill brigade, is 120 points ahead of Homer
> Krout, the lowest ranked of the red pills. This was almost exactly the
> scoring breakdown that Mike Kneebone and rallymaster Lisa Landry had
> predicted in Nevada.
> All this ignores, however, the 11 riders who departed southern
> California for the Great White North. We are fairly certain that they
> have all reached Bella Coola, British Columbia or Goose Bay,
> Labrador. If they arrive at the Maine checkpoint on time, they will
> immediately take over the top positions, irrespective of what any of the
> riders in Florida may accomplish on their next leg. At that point only
> the final run back to Missoula will remain.
> Virginia's Leon Begeman, 24th overall, apparently is insulted
> that his 250cc Kawasaki Ninja, the smallest machine in the rally, is
> assigned to the Hopeless Class. As usual, he is running like a man
> possessed. Tonight he stands 42 places ahead of Paul Meredith's 750cc
> Suzuki water buffalo. Sure, Meredith's two-stroke bike is ancient and
> struggles to get even 20 mpg, so maybe that's not a fair fight. But
> Begeman takes on motors with five times his displacement --- BMW K1200LTs
> and 1,800cc Gold Wings --- and chews them to pieces as well. If you put
> him on an armadillo, he might lose a few places, but he'd still be
> scratching his way down the road.
> Sparky Kesseler, the terror of the bristlecone forest, parked his
> replacement bike at the checkpoint, was awarded 2,000 points for making
> it to Florida without incinerating anything along the way, and remains
> firmly in control of 117th (and last) place with a total score of -8,000
> points. This afternoon, however, he picked up some competition. Bob
> Wooldrige's '64 BMW R69S, having had alternator replacement surgery two
> nights ago at Craig Vechorik's vintage BMW factory in Sturgis,
> Mississippi, has eaten a valve. Wooldrige grabbed a newer BMW, will take
> a 10,000-point hit in Maine, and soon should challenge Sparky to see who
> can crawl out of the negative number territory first. My bet is on
> Sparky; he'll torch Wooldrige's bike the first chance he gets.
> The ride west to Lake City was not completely uneventful. John
> Langan hit a deer but was able to continue. Jerry Harris, coming down
> from the top of Mt. Evans in Colorado, was smacked by a mud slide. For a
> moment he thought he would skip through. He didn't. The right side of
> his BMW K1100LT looks as if it was scraped by a train, but it's still
> running somehow.
> Great Britain's Steve Eversfield ran into a nightmare while
> attempting to pick up a valuable bonus in Silverton, Colorado. He was on
> U.S. 550, The Million Dollar Highway, one of the most picturesque roads
> in the West. Southbound from Ouray it rises straight up and over a
> couple of 10,000' passes. On a clear day you can almost see Argentina.
> Eversfield, however, wasn't having a clear day; he was having a
> black, fearsome night. He was reminded of the terrifying Bald Mountain
> scenes from "Fantasia," a movie that has sent two generations of children
> from playgrounds to psychiatrists. Lightning smashed into the hills all
> around his elevation, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Unable
> to see through his rain-swept visor, he raised it. That was worse. In
> the Rocky Mountains that awful night he was practically the tallest thing
> around. He was also on top of a 700-pound block of metal. Eversfield
> was feeling peckish.
> A mud slide had wrecked Jerry Harris' day; a mud slide now saved
> Steve Eversfield's night. As he rounded a corner, he saw that the
> highway ahead had been completed washed away. He was the first vehicle
> southbound to encounter it. Disappointed was he? Not a bit of it,
> mate. He jumped off the bike, draped his identification towel on the
> rocks that covered the road, and snapped a photo. Because of an act of
> vengeful Nature, Eversfield would be able to claim the Silverton bonus
> without actually having to go there. Better still, he could turn around,
> get off that hateful mountain, and look for a quiet place to dry out and
> stop shaking.
> All's well that ends well, right? Sometimes, but not for
> Eversfield. His Silverton bonus was disallowed by the scorers when he
> arrived in Florida.
> "Excuse me?" he said in his best British accent, the kind of
> sound you hear just before a Limey begins beating your head in with a
> spanner and tyre iron. "The road was completely blocked. Other
> motorcyclists have verified it. I followed the rules exactly."
> "Sorry," the scorer said. "There was an alternative route to
> Silverton."
> "That 'alternative route' was a 300-mile loop around half the
> state of Colorado," Eversfield protested.
> "True," the scorer replied, "but it was available."
> In the old TV series set in New York, "The Naked City," the
> closing voice-over intoned darkly each week, "There are eight million
> stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
> And there are eight million stories in the Iron Butt Rally. Some
> of them are sad.
>
>The Top Ten in Florida
>
> 1. Paul Pelland BMW 18,517
> 2. Eric Jewell BMW 16,391
> 3. Rick Sauter Suzuki 16,348
> 4. Tom Loftus Honda 15,998
> 5. John O'Keefe BMW 15,919
> 5. Jeff Earls BMW 15,919
> 7. Jim Owen BMW 15,903
> 8. Jeff Fisher BMW 15,842
> 9. Heinz Kugler BMW 15,751
> 10. Eddie James BMW 15,010
>
>Bob Higdon
>www.ironbutt.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
 
Rob Lysowski

We talked to Rob today and went by the hospital to drop off his belongings (he couln't believe so much fit in the bike) anyway other than some roadrash and stiffness he is feeling good.:clap
 
Scratch and dent K11LT

KBasa...

A little 1200 paper and the whole thing will be as good as new, won't it?

