The Big Dance...otherwise known as the Iron Butt Rally

Phil Tarman

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Some of you are familiar with it, some not. The Iron Butt Rally is an 11-day "ride" held during odd-numbered years for about 100 riders/teams. It's a bonus rally in which the objective is to score more points than anyone else. Riders usually do 11-13,000 miles. This year the ride started in Minneapolis on Monday. Checkpoint #1 was yesterday in Allen, TX (north of Dallas).

Eldon Cannon (EX-WINGER on our Forum) and I met 14 years ago in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Missoula, MT, as the '03 IBR was finishing. We've been friends ever since. I've never ridden (and never will) the IBR, but have done one semi-major bonus rally, the '14 "Working on the Railroad" Rally based in Big Sky, MT. I've registered for the '17 "How the West Was Won" based in Grand Junction this August. That rally is a 34-hour rally that will have 4-500 possible bonus locations. Obviously, planning is a major requirement for such a rally, and, just as obviously, planning is the reason I'll never make it as a "Big Dog." I did manage to finish the Working on the Railroad Rally, but would have done better if I had collected all the bonii I thought I had earned. Execution, another weak point for me, is also essential.

The Iron Butt Rally raises planning and execution to their ultimate level. If you're interested, here's a copy of a summary at the end of the first leg that I sent to Eldon this morning.

The Boge family, sitting in next-to-last place, that I mention is a father/wife/daughter combo riding a Harley with a sidecar. They have previously ridden from Prudhoe Bay to Key West. Jim Owen, the leader after Leg One, has already won one IBR and would have won another if not for a final drive failure on the final leg to Denver of (IIRC) the '11 Rally. Jim's a former Navy pilot and a retired Delta airlines pilot who's a heck-of-a-nice guy. He went out of his way to help me with a GPS problem at the Working on the Railroad Rally.

Here's what I sent Eldon. It has links to some sites on the Iron Butt Association website:

Updates: Spotwalla (https://spotwalla.com/locationViewer.php?id=429) shows them back on the road. One is nearly to Kansas on I-35, two are in the panhandle of Texas already, one is to Little Rock, one south of Houston, and big clumps are still in Central Texas and Louisiana.

Results: No surprise here. Jim Owen is in first place by 3,000 points @ 25,000+ and 1700+ miles, followed by a long list of the usual suspects. Kurt Worden on his Ninja 250 is in 16th. Dylan Spink, on a really sharp looking '77 GL1000 Goldwing that's older than he is, is in 21st. The highest placed Honda is in 11th right in front of the highest placed Harley. There's an FJR in 6th and a Triumph Trophy in 7th. The Boges are in next-to-the-last place, 103rd. They had a SPOT-tracking problem which has been resolved. That might have cost them some points, but don't know if that's the main reason they're placed so low. A Japanese man on a Burgmann 400 is in 101st, and an NC700X is in 95th.

A link to the Iron Butt Association site is: http://ibr.wvi.com/


Some of you may remember Mungojerry from our Forum. He ran the '15 Iron Butt Rally on his NT700V and was doing fairly well (well on track to be a finisher) when he had a connector failure wet of Dallas on his way to the finish in Albuquerque. He managed to bodge together a couple of replacement batteries, but then gave out east of Las Vegas, NM, and didn't make it to the finish. He's disappeared from our Forum since then.
 
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Phil Tarman

Phil Tarman

Site Supporter
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Joined
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Jim, I don't know why those links didn't work. The one I've put in there now gets you to the site that has the links to all that's been posted so far.

Here it is, just for you: http://ibr.wvi.com/

:hat1:
 
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