In the early ‘80’s I began venturing further and further away from home on my bike. I’d ride to the annual Yuma Prison Run from San Diego with a number of my buddies and up the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) to the Bay Area. It didn’t take long for me to get up the courage to make the run to Sturgis from San Diego and, before much longer I made the ultimate biker fantasy trip … cross country from the Pacific to the Atlantic and back, an adventure that kept me and my riding partners on the road for nearly two months. That experience convinced me that the more people that were part of the journey the slower the progress would be. The byline for this story definitely holds true. A mathematician would state that the number of riders on a ride is inversely proportioned to the average hourly speed.

As time went by I began seeing decals that state “He who’s fastest travels alone”. I decided to do a little research to determine who is credited with this saying and found that it was attributed to Rudyard Kipling. Rudy wrote a number of classics, perhaps the most memorable being the Jungle Book. The phrase he coined goes like this: Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels fastest who travels alone. While I was doing my research I stumbled onto a similar quote from Henry David Thoreau: The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. Whether you prefer Kipling or Thoreau, they’re both saying the same thing: if you want to get somewhere quickly, keep your pack small.

In June of 2005 the Houston Chapter decided to participate in the Gypsy Iron Butt that was conceived by Mount-N who is the Area E Sgt at Arms. Three of our members soldiered to the starting gate and hit the road at just after 5am on Saturday morning. We lost one of our riders in the parking lot when he realized that he needed gas before starting. That left two of us running west on I-10 at 5am jamming for our first checkpoint in New Braunfels. The Iron Butt journey would take us from Houston to New Braunfels to Dallas to Shreveport to Layfayette and back to Houston. The ride was a little over a thousand miles and the goal was to finish in less than twenty-four hours. We participated until we’d gotten about half-way through the ride and I began calculating what great time we were making. At that moment we shifted from “participation” to “competition” with a group of riders from Dallas that were riding the same circle but had started from the Big “D” clubhouse. I calculated in my mind (math is one of the things I do to wile away the time behind my windshield) exactly when they’d have to leave the Houston checkpoint in order to be ahead of us. At our next stop I called the Houston check point and realized that we were in the race. If we maintained our pace we’d come into our respective final stops neck and neck. The race was on. Bottom line is that the group that I was riding with finished the thousand mile ride in a little over fifteen hours. That’s an average of nearly sixty-eight miles an hour and counted seven gas stops and a social visit to the Big “D” clubhouse. There were times when we ran over ninety miles an hour for sustained distances.

My partner was my brother Eyeball who rides a geezer-glide similar to mine. He and I rode from Houston to New Braunfels together and invited Shrek, a Fort Bend member, to join us when he rode up to the checkpoint as we were pulling out. When the dust settled on that days ride Shrek had the best time … we all pulled into the final checkpoint together but he had started about eight minutes after we had left the first check point. He got the plaque for best time but I know it was the synergy between a group of well matched riders that resulted in very fast times for all of us. I think it’s worthwhile to point out that the Big “D” member that we were competing against rode a 250cc Ninja with a gas tank capable of doing two-hundred and fifty miles or more between stops. That dropped his gas stops from seven to four (maybe five) and gave him a definite advantage. And, by the way, if you think that a 250cc bike isn’t capable of making damn good time, think again … he’s ridden this bike on more than one Iron Butt and always finishes in time for dinner.

You’ve just read a report on how three riders can make really good time by hanging together but this usually isn’t the case. The riders in this example were seasoned and grisly, and very determined. When one of us would experience a little fatigue, that rider would fall back and someone else would take the lead and maintain the pace. It gives the guys not in the lead a break to follow … the lead rider concentrates on the road a bit more and is the rider responsible for sensing damager from traffic and traffic cops in time to slow the pack down.

What usually happens when a pack of riders go someplace together is that they’re not nearly as well matched as my Iron Butt example. You’ll get guys with older bikes or smaller bikes that just won’t maintain the speeds that big touring bikes are able to achieve. You’ll also get bikes with varying cruising ranges, the Sportster and V-Rod’s are prime examples. Where a big FL touring bike will get a hundred fifty to a hundred seventy five miles to a tank, a V-Rod or Sportster will only get about a hundred miles. Gas stops will definitely slow a larger pack down. Once the pack is off the highway and into the gas station it’s not only gassing the machines that takes time but the inevitable potty stops and the necessity to take on liquids and smoke cigarettes (Eyeball used to ride up close to me at about eighty to ninety miles an hour and borrow my cigarette lighter … this maneuver required me handing the lighter to him and taking it back without burning my hand or, worse yet, crashing into one another. I’m damn glad his new bike has got it’s own lighter).

Even if all the riders have bikes with similar fuel capacity and mileage specs all riders won’t be comfortable riding at the same speeds. This fact will cause one of two resolutions: one is invoking the pirate’s code: lag behind, get left behind or the second is that the whole pack slows to the pace of the slowest rider. The rider that’s the most uncomfortable will whine and complain at each gas stop that he’d rather see the scenery or smell the roses … and maybe he’s right. Perhaps the difference is what you’re going to do when you get to your destination. For runs and rallies, I always want to get to the site and the scenery along the interstate is not that interesting to me. I’ve generally seen it before. But I’ll have to admit that the times I’ve come home from Sturgis to Northern California and detoured through Yellowstone Park I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the diversion and had absolutely no remorse that the average speed dropped down to about forty miles per hour.

The moral to this tale is that there’s times when you want to travel fast and times when it’s more enjoyable to take your time. Don’t forget that the most enjoyable rides, whether fast or slow are the ones when all parties have similar expectations for their trips.