Ride Apart:

Meet Wendy Crockett, the first female winner of the 2019 Iron Butt Rally. This was at least her fifth time participating. If you don’t know anything about that particular event, the long and short of it is, you need to ride 11,000 miles (yes, eleven thousand) in eleven days and stop along the way to get proof of your accomplishment. It is not just a ride in a straight line, however. Checkpoints are set up along the way and different daily destinations have different point values, so it’s not just an ultra-long-distance ride, but a puzzle, as well: cover at least a thousand miles in a day, along a route that also gains the most points.

As a fellow motorcyclist, doing a single “Iron Butt Day” (1,000 miles in 24 hours) is inconceivable to me. The most I’ve ever done is 800 miles in a day and I was utterly exhausted for two days afterward. Crockett did 1,000 miles a day for 11 consecutive days. 12,998.9 miles. Of course, all of us FJR guys are crowing about the fact she did it on a 2005 Yamaha FJR 1300 with more than 200,000 miles on it before the rally even started. It was her 5th IBR on that same bike.