From the Library

[Biggles]

The day was also eventful in other ways.  During the two days, the Elephant sat in the hotel's front garden under its cover.  Unfortunately it also sat with its parking lights on as I had inadvertently turned the key one click too far before removal.  It was a silly mistake that left our battery so flat it wouldn't run the GPS much less spark the ignition.  As has often happened in tight situations, a friendly local went of his way to assist us.  A delivery driver was having coffee when I went back into the hotel.  He brought his van around and parked in close.  We didn't have a set of jumper cables, but we found two lengths of 10 amp electrical cable.  From (bitter) experience I knew that these would not provide the power to crank the engine so we connected the cables and let the Elephant draw some power from the van for about 15 minutes, resisting the temptation to press the starter and smoke the cables.  When there was enough power in Elephant's battery to give a bright ignition light, we unloaded the luggage and Jo and the van-man gave a big, running push while I jump-started the beast in 3rd gear. The engine fired easily and we were away!
The Elephant's Tale  Mike Hannan p 183-4

[Biggles]

We often felt isolated by our complete inability to understand the Russian language and script but this was seldom a domestic problem.  Despite our complete lack of language, we always managed to find a bed and get fed, get repairs done on the bike, and negotiate our way through police checkpoints and border crossings.  We each had our areas of responsibility for the administrative tasks we collectively called hunting and gathering.  Jo was responsible for negotiating the accommodation while I parked the bike and kept it safe.  As she explained it, if she walked into a hotel or guesthouse, she probably wasn't there to buy bread.  All that was required was to determine if a room was available, look at the room, signal acceptance, and negotiate the price using numbers written on a scrap of paper. 
A similar pantomime was played out in cafes and restaurants.  We would often walk around the tables and identify what looked good on other diners' plates then signal to the waiter that this was the dish we wanted.  It was a simple system and, if executed with a little good humour, generally got a good laugh from the locals and often an endorsement for our choice from the other diner.  In supermarkets Jo always stood back and let me make a fool of myself gesturing and smiling.  She had noticed that the women who inevitably served behind the counter were apt to find the foolishness of a bloke amusing, if not charming, but were not so well disposed towards charades by a female.
The Elephant's Tale  Mike Hannan p 229

[Biggles]

Throughout our 12,000 kilometre ride across this stunning land we had rubbed along with the ordinary Russians going about their lives.  In the remote areas the only foreigners we met were other adventure riders.  The locals were friendly, amazingly helpful, curious, cheerful and pleased that we had made the effort to come to their town.  We had often said that we were propelled on our way by the kindness of strangers, but nowhere was this more so than in the Russian Far East.   
Although there was always the risk that Elephant would miss-step and put us onto the road, we were confident that the Russians would stop and offer genuine assistance. It was just that kind of place.
The Elephant's Tale  Mike Hannan p 253

[Biggles]

We found, as we travelled, that the idea of the journey had a deep cultural significance that was probably universal.  To journey far among strangers was seen as an honourable thing, worth doing for its own sake.  Our arrival on Elephant underscored the challenge of our journey; its difficulties and, therefore, its specialness.   
We learned to tell the story of our journey quickly and efficiently and use it as a kind of currency.  We used a map with graphics to show where we had come from without the need for language.  We ended our explanation by saying, or indicating, "And now we are here!" This usually elicited a broad smile.  The personality of Elephant was the final element in the transaction.
Elephant was so distinctive that a small fan club formed wherever we parked.  People waved as we rode by and grown men asked to sit in the rider's seat to have their photo taken.  People often said to us, "That's my dream, too," and we often spent a half-hour or more answering questions and posing for photos and videos when we stopped in the street.  We spent the time willingly even when we were filthy, exhausted and hot, because we understood that this was our part of the transaction.   
And, for their part, people were kind to us, and true to their own belief in the idea of the great journey.  With these thoughts sloshing about in our heads we rolled on towards Vladivostok, looking forward to our arrival and the symbolic end of our odyssey; the end of our easterly journey; the chimera at the end of a continent.
The Elephant's Tale  Mike Hannan p 255-6