Send the tablet back to Dell - Warranty! It ddin't hold up to the everyday thrashing of the RI gorilla.

BFF;)
 
Higdon Report - Day 6

Portland, Maine
August 17, 2003
Day 6

Reports from the Frozen North

Trying to retrieve accurate information from the 11 red pill riders who
left for Canada during the second leg of the rally last Wednesday has been
harder than going ten rounds against a kangaroo. But we do hear rumors and
naturally have no hesitancy about repeating them. One of the best ones
starts with the night that Paul Taylor was almost shot while trying to
knock down the door of a house in British Columbia.
It was a dark and stormy night --- well, dark at least --- and Taylor was
hustling toward the bonus in Bella Coola, British Columbia. Two riders
passed him. That was irritating, for Paul is one of those rare riders who
has finished not only the IBR in the top ten (twice) but lived through Greg
Frazier's vicious, invitation-only Big Dog Rally in the Rockies. He
doesn't enjoy being overtaken by anyone.
As he began preparing for a counterattack, the alternator light on his
BMW's R1150GS started glowing. He continued to ride, draining the battery
and looking for help. He noticed a bed-and-breakfast and turned down the
driveway. It was 2:00 a.m. He banged on the door. Nothing. More
banging. More nothing.
Now if your alternator is dying, you might try changing the belt,
right? And you always carry a spare belt with you, huh? Of course you
do. So does Paul. So he started taking his bike apart to dig out the
alternator only to discover that a socket he needed to handle the job was
at home in Virginia.
Back to the front door he goes for more banging. After a while, he
notices that a woman is aiming a rifle at him from a basement window. She
has evidently called a neighbor to protect her from this deranged
motorcyclist, because Paul sees the headlights of a pick-up truck coming
down the driveway. With the way his night has been going, the driver will
probably be carrying a 50mm cannon and a few grenades.
Before war can break out, Paul manages to relate his story of woe. And
while not everyone runs around at night with a 27mm socket, the neighbor
has one in the truck and lends it to Paul. The belt is replaced and
everyone lives happily ever after.
Fast forward to later that morning. Peter Hoogeveen is staring at a "Road
Closed" sign. It is barring his way to the Bella Coola bonus, just 30
miles away. A construction crew is preparing to do some blasting and the
road will be nailed shut for about four hours. This is not good news for
Peter. He begins to reason with the flagger. You have to know here that
Peter's endurance riding exploits over the years have made him something of
a hero in Canada. Magically he is slipped past the barricade.
What was good news for Hoogeveen was even better news for Will Outlaw who,
at the moment Peter was being waved through, sat on the opposite end of the
construction zone, unable to get out of Bella Coola. Apparently Peter's
flagger radioed Outlaw's flagger and the gate suddenly opened for Outlaw
too. When Paul Taylor, later held up for hours on the far side of the
barrier, found out what Hoogeveen had done, his eyes rolled up in his
head. And while gates do occasionally open for a favorite Canadian son,
they rarely do so for a Yankee who is known in British Columbia mostly for
terrorizing little old ladies on dark, stormy nights.
As we suspected, Alan Barbic and Dick Fish took off from California for
Goose Bay, Labrador. The town lies at the end of hundreds of miles of
rugged, often impassable dirt. Because Barbic was faster on pavement and
Fish faster on dirt, they decided to split up in Nevada, figuring that
their paths would cross later. They didn't. Barbic apparently bailed out
at some point and headed for the Maine checkpoint. He'll be credited with
the few bonuses he grabbed during the second leg, but without the
2,000-point Florida checkpoint bonus, his 11th place standing in Nevada
will drop to perhaps 80th place in Maine. In Alan's case, the red pill
turned out to be poison.
Fish's pill was poison squared. He aimed for Goose Bay, made it, and then
lost his alternator on the road out. It was a shorter route than the run
to Bella Coola, but it was harder on the bike and worth fewer points. It
doesn't matter now; Goose Bay cooked the Fish's goose.
Lee Myrah suffered minor injuries when his bike was blown into a ditch
near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in the late afternoon yesterday. His rally is
over. Mike Hutsal, who was riding with Myrah at the time, made sure his
partner was all right, then continued east.
Bob Hall, with Bella Coola behind him, was feeling great yesterday until
his engine began sputtering near Livingston, Montana. He subsequently
called to say that all was mysteriously well again. Leonard Roy hasn't
been heard from in days, but he never has problems anyway. All he ever
does is finish quietly and well. Mark Kiecker pulled away from Marty Leir
in Chicago and caught up with Will Outlaw this afternoon in Erie,
Pennsylvania. Kiecker laughed that they were so far ahead of schedule that
they might take in a Red Sox game tonight in Boston.
It thus appears that of the original Canadian 11, only Myrah and Fish
won't make Maine tomorrow. The nine who do will be leading the rally. And
the one of them who is the most well rested will be the favorite as the
long, last leg back to Missoula begins.

