Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1165: Endurance Motorcyclist Wendy Crockett

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Ep. 1165: Endurance Motorcyclist Wendy Crockett · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for adventuring with us, as we discover what incredible athletes and outdoor enthusiasts are doing all over the world.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Now here's your host, Kurt Lindville.
0:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey friends, welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Today is Monday, January the 12th.
0:26
[SPEAKER_01]: That matters because I'm talking to you from the past.
0:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Right now, as you're listening to this, I am somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
0:35
[SPEAKER_01]: in an airplane, flying to Tanzania to climb Kilimanjaro, super excited about that.
0:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I am pre-posting this episode so that the Adventure Sports podcast can continue to roll while I am out of the country.
0:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to keep on posting episodes and I also
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: and going to have a couple of episodes that are from the backpacking in Blisters podcast, they're going to guest host for the Adventure Sports podcast, while I'm out.
1:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So that'll be a lot of fun.
1:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Those guys are hilarious.
1:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And upon my return, I'm going to put together an episode that features all the climbers that are on Kilimanjaro and will give you a bit of a play by play.
1:17
[SPEAKER_01]: about that trip, so really looking forward to all of that.
1:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for your thoughts and support as we climb Kilimanjaro now on with the episode.
1:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi friends, thanks for joining the Adventure Sports podcast today.
1:34
[SPEAKER_01]: This show is going to be so much fun.
1:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I can already tell Wendy Crocket and I have been just talking before we hit record.
1:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I finally said we have to hit record.
1:42
[SPEAKER_01]: This is too good.
1:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're just having fun swapping motorcycle stories.
1:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Wendy Crocket holds a Guinness World Record for the longest distance covered in a single ride in a single country.
1:57
[SPEAKER_01]: She also has one of the iron butt rally, at least once.
2:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to have to talk about that because I saw different sources citing different numbers.
2:06
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, that's 11 day, 11,000 mile rally.
2:10
[SPEAKER_01]: She is a endurance motorcycle rider.
2:12
[SPEAKER_01]: She is a motorcycle mechanic.
2:14
[SPEAKER_01]: She actually owns her own motorcycle shop.
2:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And she has been all around the world.
2:19
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be a lot of fun to talk about her unique approach to enjoying motorcycles.
2:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me, Curtis.
2:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Wendy, where are you right now?
2:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Just because I think it's fun.
2:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I am in August, Caliente's, Mexico.
2:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Two days ago, I was in Santa Cruz, California, so that's one of the hidden superpowers of people that do long distances, as I can just say yes.
2:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And two thousand miles in a row.
2:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I can go.
2:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, most people when they think of Mexico, they think about the airplane.
2:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Most people do.
2:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, so there is so much beauty in Mexico.
2:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, many incredible things to see, riding through here.
2:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I just, if I possibly can, on ride, I will.
3:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's fantastic.
3:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And what's home base for you?
3:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Home base is Rapid City, South Dakota in the Black Hills.
3:08
[SPEAKER_01]: In the writing in the Black Hills, I've seen videos and pictures and it just looks like so much fun.
3:15
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really, it's a nice secret that we have up there.
3:19
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people when they think of South Dakota, they think of the open prairies.
3:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And we definitely have a lot of that, but the Black Hills are just fantastic for motorcycles, bicycles, hiking.
3:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been there a couple of no I guess three times at least and but never on a motorcycle every time I was there You know you're in those nice beautiful switchbacks curving around the the small mountains, you know, and I just think wow this would be so fun so much fun Absolutely, perfectly designed for motorcycles
3:52
[SPEAKER_01]: even though it probably wasn't right.
3:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's one of the things about motorcycles is we're always writing on a surface that wasn't really designed for a motorcycle, but motorcycles are just so versatile.
4:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.
4:07
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you get into motorcycles?
4:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's so much to cover here.
4:10
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to have to zero in on something, but just tell us the story, when did you start writing
4:16
[SPEAKER_02]: So I get that question a lot, and I think the most honest answer is I was just born this way.
4:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I did not come from a riding family, nobody in my family owned a motorcycle, and I just from a very young age, like junior high school.
4:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I would see motorcycle as they just spoke to my soul.
4:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that is the way that is meant for me.
4:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course my mom said over her dead body, so I turned 18 and moved out and started buying motorcycles.
4:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, my dad was not really a fan of me having a motorcycle, but he gave in, and I ended up starting, I guess I was 12 years old when I started writing, and I probably put 10,000 hours on my little Yamaha Enduro 100.
5:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Before I turned 18, I just wrote it nonstop.
5:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I absolutely, I'm just like you, from the very first time I saw a motorcycle, I just thought, I've got to do that.
5:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, I understand where you're coming from.
5:17
[SPEAKER_01]: That's awesome.
5:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's just fun.
5:19
[SPEAKER_02]: It's such a visceral way to interact with the world.
5:23
[SPEAKER_02]: There's just very little else like it.
5:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So true, you've probably seen this and I'm sure listeners have probably seen this too, but there's an ad out there where they started by saying cars lie to us, but motorcycles tell the truth.
5:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I haven't heard that when I heard another one that was saying riding driving in a car is like watching a movie and riding motorcycles like being in the movie.
5:48
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a really good accurate descriptor as well.
5:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Will why do you love it so much?
5:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a big part of it is I ride solo as another aspect of that.
5:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So there is something about exposing yourself that way to the elements to the dance of the road to the animals.
6:09
[SPEAKER_02]: The smells, the people, especially when you are writing solo, people really feel free to approach you in a way that you kind of don't, you know, the more friends you have with you, you kind of create this little bubble and that you're in your bubble that is separate from the world around you, but it's a solo traveler.
6:28
[SPEAKER_02]: People are really fascinated.
6:30
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, did you ride this here where you come in from where you headed?
6:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me tell you what is great about my town or my country or my village?
6:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a very, very unique way to experience a country.
6:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think every new set of wheels you add creates kind of this bigger bubble around you.
6:49
[SPEAKER_02]: motor cycles, bicycles, walking are incredible and then cars and buses and everything else are just one more step removed from that magic.
7:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It really is true.
7:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I think when we're in cars, people even have different personalities when they drive cars.
7:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you noticed that?
7:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But on a motorcycle, you kind of have to be real.
7:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you are out there.
7:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You could use the word exposed, but I prefer available, you know, approachable.
7:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just just so much more, so much more real.
7:24
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not hiding behind a windshield or a ton or more of glass and steel, you know?
7:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So here's another aspect that I think is super cool and I want you to come in on this in a car I feel like I'm sitting in something and it's doing something and I'm I'm just kind of in it Right, but on the motorcycle I mean it's almost weird.
7:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I pet my motorcycle.
7:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I hate to admit that but
7:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like it's a part of me or it's alive and when you're writing it the whole motorcycle has to move and shift with you You're like one thing not like I'm something in a car right on a motorcycle I feel like you kind of become one with a machine and we anthropomorphize that I know I've talked to so many motorcycle.
8:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, I named mine such and such and you know and what what is it?
8:13
[SPEAKER_01]: About motorcycles that they almost feel like they're a part of it
8:17
[SPEAKER_02]: It is.
8:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I think definitely it's much more of an extension of your body.
8:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And the more I ride, the more carcic I get because I am so used to that motion, that sway, you know, completely present and interactive with that ride in a way that we're just not in a four-wheeled vehicle.
8:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's definitely for me, it feels like when you hear people describe when they're on
8:45
[SPEAKER_02]: How, you know, it just kind of slows everything else down and you just have this pinpoint that you can focus on quietly and that's what motorcycles are for me, all of that background noise of life fades away and you're just present right there in that moment just fully engaged with the run well.
9:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I, I have not done anything like the distance of done, and that's a unique approach to motor cycles.
9:12
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of people like the tour, but the idea of being on a motor cycle for, I mean, a dozen hours.
9:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe two dozen hours.
9:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you just go and go and go and go and go.
9:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're an endurance writer.
9:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I tell us what that's about.
9:27
[SPEAKER_02]: The endurance writing, the kind of base entry level to be considered a member of the Iron Bud Association, which is a group that oversees the support of safe long distance writing, is 1,000 miles or 1,610 kilometers in 24 hours.
9:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you are on high speed highways and you're keeping an average of say 70 miles an hour, it's less than 15 hours of writing.
9:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not really, really time consuming people immediately their approaches like that's not even mathematically possible.
10:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Now it's really possible as long as you're not fooling around a lot when you're stopping things like that.
10:08
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's also people that do 1,000 miles and 24 hours on dirt bikes or they plan scavenger hunt.
10:16
[SPEAKER_02]: type of events.
10:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So you are gathering points by visiting places and documenting doing things whether you're needing to go visit a nudist colony and take a picture of yourself and you're writing gear in the hot tub or take a tour of a museum and catch a picture of a certain exhibit.
10:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So that adds kind of this silly fun treasure hunt.
10:42
[SPEAKER_02]: element to the the sport that really makes it easy to go just one more just a few more miles down the road.
10:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's fun.
10:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Before we hit record, I was relating to you that I'm on a DRZ 400 and they're notorious for having very uncomfortable.
10:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And
10:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if I get it, I'm usually off-road.
11:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what the conversion factor would be for exhaustion or stress or tired, you know, on the body compared to off-road versus the pavement.
11:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what that conversion factor is, but there is one.
11:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But 100 miles on my DRZ is enough.
11:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I am bushed, and my dairy air is well past, well done by that point, so hell, on earth, if you're going to be on a motorcycle for 15 hours or more, what sort of considerations do you have to make to make sure that you can be comfortable in some of the things you need.
11:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I will say the most, the best investment I have made in my rallying motorcycles in a custom.
11:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And I work with a company called Russell Daylong that takes your stock seat pan and basically crash the seat to your, but it is the most comfortable place in the world for me to be sitting.
11:52
[SPEAKER_02]: My husband has a Russell Daylong and I have a Russell Daylong and we both love ours and we hate each other's.
12:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Because they're made for the individual.
12:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
12:02
[SPEAKER_02]: They did such a good job of fitting it to each of us individually, but I can I have a tall windscreen and that helps create a quiet, calm bubble for me to sit in.
12:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I have water on the bike so I can hydrate as I ride and it's just a very comfortable place to be.
12:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
12:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, when I do something like 100 mile day off road, I'm in recovery the next day.
12:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just exhausted.
12:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So to be fair, those seats are designed to do a different job, but in the last few years, I've been impressed to start seeing some of the more, the, you know, the stereotypical dirt bike hard as aboard seats are getting a little more comfy.
12:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I actually did the Armbut Rally last year on a fresh off the showroom floor Chinese dirt bike with with the stock seat and everything.
12:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was really impressed at what a good job they did on making that offer and see it a lot more comfortable.
13:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm going to stretching my knowledge.
13:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it a beta?
13:08
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a zontase.
13:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It's actually not available in the US, but yeah, they're available in a lot of the rest of the world.
13:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
13:16
[SPEAKER_02]: A 703 adventure, the model that I rode.
13:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you have won the Ironbutt rally.
13:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, how many times?
13:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I know you've been in it many times, but.
13:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, so I've been in it seven times.
13:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And I won one time.
13:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I podium several times.
13:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I also came in third place and had some close finishes but just the one win.
13:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do you win the Ironbutt rally?
13:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Explain this event to us.
13:43
[SPEAKER_02]: The Ironbot Rally is an 11 day 11,000 mile head-to-head competition, and basically you show up at the starting line.
13:52
[SPEAKER_02]: The night before or the morning of the start of the rally, depending on that year's theme, they will give you a list of bonus look.
14:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It may be 100, it may be 500, points on a map.
14:05
[SPEAKER_02]: They all have different point values.
14:06
[SPEAKER_02]: They all have something that you need to do there to prove that you were there and you need to plan the route as efficiently as possible to get as many points as possible without missing time limited checkpoint window.
14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, so not everyone is doing the same route then.
14:25
[SPEAKER_02]: everybody is planning their own route and so some people get in it just to finish and they want to see as many beautiful things as possible and they'll select their bonus locations for whatever is the most interesting things that they want to go see and then the people that really want to place well will completely disregard whatever it is that they are going to see or do and just put together the highest point value route that they can so there's definitely something for everyone
14:54
[SPEAKER_02]: everybody gets to the the end and go, man, I'm exhausted.
14:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure I'll do it again and three months later they're saying, when do I have to have my name in for the next ironbunk?
15:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, it's a little bit of the type to fun.
15:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So much of adventure sports is like that, you know, but you feel like you accomplish something.
15:12
[SPEAKER_01]: It's exhausting, but when you reflect on it in a couple of days, it's like, wow, okay, that was cool.
15:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and it's really, you know, the ultimate vacation just imagine showing up at the starting line hotel and you have no idea where you're going to be in the next 11 days across the entire with and depth of North America, you know, you, you may be in dead horse Alaska, you may be in in, you know, kept rosé in Canada, we're
15:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Newfoundland, or, you know, I've been in Miami in the middle of the night in the eye of a hurricane in just this eerie column as the only person on the road just puddering through there at two a.m. Just while these wonderful experiences out there in life that you would never ever have occasion to have outside of this strange pursuit.
16:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, man.
16:08
[SPEAKER_01]: You have so much expertise in motorcycles.
16:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I've ridden a lot, but I'm a real hack.
16:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Just you're the one who knows how to make it work the right way.
16:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have any tips for people for?
16:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's start with just doing a long ride.
16:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Things that you'd be like.
16:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, this really matters.
16:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say the the first most important thing to know is there is no right way.
16:32
[SPEAKER_02]: There's the important thing is that you get out there and do it.
16:35
[SPEAKER_02]: If this is speaking to you and and you keep making excuses just do it.
16:41
[SPEAKER_02]: The very best fight to have an adventure on is whatever bike you own right now assuming it is road worthy.
16:47
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I have done big rides on 100 CC Chinese bikes, on sidecar rigs, big bikes, small displacement bikes, mid displacement bikes, you know, all bikes are good at something.
16:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, don't don't hold back waiting for that.
17:04
[SPEAKER_02]: mythical perfect bike to or mode of transportation in general to float into your life because there will always be something better down the road There'll always be an excuse.
17:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I took my Yamaha ajar, which is a sport touring bike up beyond the Arctic Circle to a town called the Nuvik and I returned from the trip and did a little right up on the journey and I had so many people on the internet saying Why did you take your FJR to a new Vic?
17:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You should have
17:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, written by KBC or D, and it's like, well, you're still sitting behind your keyboard telling me what I did wrong, and I've been to any of it.
17:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's exactly it.
17:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You couldn't have said that better.
17:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you just have to go, and I often say on this on this program.
17:49
[SPEAKER_01]: people worry too much about the gear, whatever the sport is and it's fun to get really kind of be a gear head and get really techy about it.
17:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It's part of the enjoyment of a sport, but you don't have to, and you don't have to wait to have the money for the expense of perfect thing.
18:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you just said, the right thing to go out on is what you have right now.
18:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
18:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fun.
18:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard so many debates about adventure motorcycles because they're trying to bridge the gap You know, between comfort on the highway for long distance and still being able to get off road without having to Worry too much about the challenges that a street bike would have you know in difficult dirt situations and it seems like everyone's trying to build the perfect hybrid But I don't think it exists.
18:33
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
18:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I, I can entirely agree.
18:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the reason I have 14 motorcycles because they're all they're all perfect at something.
18:42
[SPEAKER_02]: They all have some fun aspect to their personality that makes them great, but you know, the, the, and I will readily admit there are a lot of fantastic adventure bikes out there that far exceeding.
18:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I am the weakest link in that machine.
18:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely no question about it.
18:58
[SPEAKER_02]: But do I need an 800-pound machine to do the types of ride that I've enjoyed?
19:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm really happy to start seeing the industry skewing toward small and mid-displacement bikes, because I really think it opens up this type of adventure to a whole new group of people when it's a low-risk high-reward situation.
19:20
[SPEAKER_02]: On a much smaller lighter bike that
19:24
[SPEAKER_02]: You can say, hey, where does that path go?
19:26
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a steep road up to that little village.
19:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I'll check it out because worst case scenario, this is a pretty lightweight bike if I need to pick it back up.
19:34
[SPEAKER_01]: that's fun.
19:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So just for fun, you have a lot of motorcycles, you have a motorcycle shop, you've been doing this a long time.
19:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don't have to tell me your favorite, okay, because that's really hard for us to sort out.
19:46
[SPEAKER_01]: There are too many wonderful things about bikes, but if I name a style of trip, a style of ride, can you say, well, here's an example of a bike that would be good for...
19:56
[SPEAKER_01]: because I think that would be good for the listeners.
19:58
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of listeners, you know, they don't ride motorcycles yet.
20:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm going to say yet because I think everyone should give it a go.
20:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a lot of fun.
20:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but let's say that you're a beginner and you just want to learn to ride and you've decided not to ride on the streets yet.
20:14
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to be riding on back roads, dirt roads, things.
20:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've been a fantastic way to start always is like the TW 200.
20:23
[SPEAKER_02]: They are the most forgiving little bikes that's a Yamaha with kind of fat chunky tires.
20:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And they've got enough power to get you in and out of places.
20:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Very forgiving with those, you know, the big fat tires and a nice part of your suspension system.
20:40
[SPEAKER_02]: They will just go and go and go forever.
20:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So definitely a great starter.
20:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, and what's the drawback to that learners?
20:46
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not going to have it is not a highway bike.
20:49
[SPEAKER_02]: It is, you know, it will be hard pressed if you were trying to keep up with interstate traffic.
20:56
[SPEAKER_02]: For sure, it's probably not the lightest thing out there, but it's ubiquitous.
21:02
[SPEAKER_02]: You can get parts for it, which is important and important aspect that I think of as a mechanic that not everybody does parts availability.
21:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm running into that right now, just because my motorcycle is 21 years old.
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was just trying to order a new clutch cable and I'm like, none of these look like they're right.
21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So I ended up just ordering one so I could mess with it, but I've that's kind of stuff you run into.
21:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, here's the next, next ride.
21:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I told you before I hit record, my dream is to go to Iceland and do the, you know, the highway that goes around the coast, but then I also want to cross over the top.
21:37
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so I get some dirty and some high passes and that kind of thing.
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So what kind of a motorcycle or maybe it takes more than one, but what kind of motorcycle would you recommend for a trip like that?
21:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, see, that would be a great one for one of the bigger adventure bikes at Africa, twin, super tenoray, would be a great choice for that.
21:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, of course you got BMW just about any of their
22:03
[SPEAKER_02]: GS is, you know, starting from this small ones up to the bigger ones.
22:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm definitely partial for longer trips like that to a bike that has a shaft drive, and you get less power to the ground, but it's way lower maintenance.
22:15
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you're looking for something that's going to be nimble on a variety of road surfaces, like you'd find in Iceland, but you may have big mile days to get behind between places where you can camp or spend the night or find food,
22:30
[SPEAKER_02]: you're going to want and that you're going to be doing less like single track type things presumably on the roads and islands.
22:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got limited road choices.
22:40
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't need to be so worried about the weight on that one.
22:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay and we were just visiting about what it would be like to ride in Tanzania.
22:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So what motorcycle would you select for that?
22:52
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got a lot of sand and density and a lot of loose surfaces.
22:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So definitely a smaller displacement bike.
23:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So something like the Himalayan 450 from Royal Enfield is a really nice kind of middle of the road.
23:09
[SPEAKER_02]: You could get definitely more into a more aggressive
23:13
[SPEAKER_02]: start bike situation, more of a enduro than a dual sport or adventure bike.
23:21
[SPEAKER_02]: But again, the question is going to be, as you get real lightweight, you also are losing fuel capacity.
23:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So what are those distances going to be that you're trying to cover each day?
23:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And is it worth the weight trade off of a slightly porcupine year bike that can get you the fuel range you need?
23:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I have an extra gallon on the back of my motorcycle at all times for that very reason.
23:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I have an extra four and a half gallons on the back of my bike.
23:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
23:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so we covered everything from kind of a Enduro ride and adventure ride, you know, a beginning ride.
23:56
[SPEAKER_01]: But what would you use if you wanted to do all the pig tails from your neck of the woods up in South Dakota?
24:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And I, I love my young law of J.R.
24:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It just, it keeps in my bike.
24:08
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also 20 years old, my primary, but I've got several of J.Rs.
24:12
[SPEAKER_02]: But it is just that perfect amalgamation of sport bike, twisties for the, you know, the twisty roads and the mountains and nice and stable at highway speeds and not not to, uh,
24:32
[SPEAKER_02]: 1,700 kilometers up to the Arctic Circle.
24:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
24:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, of course, in the Black Hills riding your pig tail bridges and the needle highway, the iconic bike is obviously the Harley Davidson or the Indian motorcycle.
24:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, represented with the Sturgis right there.
24:49
[SPEAKER_01]: that's fun it so we only touched on five percent of the different types of writing that are out there and the different types of motorcycle's boat i think what it illustrates is that there is so much to this sport there's so many ways to do it there is again there is no wrong way to enjoy motorcycle
25:09
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25:13
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25:24
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25:39
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25:48
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25:57
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26:14
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26:22
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26:23
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26:26
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26:32
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26:37
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26:41
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26:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's talk about some of the amazing things that you've done in joint motorcycles for a little bit.
26:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So we talked about the iron butt rally 11,000 miles in 11 days and that's cool, but we need to talk about this.
27:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It was about 100,000 mile trip, Australia, Canada, US, you're visiting all the states and provinces in these three countries.
27:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that what's going on?
27:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, what we were doing is, and we is my friend Ian McFee, and he and I were competitors against each other in several Ironbot rallies, and we happened to, in 2019, that which was the year that I won, we happened to have long sections of our route planning that overlapped and it overlapped in such a way that we had to stick together.
27:42
[SPEAKER_02]: uh, the uh, islands around Vancouver, British Columbia, and we had to take a series of like five or six fairies in between islands and documents something on each island.
27:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And there was only one way to string all these things together and make the timing work.
27:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So we we had to stick together for the better part of a day, which is really unusual in this event.
28:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And we found that our rhythms just aligned naturally.
28:06
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn't have any communications connected in our helmets or anything.
28:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And our speed was the same and our style of writing and our fuel range.
28:15
[SPEAKER_02]: So having only written together as competitors, he called me up following the rally and he said, I had this idea.
28:22
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to ride my motorcycle in 49 US states, minus Hawaii.
28:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I said, well, that's boring.
28:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody does that.
28:29
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, I want to ride it in alphabetical order.
28:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, well, that sounds ridiculous.
28:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Totally.
28:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's a big ramps.
28:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So he is Australian, and he and I, as I said, we'd not written together on purpose prior to this.
28:45
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't live in competitors.
28:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So we decided to add the Australian states in alphabetical order as well as a shake-down ride to see this as we figure again, low-risk high-reward attempt to shake-down and see if we could work together well.
29:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And the in order to get alphabetically to the states we we started in Alabama, the next state is Alaska.
29:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So the ride we did across Canada was a connector leg to so that that didn't count the miles in Australia didn't count towards the Guinness World Record and the miles in Canada didn't count.
29:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Only the miles we rode together within the country of our choosing which happened to us.
29:31
[UNKNOWN]: Wow.
29:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So you want to do them alphabetical.
29:34
[SPEAKER_01]: That means that you're going to be traveling over states so you're not going to count until you come back and do it again in the right order.
29:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that the way it worked?
29:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It absolutely did and it's just, it's absurd and everybody's like, well, why would you do that?
29:48
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we just love motorcycles.
29:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It was just an excuse.
29:52
[SPEAKER_02]: It didn't, I read it, didn't make any more sense.
29:55
[SPEAKER_02]: to us at the time, then it does sound like when I'm explaining it to you now, but it's just an excuse to get out there and spend some miles on the road and see how much of this continent we could see.
30:08
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, so he had decided that you can't just touch the border of each state because that would be cheating.
30:16
[SPEAKER_02]: That wouldn't really count as visiting the state.
30:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had to go photograph the state capital building of the state.
30:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
30:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So there were times that like we went from Virginia to Washington to West Virginia.
30:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the criss-cross going from far east coast, far west coast, back to the far east coast.
30:39
[SPEAKER_02]: We drove right past the West Virginia capital.
30:42
[SPEAKER_02]: We wave to it on our way past.
30:45
[SPEAKER_01]: We had to come back.
30:47
[SPEAKER_01]: That's hilarious.
30:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so just so people can think about this.
30:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if I can actually do this.
30:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We have in alphabetical order, I'm not going to do all 50 states, but so Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, and then is at California, and then it would be Connecticut, then Delaware.
31:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I just keep going, but if people, yeah, Colorado is skip Colorado.
31:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where I am.
31:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But the point I'm trying to make is that we're going back and forth, coast to coast in north to south and we're hopscotchting all and this is a big area.
31:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean the United States.
31:22
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it?
31:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's like 3,000 miles from New York to Los Angeles or something like that.
31:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So wow.
31:29
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a lot.
31:29
[SPEAKER_02]: That's approximately.
31:30
[SPEAKER_02]: It is.
31:31
[SPEAKER_02]: It was so the base distance was about 66,000 miles
31:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we decided because this planning had started in late 2019, early 2020, then the pandemic hit.
31:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we had all the time in the world to sit and fiddle with this plan.
31:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And at some point we were looking at this going, why wonder?
31:53
[SPEAKER_02]: If there's a world record, I had known the person that had set the individual world record for the longest continuous journey and I was thinking I wonder what the current team record is and there didn't happen to be a team record but they agreed to let us make the attempt and they said our benchmark
32:10
[SPEAKER_02]: on the existing solo record.
32:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was like 72,000 miles was our benchmark.
32:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we built a little more on there for buffer.
32:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So our final ride plan was 83,000 miles in 80 days within the U.S.
32:28
[SPEAKER_01]: In 80 days.
32:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're doing over a thousand miles a day for 80 days.
32:33
[SPEAKER_02]: We were, and part of the complicating factor is because this was in the periphery of COVID.
32:39
[SPEAKER_02]: He, as an Australian, was not able to apply for a longer tourist visa for his trip to California.
32:45
[SPEAKER_02]: They had just opened for applications for longer tourist visas, to have couple of weeks before we started travel.
32:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And as soon as they announced that they were taking the applications again,
33:00
[SPEAKER_02]: it immediately had like a nine-month wait.
33:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So there was no possible way for him to get that longer visa.
33:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So we were working with the parameters of a 90-year-old.
33:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh goodness.
33:12
[SPEAKER_01]: That drives the record, I guess.
33:14
[SPEAKER_02]: It did.
33:15
[SPEAKER_02]: It gave us a very what we thought to be a very fixed pivot point in there and that we had to work with it.
33:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
33:24
[SPEAKER_01]: that's crazy so you wrote a book about this trip and it sounds delightful it's called pushing miles and then the subtitle is a chronicle of motorcycles mayhem in metal and I understand there is a lot of mayhem tell us about the things that happened along the way
33:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my goodness.
33:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So it started 70 miles from home.
33:46
[SPEAKER_02]: We were setting up a service depot in a town called Odell, Illinois just because it was about smack dab in the middle of the country.
33:54
[SPEAKER_02]: We would crisscross past it enough times that we could put all of our service tools and equipment and fluids and et cetera in this location.
34:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was trailering
34:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Both of our motorcycles to that starting point 70 miles from my house.
34:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I had a deer and I totaled my car.
34:12
[SPEAKER_01]: No way.
34:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm standing on the side of the highway in the middle of the night with Ian on the phone and I said at least we got all of our bad luck out of the way early.
34:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, not gunwood.
34:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We said that at least once a day every single day for the next six.
34:33
[SPEAKER_01]: that's crazy you know my son's truck is in the shop right now today because a deer jumped in front of it and you can't do anything about it you cannot miss a deer if they jump right in front of you it's just it's just gonna happen yep and it was it was the first time I've ever hit anything bigger than I could eat in a single sitting so I was not prepared for the amount of damage that it caused just it stepped
34:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Boop, right in front of me, so, but you know, you figure that is never happened in my lifetime.
35:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, be all right.
35:04
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a, that was a left field thing.
35:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the replacement vehicle that I got broke down, never had a problem with that before.
35:12
[SPEAKER_02]: All of a sudden, I'm desperately trying to get that running again.
35:15
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't miss my flight out of the country to Australia.
35:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Then we had all these problems in Australia.
35:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Then I had an emergency surgery in Australia.
35:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And no way.
35:25
[SPEAKER_02]: every single one of these things, there was no precedent for this amount of stuff going wrong.
35:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So we, with the greatest of optimism, kept saying, well, the statistical probability of things continuing to go wrong at this rate is effectively zero, right?
35:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So we'll just keep on going.
35:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you ever think this one was trying to tell you something?
35:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I don't think we're bright enough, but like we are deliberately at one point in Australia.
35:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I hit a kangaroo and I, you know, I got the bike picked up and I'm checking myself over and I'm, you know, flinging my arms to get the kangaroo away and in turns around it comes back.
36:05
[SPEAKER_02]: We sit there and, you know, we're kind of doing this damage control and the people pause for a minute.
36:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Could each other, there we go.
36:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Can't tell anybody about this because smarter people than us are going to tell us to stop.
36:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Are you listening to these signs from the universe?
36:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you guys should pack it in and call it a name.
36:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That's crazy.
36:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So what else happened?
36:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you just list some more like this and this and this and this and this?
36:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So a few hours before we were supposed to be on the plane back to the US.
36:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I had ended up in emergency surgery for kidney stones in Australia.
36:41
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
36:41
[SPEAKER_02]: That I'd never had kidney cells before in it was too late for him to cancel his flight or to re-book his flight He'd have to pay for a whole new ticket so he flew back to the US without me So that started his visa clock ticking while I am in the hospital in Australia for a week And so we were behind the table right right from the get-go
37:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So he went to Alaska without me.
37:05
[SPEAKER_02]: So that screwed up our entire trajectory.
37:08
[SPEAKER_02]: We lost a bunch of miles by not writing together.
37:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And then he started having a lot of mechanical difficulty.
37:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't want to, you know, bash away at the poor BMW.
37:20
[SPEAKER_02]: He was writing a 21-year-old BMW R1100RT.
37:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And it had never given him a minute's trouble before this.
37:31
[SPEAKER_02]: leaking seals and his clutch slipping and he bent rim that's, you know, he hit a pop hole and broke his frame in half on his motorcycle, not hyperballically, literally, just his left side passenger foot peg mount was the only thing holding the half of his bike together and all of these things are such wild left field occurrences that there was no, no president.
37:56
[SPEAKER_02]: for such carnage with such regularity.
37:59
[SPEAKER_02]: But I had a second procedure because of my kidney stones.
38:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was supposed to be outpatient and that went to rise.
38:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So I ended up in the hospital for eight more days.
38:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Ian got home.