[Biggles]

It is indeed a vague measure of time.  In my case, the pointless wandering comprised an eleven year sleep of motorcyclelessness.  When I woke, I was in a dark hallway, stumbling forward with hopeful hands held out.  Then I saw a slice of light.  Closer, and I could see the title on the door from under which it spilled: "Bikes Here. Enter and Be Saved."  Inside was such strangeness: Everything has changed!  At least on the surface- the great increase of riders, numbered in hundreds of thousands; the armored gear; the digitized, the carbon-fibered, the ABSed and GPSed, the piled-up complications of parts and pumps and suspensions; the listservs and forums ever-blossoming to encompass billions of words and countless thousands of clever avatars behind which masks were people who rode faster and braked better and knew more about more minutiae than was ever conceived of a decade earlier.  I reeled back.  For a moment.  Then, in the very center of the swirling din, I saw that what was elemental had not changed.  For it never could.  The joy.  The need.  The familial bond of blood.  The erotics of risk.
Finally, the realization that this all begins with miles.  And the consumption thereof.
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p x

[Biggles]

He had not yet fully become what some small, potent seed in him had long ago foreordained he would be: a rider of singular talent and drive, one of the top long-distance endurance riders in the world.  He would soon shatter the record on a frightful, 5,645-mile journey on some of the most difficult roadways in North America, and he would do it so fast (a blistering 86.5 hours, ten fewer than his predecessor) that no one could name the person who could have kept him in even distant sight ahead.  When he finishes this ride, the first thing he does will be to conceive of something harder to do next.  There are other people like him, who live to ride the ever more challenging ride.  But few of them think they might like to become the first person to ride upwards of two hundred thousand miles in a year; few of them are as truly strange as to think they could sit in the saddle for an average of 550 miles every day of the year, Christmas and New Year's not excepted.  John Ryan is thus alone-far and away alone- at the head of a small group, the rabid mile-eaters, that is hidden in plain sight near the very heart of motorcycling.
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 2-3

[Biggles]

And so it is that long-distance riding can be seen as a proxy for the daily life-or-death struggle we were kitted out for as forest-dwelling hunters.  In its absence, we feel a need to find pursuits that exercise the same mental and physical capacities.  Or else they start to itch.  We want to feel fully alive, and fully ourselves.
In this way, riding to extremes takes humans home again.  The incomprehensibly extraordinary endeavour is nowhere better captured than in G. K. Chesterton's phrase "the immense act".  Its undertaking is "human and excusable" due to the fact that "the thing was perfectly useless to everybody, including the person who did it".
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 9

[Biggles]

In order to do this, to be unlike anyone else in the world, he has cleared the decks of all the ropes and anchors the rest of humanity laboriously collects in order to feel safe, or in order to trip over.  By his own account, he has "no career, savings, or health insurance, because I have chosen to ride instead of responsibly chasing my tail like everyone else."  He does not have a car, or a house, or a wife, or children.  What he does have, as of the end of that first Bun Burner Gold, is a calling.  The allusion to sacred ordination is more than apt: Ryan often refers to a special class, that of devout motorcyclist.
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 15

[Biggles]

The people, and there are many, who simply don't get LD riding seeing it in a place it does not belong: the standard motorcycling paradigm.  "Bikes take us to beautiful places (or adventuresome which in their difficulties are beautiful to a rider) that are experienced through the senses that touch the external world- sight, smell, sensation." But the way you must see this melodic variation on the motorcyclist theme is that the adventure is internal.  It aims itself toward the mountainous passes and river crossings of the mental and emotional landscape, as brutal and awe-inspiring and challenging as any route outside.  This inner country is rarely explored comprehensively, for the simple reason that the common structure of life has no quarter for it.  But engage the peculiar mechanics of deep time on a machine that focuses the mind like a laser at the same time it frees the bonds of the physical, and you go, fast, into infinite slowness.  Here is the lovely electrical charge of paradox; motorcycling taps deep into it.
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 26

[Biggles]