Reports from the Sweltering South

Key West, the southernmost point in the continental U.S., has been a bonus
stop on 238 of the last 11 Iron Butt Rallies. It is never, ever worth
going to, mainly because first you have to ride more than 380 miles from
north Florida to Miami, then survive another 160 miles from there to Key
West. The last 105 miles are two-lanes wide. It's so hot and humid that
you pray for rain to come along and wash your sins away. There are cops,
deer, and blue-haired matrons to enforce snail-like speed limits. On
Saturday night the drunks come out to play. And no matter how well you
felt before you headed south, when you emerge from the Keys in a day or so,
you'll be tired, boiled meat, utterly unfit for human companionship.
So when rallymaster Lisa Landry suggested that the boys and girls run down
to Key West from the Lake City checkpoint instead of conserving what is
left of their energy for the final run to Missoula, at least a couple of
dozen of them said, "Let's do it!" Those were the last words that Gary
Gilmore said some years back, just before Utah state prison execution squad
put six bullets through his heart.
Thirty-seven riders who were thinking a little more clearly left Lake City
and took the saner route up to Iron Butt veteran Eric Faires' house near
Knoxville, Tennessee for a bonus that paid the rider to sleep for a
while. On the way north they will be picking up bonuses that are worth
more than what they lost by skipping Key West.
In tonight's down-and-out report, Bob Lyskowski was involved in a
multi-vehicle wreck yesterday near Gainesville, Florida on his way to Key
West. He sustained what are believed to be minor injuries. Although his
bike may be rideable, Bob has decided to withdraw. Don Speck's Harley was
totalled when, on his way back from Key West, a van in front of him
suddenly slammed on its brakes on a bridge near St. Augustine. Speck's
rear-end slid out with predictable results. He is unhurt but has retired
from the rally.
Finally, in a bulletin from the Hopeless Class, we can confirm that Mike
Grosche, whose '80 Suzuki GS750 has suffered fuel starvation problems from
the start as well as two flat tires, not only missed the Florida checkpoint
but blew out a head gasket along the way. He is somehow up and running
again. If he doesn't make the checkpoint in Maine tomorrow afternoon, he's
out of the rally. We can only hope that he doesn't decide to go to Key
West first.

Bob Higdon
www.ironbutt.com
 
This is Marcia?

639814-M.jpg
 
Rob Report for today, the 18th.

Rob wound up riding a good chunk of the trip north with Paul Pelland. Paul was leading the blue pill people and is now in 8th or 9th spot after the arrival of the red pill folks in Maine. Great rider. Lousy dresser.
639794-M.jpg


Rob took the shot to Key West, which even he says was a rookie mistake. Lots of miles, not much bonus payout. But hey, it was a nice ride.

Anyway, they met in the Carolinas somewhere when they both came across the guy on the HD that went down. From there, they've been talking and whatnot and keeping each other on the move. The finally called it quits last night in Maryland and slept for a couple hours behind a rest area. They were in and out of NYC this morning collecting bonus points and split up after they left the city.

Here's hwo it stood in Gorham, ME. Irene Boettcher took these pictures and has nicely provided them.

Crusty K11LT
639793-M.jpg


Fix those lights.
639792-M.jpg


Voni's bike. I wonder if the bike is sMiling?
639796-M.jpg


I need to get one of these. A tablet PC on my tankbag. Yeah. That's what I need......
639801-M.jpg


The truckers are taking some interest in this event as well. They've got CBs and a bunch of the riders have CBs, so they wind up talking to each other.

Rob was asked a few times last night what was going on with all the bikes. He told them and the truckers kind of dug it. What the IBR guys are doing is what these guys do for a living. Ride more miles safely and with good bookkeeping and you make a pile of money. Or win an IBR. Or finish an IBR.

Anyway, some of them have been taking note of the gizmos attached to the bikes and realize that these guys are serious. One of the truckers and Rob were talking about what they're using for navigation systems. Rob told the driver what was installed on the LT and the trucker responded that he had a similar setup and that the GPS base map had been modified to show only roads that he could drive down legally with his truck.

Max's BMW in Portsmouth, NH took good care of Rob today and he wanted to send them some props. They hung some fresh tires on his bike, got him a shower and let him sleep on their lawn for a while. I thought getting free donuts was pretty sweet.....

OK, here's Rob after a week on the Iron Butt:
639803-M.jpg


And here's me after 860 miles:
456599-M.jpg


...and that's why I'm here typing this stuff and he's out there riding around the country.
 
the Iron Butt Rally- Gorham checkpoint

For a full pictoral of Paul Pelland's castoff Iron Butt ensembles,
see his website and click on IBR Clothing Drive... way too funny!
Avoid the Scratch 'n Sniff section, though...

Long Haul Paul's website
 
Paul Glaves' K75FT at Reynold's in Gorham. "well, RT was taken, and so was LT, so this one is FT. Farm Truck."
 

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Higdon Report - Day 6

Hartford, Connecticut
August 18, 2003
Day 7

M*A*S*H, Iron Butt Style

After a telephone call from Peter Icaza last night, I decided to
administer mental status tests to some of the suspect riders. Icaza was
reporting that he would miss the Maine checkpoint by several hours. It
turned out that he was fewer than 200 miles from his goal and had almost 24
hours to get there. He's not the first rider to be off target by a day.
So now I look at them carefully when they check in. If they crawl up to
the table on all fours, I ask them what day of the week it is and the name
of the vice-president of Botswana. If they fall asleep before answering,
we drag them off into a corner and hit them with the fire hose. If they
get cute with me, I threaten to disqualify them. Naturally, I have no
power to do that, but they don't know it.
If I did encounter a truly questionable case, I would refer the matter to
my medical officer, Don Arthur, a two-star admiral and the commandant of
the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He worked the
intake scoring table today and on Saturday night he put up most of Moron's
crew for the night at his home in suburban Washington, D.C. We like to
have multi-talented individuals volunteering to help this rolling
circus. Arthur, who racked up more than 100,000 miles last year on a BMW
K1200LT and won both endurance rallies he entered, certainly fits that bill.
On the days when I don't think I'm Ernie Pyle, I like to think I'm a
doctor, like Dr. Zeuss. I sure hope no one decides to start testing
me. They might find the cat in my hat.

