“ This is bloody ridiculous ,” the thought kept running through my head . Here I sat , with a sore arse , contemplating the final touches needed to ‘ complete ’ an Iron Butt ride . One of those pointless , long-distance rides , that proves nothing but the fact that a motorcycle rider can sit on a bike for a long time , to complete a set distance .
It was now months after competing the ride and at the time I thought the same thing , heading home , two hours after the sun had fully set , in the middle of an Australian summer . It had been a hot day , book ended by a cold and wet , pre-dawn and now returning to the starting point , dark , and again cold and wet . What was the point of this ? What , was the point of this ? I ’ d never understood the point , the attraction , of completing an Iron Butt ride , yet in the middle of Covid restrictions within an Australian state hell bent on locking down at the slightest inclination that someone might be contagious I ’ d set out to ride my bike as far as I could without a plan or idea of what this meant .
Fellow riders had explained that this was like setting a Guinness World Record . ‘ Bullshit ’, I ’ d thought , they are pretty pointless too . Nevertheless , I set off at 2:45am , into the gloom , to reach the first fuel stop three and a half hours later . Heading West , I ’ d seen no sunrise behind me , the morning cloaked by the dreary mist of falling rain . What was the point ? Taking a left hand turn I began heading south towards the Victorian shipwreck coast , and still that thought rolled around in what I considered to be a now almost empty head . As I considered why I was doing such a ride the history of the Iron Butt ride concept started to come to the fore .
Iron Butt started in 1984 with a group of ten motorcyclists riding from Philadelphia in the United States . A rally for friends with a common passion to ride long distances in a single attempt . Seems pointless however , the Iron Ass Rally continued for four years .
Although a further four years passed before another rally was held the concept was popular and so under the direction of the now Iron Butt Association led by Mike Kneebone the concept was altered to not be about prize money but rather setting a goal and achieving it .
According to IBA Historian , Bob Higdon , the final years of the previous iteration of the rally had highlighted short comings that Kneebone thought demeaned the concept . A new direction was deemed , and the Iron Butt Rally was back on the calendar , eleven days of long-distance riding on the somewhere roads of the United States . A rally where riders usually cover 18,000 kilometres across those eleven days .
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