38:12
[SPEAKER_02]: We had to, we were down for a week with Ian with COVID.
38:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And then our grand crescendo 800 miles shy of our Guinness World Record Minimum mileage, the gearbox exploded on his bike in the middle of the Nevada desert.
38:30
[SPEAKER_01]: seriously.
38:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Seriously.
38:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
38:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and it was, it was funny.
38:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say, and I will buddy toe you, if I have to, to get 800 miles on these two bikes, and I'm looking through my bag, and oh yeah, the ratchet strap we could have used to buddy toe you was now being, it had been cut to length, and was using to hold his saddle bag on, which broke off his bike, and when skittering down the
39:00
[SPEAKER_01]: This is crazy.
39:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It isn't so wild.
39:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, so statistically improbable, to have so many unrelated things going wrong, just like one comment should I cast for the next?
39:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And you say lightning can't strike twice in the same place, but it does.
39:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, goodness.
39:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It absolutely does.
39:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's, you know, where we had created a WhatsApp group with a very small number of people that we knew we were doing this ride.
39:32
[SPEAKER_02]: We wanted to make it completely under the radar.
39:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So we can keep the pace we needed and we didn't want to have.
39:39
[SPEAKER_02]: interactions or interference from from outside folks.
39:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we had a handful of people on what's up group that we kept abreast of our daily activities and every day.
39:51
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like, will you please stop saying you got all of your bad luck out of the way earlier?
39:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Just bringing it upon yourself at this point.
39:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I am afraid to check my messages in the morning and see what fell off.
40:02
[SPEAKER_02]: of somebody's life last night or somebody's body, though it was a comedy of errors for sure.
40:11
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you get that last 800 miles in?
40:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So it wasn't just the last 800 miles we actually did.
40:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Remember the the Guinness minimum was like 72,000.
40:20
[SPEAKER_02]: but our personal goal was 83,000.
40:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had a buffer.
40:23
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
40:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is where comes in.
40:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I think something that all of us can relate to when you really step out of your comfort zone and get out of the get out in the world is as soon as you put yourself out there and ask for help.
40:37
[SPEAKER_02]: People 99% of the time are awesome and they want to be part of your adventure and they want to share a little bit of their world with you and that's
40:48
[SPEAKER_02]: found as you know as far as we could tell we have exhausted the complete number of oilhead BMW clutch plates in this country But I know some mom and pop out there has please sit in on their shelf
41:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So we put something out on the internet.
41:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Does anybody have a local mom and pot shop that they think has this?
41:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you make some phone calls and let us know?
41:09
[SPEAKER_02]: So not only did we find somebody, we were in Denver, we had just cleared out your emoto electrics of all of their parts.
41:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Somebody in Pennsylvania said I found a shop in Virginia that has your parts and they have the specialty tools they will loan you to install this this seals that you need he left his house road from Pennsylvania to Virginia to pick up the parts for us and was writing them out to us in Illinois so we could meet him out there.
41:39
[SPEAKER_02]: to make the repairs that that we needed.
41:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
41:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Why?
41:42
[SPEAKER_02]: No other reason that he wanted to play a little part in our adventure.
41:47
[SPEAKER_02]: He just wanted to see our crazy dream kept alive for one more day.
41:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And the number of people we had a issue where his exhaust broke and was creating issues.
41:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And we had made calls.
42:01
[SPEAKER_02]: We made a lot of calls.
42:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the the the whole coming day every town we projected to be through of any size we were calling to see if there's anybody that can help weld it up very quick.
42:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Just it's a two minute job we can pull it all the way down for you so you can repair this for us.
42:17
[SPEAKER_02]: We couldn't get anybody that was available willing to help and so we said.
42:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's just, let's pull off the freeway.
42:24
[SPEAKER_02]: The tab of coffee, let's do a reset.
42:26
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll come up with another plan.
42:27
[SPEAKER_02]: So we pull off the freeway and at the stop sign on the off ramp, right in front of us is a mobile welding truck.
42:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And Ian and I kind of look at each other and go, okay, well, we're not gonna be creepy, but if he stops in this little two-horse town, we'll follow him over.
42:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure enough, he stops in town.
42:41
[SPEAKER_02]: We pulled up behind him and explained the situation.
42:42
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, oh, yeah, come on around the corner, man.
42:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you have no problem at all.
42:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Just nice.
42:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Took the time out of his day and he said, well, can I, can I pay you?
42:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I get you a case of beer or something?
42:53
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, absolutely not, man.
42:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I suppose I've got to stick together.
42:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just happy to help.
42:57
[SPEAKER_02]: This is really cool.
42:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you guys succeed.
42:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was, you know, every around every corner.
43:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think ultimately that is what kept us going, because we had this ever growing, just beautiful tapestry of people out there in this world that just happened to be in the right place.
43:16
[SPEAKER_02]: just happened to read the right post and said, you know what?
43:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I can do that.
43:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I can help you guys.
43:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm here for you.
43:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, they were in the background cheering us on.
43:26
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so it was a success that we wanted for everybody that had invested in something and in seeing us succeed.
43:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
43:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what seemed to mind just then Wendy is that I don't like to talk politics on the show so I'm not going to accept to say that uh it seems like the major parties want to create division and we start distrusting our fellow humans and if we don't get out and find out.
43:49
[SPEAKER_01]: that people are great, that you might be missing because right now the media is feeding us a lie.
43:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Humanity, people are wonderful.
43:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And how did this trip change your view of humanity or maybe you had already realized this in your prior travels?
44:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But how does that impact it?
44:05
[SPEAKER_02]: It absolutely has and I think the biggest impact it has had on is seeing how it has impacted my daughter and she is 11 years old now, but she has written motorcycles with me.
44:20
[SPEAKER_02]: all around the world and I took a long trip in Pakistan and she will tell you that is her favorite place in the world to visit.
44:30
[SPEAKER_02]: She's written in our side card rig and so she and I have explored all over Mexico together and Nepal all through the Himalayas and so
44:41
[SPEAKER_02]: as far as she knows, like all kids grow up having inventures around the world in five cars.
44:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
44:47
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's also, she has absolutely no qualms and saying, you know, when people start making xenophobic comments, she said, no, when we lived in Mexico, we stopped and asked somebody where the bathroom is and they said, Mikasa Sukasa and then let us use their bathroom and then we played with their bunny and they made us dinner.
45:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's like, she's very happy to say,
45:11
[SPEAKER_02]: all around the world is that no, they're actually super cool.
45:15
[SPEAKER_02]: They're, you know, very welcoming, very warm, the vast majority.
45:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And you just, you need to cut yourself out there.
45:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, that's, it's part of the beauty of traveling by, is you, you put yourself out there in a way that makes it really, really cool, the interactions that would not have come with any other mode of travel.
45:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's,
45:35
[SPEAKER_02]: That's my big takeaway is watching her go fearlessly out into the world, knowing, you know, when she and I were going to be writing our side card rig down to Yushwaya at the Southern Tip of South America when the pandemic hit and that's how we ended up living in Mexico.
45:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And to see
45:55
[SPEAKER_02]: to see those experiences and the impact that they have had on her.
46:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I just hope that somewhere she's got this fearless spirit that she takes on to the next generation and it continues to be happy to say, no, it's not exactly like you've heard.
46:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Get out there and do it.
46:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I have people that are shocked that I ran down here in Mexico by myself.
46:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, where I was going with our South American tour is a lot of people who like South America.
46:25
[SPEAKER_02]: That's dangerous, and it's like, well, that's saying that
46:28
[SPEAKER_02]: North America is dangerous, don't go to Nova Scotia because there's gun crime in Chicago.
46:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, that's marginally misinformed if you're being street-wise about where you're going and how you conduct yourself.
46:40
[SPEAKER_02]: But, too, it is a continent.
46:42
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
46:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So, such a wide array of situations and communities and cultures and politics.
46:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But most definitely, so many good people can't say that enough.
46:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
47:01
[SPEAKER_01]: That is so, and I'm just thinking about the wonderful gift you've given your daughter to take her on these sorts of experiences.
47:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so beautiful.
47:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It's something that I frequently have people in our, you know, niche of motorcycle, travel, and competition.
47:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm fairly well known, so she has seen people come up to inspiration.
47:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like that, and I like to talk to her about the women in our country that
47:26
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, fought for our rights to ride motorcycles and wear pants and vote.
47:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And those are the women.
47:33
[SPEAKER_02]: We are standing on their shoulders.
47:35
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I took her to Pakistan, she, we were eating in a restaurant that was owned by a woman.
47:40
[SPEAKER_02]: She was the first woman.
47:41
[SPEAKER_02]: in the entire hunts of alley to own her own business.
47:44
[SPEAKER_02]: When she was telling my then nine-year-old daughter, I had people try to set my business on fire.
47:51
[SPEAKER_02]: They were vandalizing, you know, spray painting my business.
47:54
[SPEAKER_02]: They would spit on me in the street and I would go home in tears every single day going, I don't know why I keep doing this.
48:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And then she just swelled with pride.
48:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But now,
48:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Now there is another woman that owns a business and it still gives me chills that my daughter spoke to the woman that is changing her world today.
48:14
[SPEAKER_02]: That is such a powerful thing that those there are still women like the ones that we see in our history books.
48:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, not to the extent that we should be, but we, we start to see women give credit getting credit where credit is due for the work they've done in this and to know they're still women out there fighting that fight is really important.
48:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I just had a horrible idea, Wendy.
48:37
[SPEAKER_01]: What is you held a 10,000 female motorcycle rally in Afghanistan.
48:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's an event called the Women Riders World Relay that they did their first event in 2019 and they're going to be coming back this next year with a slightly modified version of the relay but the concept was that a physical wooden baton and the baton started in UK and it was passed from women writer to women writer.
49:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It threw 120 countries around the world through tens of thousands of women writers.
49:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I also happened to be carrying baton with me when I won the Ironbot rally, which was really, really amazing.
49:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, that was an absolutely incredible feat to link together women in a lot of countries where women can't ride unascorded.
49:31
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a lot of difficulties getting across borders where women needed permission from their parents or their spouse in order to travel.
49:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Timing across an incredible variety of climates and political and weather climates.
49:48
[SPEAKER_02]: It was incredible undertaking.
49:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And then also coming up this next year, there's a all women's motorcycle ride in Pakistan that will be teaching local women to ride their own motorcycles in Pakistan.
50:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And for the most part, they are not allowed to pilot their own motorcycles unscorted.
50:09
[SPEAKER_02]: So we were just in the last few years starting to see more women in Pakistan learning to ride.
50:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, just pushing that envelope, pushing that envelope a little bit more, but given them the skills to get out there on their own to maintain their own bikes like how to service and do their regular maintenance and that just a little bit more of
50:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I have found windy and I think hopefully people generally agree that it seems there's a very small minority of people who have some ideology that creates so much trouble for everybody else, especially when they have the power.
50:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you go to these places where women are fighting for their rights, for just what we would consider in the West, a normal existence, you have to remember most of the people in that country probably don't care that much about it.
51:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the ideology that's driving some sort of an elite group at the top.
51:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you ride a motorcycle in a place like that,
51:12
[SPEAKER_01]: You're a witness.
51:13
[SPEAKER_01]: You're a testimony.
51:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You're saying, look, all I have to do is write through here, and you see that I am a woman who can do this very well, as well as anybody, your regardless, and I'm doing it and wake up.
51:27
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that takes cuts, though, as it ever made you nervous.
51:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, I don't know, you know, I always have a, there's always that little bit of nerves.
51:36
[SPEAKER_02]: There is that, the, the, that first step, leave in home is the hardest.
51:41
[SPEAKER_02]: No matter what it is that you're setting out to do and that I have written more than a million miles all around the world and that is still holds true to me today.
51:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that first, just getting to the far side of town is everything, everything secure.
51:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got everything thinking about things that could go wrong on the road.
51:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you get a little bit down the road, and you're like, I remember why I do.
52:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So I love it.
52:02
[SPEAKER_04]: I love it.
52:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I don't think there's been destinations where I am particularly concerned about destinations.
52:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I love underdog countries.
52:11
[SPEAKER_02]: That said, I do my research and make sure that I'm making wise choices about my travels.
52:17
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's more that, once you, once you p-o yourself away, you get off that block, get halfway across town, get halfway across the state.
52:26
[SPEAKER_02]: all of a sudden, what seems so potentially scary.
52:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, falls into this beautiful day.
52:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going out there doing it.
52:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I love it.
52:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So cool.
52:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So we haven't covered half of the feats that you've done, but it's so fun what we have talked about.
52:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And the name of the book, if you want to know more about that 100,000 mile journey, it's called pushing miles, a chronicle of motorcycles mayhem and metal.
52:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Ian McFey was the partner that you did this feet with and from Australia.
53:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, what else do the listeners need to know?
53:04
[SPEAKER_01]: How can they find out more about you and what you're up to?
53:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, they can go to pushingmiles.com and that will direct you to where you can get the book.
53:13
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a chunky boy.
53:14
[SPEAKER_02]: It is eight entered pages because there was never ending a ray of things that went wrong.
53:21
[SPEAKER_02]: But there is also an abridged version and there is an audio book that's voiced by my co-author.
53:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So they'll find all that information, and there's a lot of bonus materials.
53:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So every time you find yourself reading through the book going, there's no possible way that can happen.
53:35
[SPEAKER_02]: You can hop on the website and find the correlating pictures and videos that... Oh, there a lot of them are that particular bit of mehem.
53:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And then that has any events that we're speaking at or book tours.
53:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I do a lot of motorcycle mechanic workshops, motorcycle first aid workshops,
53:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Wendy, I, I was just thinking how much I could benefit from some of your knowledge.
54:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I struggled to work on my motorcycle, but I have to share one thing that I thought was pretty crazy.
54:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, knocked a hole in my engine block and seized up the engine on a ride.
54:11
[SPEAKER_01]: A week before my old co-host Travis, which a lot of listeners know, and I were headed out on a big ride.
54:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I had to swap the engine in my motorcycle while working
54:24
[SPEAKER_01]: So no pressure, no pressure, but I figured it out.
54:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't believe it.
54:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And but had you been there, it would have been easy.
54:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But I thought, man, what's the probability?
54:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll actually get to go on this ride.
54:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And I seems like I keep running into that over and over again.
54:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would love to take some of your motorcycle mechanic works.
54:44
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be great.
54:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
54:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
54:46
[SPEAKER_02]: You're right around the corner.
54:47
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll have to come up and visit them.
54:50
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll get you a trail ready.
54:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But I will say, I
54:54
[SPEAKER_02]: to all of the listeners, remember that adventure is what happens when things stop going to plan and you find a way to keep going.
55:02
[SPEAKER_01]: That's beautiful.
55:04
[SPEAKER_02]: That is where the story comes from, right?
55:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, and that's where the book comes from.
55:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got to read your book now just because it sounds hilarious, frankly It sounds so improbable, but here's a testimony for this again I did it or an example you just kept going and you did it with everything that was going wrong You're like, no, we're gonna go.
55:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna keep going and that tenacity is amazing But you did it.
55:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a little a little bit tenacity a little bit stupidity
55:33
[SPEAKER_02]: little bit on flagging optimism, but we dragged it across the finish line kicking and screaming.
55:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's fantastic.
55:42
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you celebrate in the end?
55:44
[SPEAKER_01]: What did you and Ian do?
55:45
[SPEAKER_02]: very interestingly, our our 80 day tour became 119 days and that is a whole other story about how we managed to get in another visa but everything had gone so wrong we had lost 52 total days to sundry chaos and failures and we got to the finish line and it felt so anti climatic because of the ride looked nothing like we
56:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we rolled in and it was about midnight and it was, you know, quite gas station and we said, well, that's that then maybe we should turn around and do the states in reverse order.
56:25
[SPEAKER_02]: See if we can get it right next time.
56:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But we both be broke before we can make that happen.
56:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it was oddly anti-climatic for having technically made it to the A sort of finish, but it looked nothing like the average of thousand mile a day that we had.
56:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So confidently had in our original ride plan, and I think a lot of people
56:53
[SPEAKER_02]: that do a lot of long travel of any sort can relate to this feeling that when when you're doing something big and it comes to an end it feels like you're being shot out of a cannon into a brick wall
57:09
[SPEAKER_02]: like oh you all of that momentum that you had build up in your world and you come to a stop and then you just look at all of the regular life going on around you and it's like these people have no idea that I just did something incredible like it's just very very disorienting.
57:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Try to get your speed back to regular life and the world as you know it you've come back changed from every one of these You're not the same person you were when you left home You know a two weeks ago or two months ago or two years ago, so it's a very Yeah, I think the antidote is to start planning your next adventure
57:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, a very wise travel advisor that I interviewed, I'm gonna say six years ago, just to guess.
57:55
[SPEAKER_01]: She said, never have just one trip planned, always have to.
57:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Because when you finish the one, you're say, okay, now there's this other one that I get to start working with.
58:03
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and it helps the let down, and I love that advice that she gave.
58:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's another side to this too, and that is that we begin to understand, it's not about the summit, it's about the climb.
58:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
58:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's a thing that people have difficulty when they're trying to wrap their head around long distance writing and you know it's it's not for everybody, most certainly it's a in up and there with ultramarathoners and as far as.
58:31
[SPEAKER_02]: doing crazy stuff just to do it.
58:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But a lot of people miss the fact that the beauty is in in the doing.
58:39
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in the rise.
58:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even really need a destination.
58:43
[SPEAKER_02]: That's just an excuse to get out and do it.
58:46
[SPEAKER_02]: But my happiest place in the world is in the saddle and watching the sunset, you know,
58:59
[SPEAKER_02]: full moon and then desert in the middle of the night in Nevada, there's just so much beauty out there stopping and having a random chat with somebody at a gas station and just learning that a little bit, there's still people that
59:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder how their adventure carried on after our brief 10 minutes, like that is the beauty of just putting yourself out there in the world.
59:23
[SPEAKER_02]: You never know when you are going to have that experience that just fuels your soul, you just gotta be out there in the world, make yourself available to it.
59:34
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a beautiful way to wrap this up.
59:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for your time today, Wendy.
59:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I enjoyed that immensely, and I'm sure our listeners did too.
59:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So, to everyone out there, I'm going to put the information that Wendy shared in the show notes, so you can find her in her book and that sort of thing.
59:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But maybe it's a motorcycle, maybe it's a bicycle, maybe it's walking, maybe it's, you know, human-powered flight.
59:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what it is, but make sure you find your thing and get out there and have some fun.
1:00:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
1:00:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks, Curtis, out of blast.