Canterbury Tales

By early afternoon the riders began filtering into the Reynolds
Motorsports dealership in Buxton, Maine, a checkpoint on every Iron Butt
Rally since the first one in 1984. With them, strange and twisted stories
from their travels arrived too. It was sort of a "Canterbury Tales" as
told not by Chaucer but by Vlad the Impaler.
Example: Stephan Bolduc, Quebec's Iron Butt entrant, is more comfortable
speaking French than English. When he was checking in with Mike Kneebone,
the first step in the scoring process, I asked him diplomatically in my
best French how he was doing. "Ca va bien?"
"Non," he said. "I try to sleep in zee park, but zee bear he will not let
me."
"The bear? You mean the police?"
"Non, non," he said, waving his arms. "Zee BEAR!"
I can't remember the French word for "bear," but I could understand
Stephan perfectly.
Example: Voni Glaves, who has undoubtedly logged more motorcycle miles
than any woman in recorded history, pointed at her BMW's odometer with
disgust. "It stopped working," she said. I looked at the traitorous
instrument. It was just 4,900 miles short of 300,000. Voni has never
learned to frown, but she wasn't quite smiling either.
Example: Jim Frens' wallet flew out of his tank bag on the New Jersey
Turnpike. Bad luck. He yanked his bike over to the breakdown lane,
stopped, jumped off the bike, and began running back down the highway. The
odds of finding the wallet, given that 20,000 cars and trucks per second
were flying up that highway, are too small to be measured. Yet Frens did
find the wallet and its cash (good), but the credit cards were long gone
(bad). At the checkpoint he told his Canterbury Tale and one of the
volunteer scorers, Howard Chain, lent Jim a credit card to finish the rally
(good). But this is the Iron Butt Rally, where no good deed goes
unpunished. My guess is that the first time Frens tries to use Chain's
card, he'll be arrested for theft, fraud, and forgery (bad).
But there is the rare Canterbury Tale where good triumphs over evil. It
happened today to Joe DeRyke. He came into Reynolds' parking lot with one
thread of his BMW R1100RT's twisted steel throttle cable still intact. The
first time DeRyke applied the slightest pressure to the throttle, the final
strand would snap faster than a heart string. The closest BMW dealer
didn't have the cable in stock, but a shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 60
miles south, did.
Joe Mandeville, DeRyke's riding partner, asked me if the rules would
permit him to ride down to Portsmouth and buy the cable. No problem, I
said. Mandeville, a judge in Los Angeles, suited up and was ready to leave
when David Smith, a lawyer from Chicago, said that he was carrying an extra
throttle cable on his R1150RT. Would it fit DeRyke's bike? Well, we'll
ask Bob Wooldridge, who owns a BMW shop. He says it's no problem. But
does anyone really know how to do the replacement? Ah, there's Paul
Glaves, the tech guru of the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America, already on
his knees at the side of DeRyke's bike. He has the machine in pieces in
the parking lot, with the help of Chris Ratay, who with his wife Erin has
spent the last four years riding around the world on their BMWs. They
showed up just to be part of the crowd and now Chris had grease up to his
elbows, busily repairing the bike of a guy he had known for all of four
minutes.
An hour later DeRyke was headed for the open road. He saw me. "You can't
write about this," he said. "My wife would kill me if she thought there
was anything wrong with the bike."
"Your secret's safe with me, Joe" I said.
Sure it is, like I'm going to sit on this story, the quintessential
example of True Iron Butt. We tell them over and over: If you're not
sleeping, riding, eating, filling the tank, or sitting on the pot, you're
wasting time. Yet here were a dozen contestants helping a rival for no
other reason than he needed help. They might be in his shoes one day. I
shook my head and smiled. How were we ever so fortunate as to meet such
people as these?

Wine for My Men; We Ride at Dawn

Eleven riders had gone to Canada. One had crashed, one had blown up, one
had pulled up short with no bonuses, and one, 2001 IBR winner Bob Hall,
called from his home in Ohio this morning to announce his retirement
because of a failing motorcycle. The curse of the Iron Butt had struck
again. No one has ever won two Iron Butt Rallies outright. They keep
trying. The curse keeps cursing.
The Canadian 11 were now The Canadian 7. All made it to Maine, though
Mike Hutsal was more than one hour late. His penalty was voided because he
had spent time helping his downed partner, Lee Myrah, a few days
earlier. Of these seven only Hutsal wasn't completely rested. Paul Taylor
was. "The Robo is ready to rumble," he said, referring to his license
plate, "RoboBike."
Eric Jewell, in eighth place and more than 14,000 points behind the
seventh place rider, had been one of the original 33 red pill riders, but
had opted not to go to Canada. He hoped that he would be able to score
enough in the Florida and Maine legs to come close to those who had gone
north. That didn't happen. He hoped that they would come in bushed while
he was fresh. Fresh he was, but so were they. He is a great endurance
rider, but he had given away too much. You can't give even an inch to the
seven men who lead the IBR tonight. They won't give it back.
At 6:00 p.m. EDT tonight the run back to Missoula began. It is a
difficult ride that will require planning, precision, and luck. Only seven
men have a realistic chance to win.
Ninety hours remain.

The Top Ten (complete standings are on the www.ironbutt.com web site):

1. Leonard Roy Honda 39,273
2. Marty Leir BMW 39,222
3. Will Outlaw BMW 39,187
4. Mike Hutsal BMW 39,009
5. Mark Kiecker Honda 38,908
6. Paul Taylor BMW 38,888
7. Peter Hoogeveen Yamaha 38,830
8. Eric Jewell BMW 24,433
9. Eddie James BMW 24,421
10. Paul Pelland BMW 24,169

Bob Higdon
www.ironbutt.com
 
How tired must these guys be!!