We talk, of course.  They are heading to Hyder, Alaska, and back.  From Florida.  In two weeks.  They met six weeks earlier, he says, referring to her as his fiancee.  That is how I come to think of them as Jack Sprat and his wife, for she is as round as he is lean.
Two weeks- for somewhere around 7,400 miles?  This means they will have to keep a pace of 525 mile days, every day.  They will become intimately acquainted with every rest area and gas station, but not much else, along a route that will certainly be slab all the way.  This they referred to as their vacation.  The man has done this kind of riding for a long time; it is the only kind of riding he does.  He has read all the books related to Iron Butt rides, but he has never documented his own; he has never bothered with the membership card.
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 110

[Biggles]

Gary Orr rode coast-to-coast non-stop, 2,232 miles, without ever putting a foot down- from San Diego to Madison, Florida- using a trailer hauling gas for his BMW K1200LT.  A November 2008 Rider magazine squib on the feat was titled "Depends?"
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 115

[Biggles]

This was what I felt awakening in me, after my eleven-year sleep: the desire to feel again.  All that sensation- a throwing of self into a pile of leaves, game of tennis, pillow fight- is an animal expression of exuberance.  And exuberance is the lifeblood of childhood, the time we first understand and collect sensation.  To be exuberant, to ride, is to return to the best part of life; not to remember, but to re-live.  Hiding, in its physicality, connected me back with life, which itself is essentially and only physical- the body in space, the body feeling things.  Thus it connected me to my mortality, because at some point I would no longer be able to ride.
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 142

[Biggles]

Next Mike pulled out another certificate and held it up for all to see- even though they couldn't, the room was so large.  They knew what it said, in recognition of an incredible eighty-six hours and thirty-one minutes for a ride of 5,645 miles.  "We have our secret clubs," he intoned, "and you, John Ryan, will forever be in the secret UCC club."  As Ryan moved to leave his seat to receive due, Kneebone started tearing the certificate into tiny bits that fell like snow to the floor. He then reached down to pull out another, this one saying only, "under four days," a mathematical vagueness. 
Ryan, who had retreated, now got up again and this time took hold of an acknowledgment, in the only form the Iron Butt Association would give.  Those who knew the rest of the story, the one that would remain written only in wind on the slate of the memory, stood up in a body to give Ryan, standing by the podium with a shy, proud smile, a standing ovation.  A moment of effusion, and then they sat down.
The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing  Melissa Pierson p 177

[Biggles]

Ed Otto, who finished in tenth place on a touring  motorcycle in 1993, entered the 1995 rally riding a 250cc and finished in twenty-second place, ahead of 17 modern, full- sized motorcycles!  This gives weight to IBA President Mike Kneebone's feeling that it is the rider that determines how well one finishes in the IBR, not the motorcycle.  The rider has to keep a clear head and be able to discern the best route from all of the available bonus locations.  The rider has to cope with bad weather, bad food, bad health, bad roads, and the other trials and tribulations of an eleven-day rally.  The rider has to be constantly sorting through options as the physical and mental stresses of the rally wear away at their soul.
Hopeless Class  Joel Rappoport p 40

[Biggles]

Why commit to  riding  in  the  most demanding motorcycle challenge in the world?  Why spend the substantial amount of money that the IBR requires as an entry fee as well as the funds needed to ready our motorcycles for the rally?  There is also a fair financial investment in the ride itself in terms of fuel, tires, oil, lodging, tolls, etc.  Then there is the investment of time.   Time spent riding in advance of the IBR to make sure that the motorcycle and rider are ready for the challenge and time spent riding in the rally.  The rally lasts eleven days, registration takes two days, and getting to and from the rally takes even more time.  I was lucky that the start was only two hours from my home. However, the finish would be in Spokane, Washington, and it would take me two days to cover the 2,655 miles to get back home.  After two hours of talking we came to the understanding that we do this because we love it.  We love having the stories to tell about surreal riding, of overcoming miserable weather conditions, motorcycle failures, and a host of other concerns.  Not every story ends in happiness or success but they all end with us learning a bit more about ourselves.
Hopeless Class  Joel Rappoport p 61