I know how quiet it gets in the later stages of just about all sporting events...when you get near the end...but I can't imagine how tired these guys must be getting.

Maybe it is like just holding on untiil the end??

Hang in their guys....

JIm
 
I talked with Rob a couple times today.

He actually slept in his own bed last night, which is probably the best night's sleep in a while. He was planning on taking the ferry from RI to Long Island to go bonus point collecting. He met up with another rider, whose name escapes me right now, and they've been riding as a team all day.

They've been to Fire Island, Manhattan (WTC, I believe), a Harley dealer in New Jersey and down to Washington DC to pick up another bonus. They had two guys riding with them, but got seperated at some point. They then made it to the 9/11 memorial in Shanksville, PA by dark. Quite a day, considering they left RI on the 6am ferry.

Weather headed west looks good and they're anticipating a straight shot into Missoula.

He can't say how much better he feels after a good night's sleep, a chance to see his wife and some laundry.

"I feel like a million bucks."

Indeed!
 
Tired or Wired?

i've been trying to keep up on about four different sites. Glad to hear Rob got some much needed rest.

Gonna be interesting to see how the "Quick Lube" fiasco plays out. Hopefully he's gonna get enough bread to make things OK.

The Team Strange guys are lookin strong going into the last leg but, as you mentioned, the quiet is deafening. Sending up prayers for everyone especially the Ladies.

Higdon's kept me grinning since the beginning.

I don't think "tired" is going be be strong enough of a word for their condition.
 
Glad the site is back up. What did I miss ?
oh yea I took this picture at the Maine Checkpoint.

I figured it was Kind of Kbasa like.

It should be over soon. Wonder how the Teamstrange boys ended up.
 

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From Bob Higdon:

Chicago, Illinois
August 18, 2003
Day 8

The Riders' Meeting

Ninety-nine riders stood in the Reynolds Motorsports parking lot in
Buxton, Maine at 6:00 p.m. yesterday, awaiting the distribution of bonus
packets. After a week of separation, the red and blue pill entrants had
rejoined for the run back to Missoula. Lisa Landry called for quiet.
"On this final leg," she began, "you may be visiting some airline disaster
sites that will demand your respectful attention. Families of passengers
lost on these downed flights visit the memorials to this good day. You
will do nothing to disturb their thoughts. Nothing. Is that understood?"
Ninety-nine heads nodded.
"Those of you who went to the bonus in Palouse Falls, Washington on the
first leg may have seen a bird watcher near the falls," Lisa
continued. "You may also have noticed that he trained his binoculars more
often on your license plates than he did on the fang-beaked mud warbler."
"It was pretty obvious," Paul Pelland said.
"It was meant to be," Landry replied. "We wanted you to believe us when
we tell you now that we have volunteers stationed at every one of these
tragic sites. They may identify themselves to you. They may not. You
will be watched, that I promise. And if our observers report to us that
your behavior has brought the slightest discredit to yourself or to this
rally, rest assured that at that moment your participation in this event
has just been terminated. Are we clear on that as well?"
Ninety-nine heads nodded.
"Good," she said. "Now in the battle for dead-last-but-still-running,
Sparky Kesseler with -1,946 points has overtaken Bob Wooldrige with
-2,101." A huge cheer went up for the arsonist, particularly from Sparky's
wife and daughter. Elizabeth had shown up earlier in the day wearing a
fireman's turnout coat and a red, plastic helmet that read "Ride 'Em,
Sparky." There's nothing like support from the home front to keep your
overall score closing in on zero.

Memorial Stones

The sites that Landry mentioned hold terrible memories. They are five of
the worst airline disasters in recent memory: the SAS crash near Peggy's
Cove, Nova Scotia; the downed TWA flight in Long Island Sound; the Twin
Towers memorial in lower Manhattan; the west wall of the Pentagon where the
hijacked plane struck on September 11, 2001; and the field near
Shanksville, Pennsylvania where the last plane came down on that awful day.
These locations are clearly not typical IBR nonsense stops like touring
the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices or paying a call on Clay Henry,
the beer-swilling goat. They are serious, somber places, difficult to get
to and more difficult yet to absorb once there. Riders may one day forget
taking a photo of the world's largest ball of twine, but they're not likely
to forget visits to places that have scorched the pages of American history.
Jack Savage, a senior editor at Whitehorse Press, came into the SAS
memorial park this morning and met John McKibbin, our observer. Jack
thanked him for providing such spectacular weather. John replied that they
have about ten days like that on the south coast of Nova Scotia every
year. When Savage left the park, he called Mike Kneebone.
"Thank you for sending me here," Jack said. "It's a beautiful park and a
beautiful day. If I don't finish the rally after this, it'll be O.K."
McKibbin reported that while he was there (from 5:45 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.
ADT) the following riders showed up: Jim Frens, Eric Jewell, Leon Begeman,
John O'Keefe, Jeff Earls, Brent Ames, Todd Witte, Sean Gallagher, Will
Outlaw, Marty Leir, and Mark Kiecker.
"You've got some big bikes there," John told Mike, "but what really
impressed me was that fellow on the 250cc Ninja."
"Leon Begeman. We call him 'The Animal.'"
"I'll say," John said. "Do you know that he's about to complete ten
straight 1,000-mile days?"
We do. In fact, while at first blush it looks as if Leon lost two places
(from 24th to 26th) in the leg from Florida to Maine, when you factor in
those riders from Canada who reappeared in the standings and took over the
top seven positions, The Animal actually gained five spots on his competition.
Hopeless Class indeed.

The Gladiator

John Hart, one of the original 33 red pill riders, had gone to California,
declined to join the 11 pills heading for Canada, and showed up at Ira
Agins' house in Santa Fe on the way to Florida. There Hart was offered an
additional bonus: go to Andy Goldfine's Very Boring Rally in Duluth. There
he should track down the person who had won the I'm Wearing the Ugliest
Aerostich Suit on Earth Contest and take a photo of the winner. If
successful, he could bypass the Florida checkpoint.
The problem was that no one had a clue when the contest would be
over. Hart might be sitting around, bored to tears at the Very Boring
Rally, for longer than riders would ever have had to wait for a barricaded
road to open in Bella Coola. No one in his right mind would accept a
challenge with so many uncontrolled variables.
Why not, thought John. He set his GPS coordinates for Minnesota, called
to say he was skipping the Florida checkpoint, and disappeared from the
Iron Butt radar for the next four days.
Hart could hardly have expected what would follow when he arrived in
Duluth. Andy Goldfine, Aerostich's founder, hauled Hart onto the stage and
introduced him as an Iron Butt rider who was then and there bravely
fighting his way through snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night toward the
swift completion of his appointed bonuses. The crowd applauded happily.
"It was unbelievable," Hart said. "They treated me like a gladiator." He
was surrounded and assaulted with questions about his heroic deeds. The
2005 IBR unwittingly may have recruited 15 new riders that evening. Hart
got his photo, climbed onto his chariot, and charged out into the gloom of
night, feeling possibly just a little like Spartacus.

The Moving Finger, Having Writ, Moves On

On Sunday morning Marc Lewis was forced to withdraw because of family
problems. He had been running 31st at the Florida checkpoint.
In Maine yesterday Mike Grosche's endless struggles with his Hopeless
Class Suzuki GS750 came to an end. In Missoula he began re-routing the
fuel cell hose minutes before the start of the rally. He was the last
rider out of the Holiday Inn's parking lot. Two flat tires slowed his ride
east, but a blown head gasket was worse, causing him to miss the Florida
checkpoint altogether and dropping him down to 108th place. The gasket was
fixed, but as he plodded north to Maine, his clutch headed south to
Hell. He came into the Reynolds' parking lot 45 minutes too late. With a
second missed checkpoint, his rally is history.

Bob Higdon
www.ironbutt.com
 
From Bob Higdon:

Gillette, Wyoming
August 20, 2003
Day 9

Moron Sails West

I know a lot of motorcyclists who can't abide the midwest. I
love it. The Great Plains is an inland sea with waves of corn and grain
elevators for navigation buoys. Interstate 80 is one of the principal
shipping lanes. This is the very heart and soul of America; everything
else just hangs on to it for one reason or another.
We have been on The Eighty since New York, for two days, for
forever. It isn't my kind of road with its sameness, its remorseless
stamp of federal approval, its turbulence, and its incessant noise. Give
me anything that parallels it, even a goat track. But Moron doesn't
care. It plows on.
The heat is searing, but Moron doesn't care about that
either. The oil light may have come on for a while this morning; we'll
check it if we ever stop, unless we forget. Moron keeps rolling,
uncaring. Now and then the whine of the tires on the concrete and the
buzz of the wind is interrupted by the sound of Mike ripping another
magazine in half. He can't put it down or away or aside. When he
finishes one, he has to rip it across, creating top and bottom half
magazines. We had about 35 magazines a week ago; now we have 70, and
they're harder to read.
I take his atavistic response to finishing a magazine as an angry
sign, usually manifesting itself on the ninth day of the event, that
there is no way on Earth there will ever be another Iron Butt
Rally. That feeling will continue to grow until next June when he will
run across a plaster cast of the world's largest wart at the Museum of
Disgusting Things somewhere in North Dakota. "If I were doing that
stupid rally again, this would have been a good bonus," he'll think. A
week later he'll forget the fingerprints that the 2003 IBR left on his
soul. Two weeks after that he'll be sending out the preliminary
invitations and mapping the base route.
Until then, the blistering heat pops corn on the stalk in the
fields along I-80, another magazine is ripped in half, and Moron rolls up
and down the gentle hills of western Iowa.

And the Beaten Go On

Paul Meredith's hopeless, triple-cylinder, two-stroke Suzuki, a
motor that creates its own smog system as it limps down the highway and
struggles to achieve a worthless 20 mpg, yesterday finally dropped off
the Environmental Protection Agency's hit list when a broken piston skirt
drove a dagger through the machine's oil-fouled heart. Its days of
contemptuous sin are finished.
Paul's are not. A friend posted news of the breakdown on the
K1200LT owner's list. Thirty minutes later a Samaritan responded,
brought his own bike on a trailer, rolled it off and turned it over to
Meredith, and hauled the dead Suzuki off to the nearest toxic waste dump.
This illustrates what I think is the major difference between all
previous Iron Butt rallies and this one. It isn't advanced GPS receivers
or sophisticated mapping programs or other high-zoot gizmos. It's the
availability of internet e-mail lists, brand specific or otherwise, that
can produce salvation literally at a moment's notice. I have lost count
of how many riders have been rescued by them so far.
There are reports that Marsha Hall's BMW R1100 alternator belt
went to alternator belt heaven this afternoon, where it will join Paul
Taylor's, Dick Fish's and many, many more. It is not for nothing that
BMW calls its machines "The Legendary Motorcycles of Germany." Marsha
was looking for a tow; BMW was looking for an engineer who knew something
about alternator belts.
In a mechanical failure this afternoon that is as scary as it
gets, Rick Sauter broke a chain on his Suzuki V-Strom and cracked open
the crankcase, not his leg. He was 11th overall in Maine. We put out an
emergency bulletin on the moto lists but have heard nothing further.
Eric Jewell, who may be in the midst of a monster final leg, had
the rug temporarily pulled out from him near Shanksville,
Pennsylvania. Today's quiz: Eric's BMW R1100RT quit running because: a)
It was tired; b) Eric has already won enough rallies; or c) An alternator
belt failed. Marty Leir, having heard stories of belt failures for the
past week, had the presence of mind to buy a few spares on the way from
Bella Coola. As prescient fate would have it, he gave one to Eric at the
Maine checkpoint.

The Leaders Head into the Home Stretch

If you were in the top seven positions in Maine, took a rest
bonus today, and picked up the bonuses in Nova Scotia, Long Island,
Manhattan, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, you have gained the combination
bonus and will have a chance to win the rally. If you didn't do that,
you won't win. Your finishing position also depends on what those other
six guys are doing.
At 7:20 CDT this morning, Marty Leir, Will Outlaw, and Mark
Kiecker --- the second, third, and fourth overall riders in Maine ---
called from New York. They had picked up the largest bonuses from Maine
to Manhattan and wanted Lisa Landry to tell them if they were ahead or
behind.
"Yes," she said and hung up.
We call them "The Boys." They're young, smart, and incredibly
tough. They're from Minnesota and are affiliated with Team Strange,
which means that, especially in Kiecker's case, they have utterly no
respect for authority. In most cases numbers on the identification
towels were assigned randomly, but Lisa saved the highest numbers for
those who had given her endless trouble in the months leading up to the
rally's start. Of the 117 towels issued, Kiecker's is #115.
They've been joined at the hips for days. At some point they
will have to break apart from each other or they'll end up in Missoula as
they were in Maine, with Leir 35 points ahead of Outlaw and 314 points in
front of Kiecker. Maybe they've agreed to that finishing order, but we
don't think so. We know that they did the combination bonus, so the bar
has been set.
Leonard Roy, who led Leir by 51 points when the final leg began,
has as usual disappeared into deep space. He never calls; he never
writes. We don't have a clue what he's done since yesterday and we miss
him. Still, we think he'll show up in Missoula. He'd better. My bike
is locked in his trailer.
We can give a time allowance to Mike Hutsal for his help to Lee
Myrah but we can't give back his lost energy. He earned some tough
bonuses in the last 24 hours but he didn't take down the combination. It
looks as if his long effort will fall short.
Peter Hoogeveen, along with The Boys, checked in this morning for
a bonus at a Harley dealer who is on a direct line from lower Manhattan
to Shanksville. It's reasonable to believe that Peter has nailed down
the combination bonus, but we don't know.
Paul Taylor also showed up at the Harley bonus. More ominously
for his competition, he was also able to secure the Pentagon bonus, one
of the largest on the leg. There he ran into Todd Witte and Brent
Ames. If other riders have made it to Washington, we aren't aware of it.
As you can tell, we are wandering in the dark here, but we do
know this: just 34 hours are left.

Bob Higdon
www.ironbutt.com
 
Catching up.....

> Missoula, Montana
> August 21, 2003
> Day 10
>
> Fire
>
> More than one hundred miles east of Missoula the cars coming at you have
> turned on their headlights. It's the middle of the afternoon. The
> visibility is under one-half mile, and the tops of some of the mountains
> that line both sides of I-90 have disappeared in dense smoke. On the
worst
> day it ever had, Los Angeles could never have looked like this.
> Forest fires have ringed Missoula to the extent that parts of the town
> have been evacuated. When we left here a week ago Monday, smoke was
> drifting through the motel's parking lot. It's much worse now. You never
> know from hour to hour what highways will be open. So widespread are the
> fires and so resistant to eradication are they that they may not be fully
> extinguished until the snows fall next month.
> A lot of motorcyclists are riding through the night toward this city. If
> they're not in by 8:00 a.m., the penalty clock starts running at 10 points
> per minute. At 10:00 a.m., they're time barred. Every second is counting
> now. The last thing you want to see on a motorcycle at night is the glow
> of a fire and a wall of smoke. God only knows what could be hiding behind
it.
>
> We Know What We're Doing, More or Less
>
> A question was raised on the Long Distance Riders list about the
> 10,000-point penalties assessed against Sparky Kesseler and Bob Wooldridge
> for changing bikes in mid-rally. The rule states that the rider's final
> score shall be reduced by one-half. Which is correct?
> The fixed penalty worked well until the point inflation that appeared in
> the 2001 IBR. Bob Hall picked up one million points for making the
Prudhoe
> Bay bonus on the final leg. Had his bike fallen apart on the way to the
> finish, he could have changed machines 42 times and still have won the
rally.
> Last year we amended the rule to eliminate that absurdity, but the scoring
> program was not similarly revised. We think the 10,000-point spanking
> roughly approximates in a rider's running score what his final total will
> look like, but we don't really know and we don't really care. It'll get
> taken care of in the end, anyone who swaps isn't competitive anyway, and
we
> think it's lots of fun to watch guys scrambling randomly around, trying to
> pull their scores up to nothing.
>
> Will the Last BMW Running Please Turn out the Lights?
>
> BMW motorcycles constituted about 50% of the starting field. Tonight they
> constitute more than 90% of the mechanical breakdowns. Jeff Earls'
K1200LT
> ground to a halt late today in Dickenson, North Dakota with a rear wheel
> bearing failure. Earls, riding the entire distance with John O'Keefe, was
> having a magnificent ride, grabbing every bonus that meant anything on the
> final leg. With any luck he and O'Keefe would have been close to a Top
Ten
> finish. Now he's just another DNF.
> Had enough of BMW rear end collapses, have you? Not quite. Don't forget
> to count the rear end of Jim and Donna Phillips' K1200LT. It dropped dead
> earlier today as they were going up Pikes Peak in Colorado, the largest
> individual bonus on the entire leg. Had they made it to the top, they
> would have guaranteed themselves a Top Twenty finish. Instead they nursed
> the bike back down the mountain, caught a ride into Colorado Springs, and
> bought an 1800cc Gold Wing.
> It gets even uglier. Yesterday Jim Owen, who stood 8th in Maine, took a
> photograph of Eric Jewell and Brent Ames in the process of replacing the
> alternator belt on Eric's BMW R1150RT at the Shanksville, Pennsylvania
> bonus stop. A few hours later the belt on Owen's R1150RT failed. He had
> no replacement, couldn't find one, and will be lucky at this point to
> finish the rally at all.
> Mike Kneebone and I sat in the hotel room tonight and reflected on the
> string of BMWs that have bitten the dust in the last ten days. We shook
> our heads. Between us we have around 800,000 miles on these bikes.
> "If you're looking for something to write about in an epilog," he said,
> "this is it."
> He's right. BMWs could easily finish 1-2-3 in this rally, a tribute that
> will be due far more to the talented singers than to the ugly song. In
the
> 2003 IBR BMW's song has been the shriek of alternator belts coming apart
> and the wail of ear ends seizing. Don't play it again, Sam.
>
> And Then There Were Five
>
> Seven riders in Maine had a chance to win. Leonard Roy was first. He
> says that this will be his last Iron Butt, and he wanted to go out with a
> finish he could be proud of. He has done that in his customary quiet,
> outstanding fashion. He knew that he hadn't gotten enough rest at the
> start of the run back to Missoula, so he picked bonuses that should
> guarantee him the highest finish he has ever had. Tonight he is safely in
> Missoula, catching up on a week's worth of lost sleep.
> Mike Hutsal was roughly in the same boat. He arrived at the Maine
> checkpoint after it closed, but was granted a time delay allowance for
> having stopped to help his partner after an accident. The revised
> checkpoint score put Mike in fourth place. That was as high as he would
> fly. Without rest, the last leg was impossible. He will finish, but he
> will take a heavy hit in the standings.
> That left The Boys --- Marty Leir, Will Outlaw, and Mark Kiecker --- who
> stood 2nd, 3rd, and 5th in Maine. We're confident that they managed to
> earn the large combination bonus and pick up other big points in Chicago
> and Sauk Center, Minnesota before pointing to the finish. It might be
> enough to take home all the marbles.
> Paul Taylor was 6th in Maine. We are under the impression that he has
> picked up the same bonuses that The Boys did. But Taylor also dropped
> south to pull in the Pentagon bonus. It's worth 2,359 points. If The
Boys
> didn't do that, Paul could vault ahead of them. We don't know. Taylor
was
> in western North Dakota tonight, aiming for the barn door and hoping his
> alternator belt would last a few more hours.
> And then there is Peter Hoogeveen, who has more second-place finishes in
> rallies than most riders have rallies. He stood 7th in Maine, 50 points
> behind Taylor. We know little about Peter's route in the final leg. He
> was seen at the TWA crash site on Long Island early Wednesday morning. He
> signed in at a bonus in eastern Pennsylvania later that morning. Since
> then he has disappeared. Is it reasonable to assume that he did the
> combination bonus? Clearly. But he didn't show up at the large Minnesota
> bonus, unlike The Boys and Paul Taylor. So where has he been for the last
> 36 hours?
> Scenario #1: he broke down. If so, why haven't we heard? Scenario #2: he
> couldn't go any farther. That doesn't sound like Peter
> Hoogeveen. Scenario #3: he saw where the other riders would naturally
head
> --- Pennsylvania, Chicago, and Minnesota --- and realized he had to do
> something dramatic to beat them. Did he then run south from Pennsylvania
> to the Pentagon and turn due west for Pikes Peak? Depending upon how many
> other smaller bonuses he and the others either earned or skipped, such a
> run could be the winner.
> It's almost 1:00 a.m. in Missoula. In ten hours we can stop guessing.
>
> Bob Higdon
> www.ironbutt.com
>
 
I WANNA KNOW!!

Who was the cruel IS geek that decided that during the Iron Butt rally was a GREAT time to swap the forum servers eh?
auuuugh!

Torture anyone?
 
Re: I WANNA KNOW!!

itchybro said:
Who was the cruel IS geek that decided that during the Iron Butt rally was a GREAT time to swap the forum servers eh?
auuuugh!

Torture anyone?

It was us. The bandwidth we were consuming was just killing us financially, so we really, really needed to swap servers.

The strange thing is that I've been talking with Rob over the last couple days and wanted to relay the stuff he said, but didn't have an appropriate, ahem, forum to do so.

I'll put some stuff up later, but suffice to say for now that Rob's in Missoula. He landed last night at about 10pm. Just outside Missoula, he ran over a deer carcass. Woke him right up to full alert, Ritalin necessary status.
 
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