Saddlesore 1000 #2–December, 2014

December 30, 2014
Preface: This is edited from a ride report posted on a motorcycling forum, a day or two after completing this ride. It does contain a lot of jargon relating to long distance endurance motorcycling.
SS – Saddlesore 1000 – 1000 or more miles in 24 hours or less.  Average overall speed must be at or above 41.6666 MPH to be successful.
BBG – BunBurner GOLD – 1500 or more miles in 24 hours or less.  Average overall speed must be at or above 67.5MPH to be successful

With a nod of approval yesterday from SWMBO, the plan is set - let's get back into this LD Riding again! Enough talk, now action - tomorrow before oh-dawn-30...with the temperature starting off right about freezing.
First off, a lot of reading, a LOT of encouragement, and a lot of lessons learned from my last trip to this one.
The intent was to ride a SS at a BBG rate. As I had mentioned a while back in a post on this motorcycle forum that I had only done a single SS before.  I really wanted to know what it would take to make a BBG happen.  That, and with another 30,000 miles of riding on this bike since the last SS, the bike is as ready as it will every be.
I knew a few weeks ago that my wife would be working a good part of the day yesterday, so what better way to spend the day.  After careful review of the weather for the last three or four days, I knew the ride would be on.
The ride itself was quite uneventful. Temperatures for the first leg (Tucson to Yuma) were in the 30's the entire way, as I knew, so the gear I had worked as expected.  It warmed to a high of 70 as I made it back into Tucson.  I was able to shed the heated jacket liner for a few hours, and as I mentioned before, the temps dropped the further east I rode.
It’s a strange feeling blowing by your home exits, knowing your goal is to ride another 500 miles. The secondary thought in my route planning was, in the event the weather turned sour, a ride abort would be easy to do.
I spent a few hours researching the stop locations, even though several of them I was acquainted with from past experience.
So...in no particular order, the stuff I found that really helped:

• Route familiarity. Other than the stretch between Deming and Las Cruces, I’ve been on all of these roads (some of the stretches multiple times...) and am familiar with where the law likes to hide...
• A comment about recording the GPS mileage - boy, was THAT a time saver!

On a tangent - I knew that my bike - and every bike - has an error. The ‘Wing has an estimated 4% error with stock tires.  Being one of these that uses a car tire, I really didn’t know what the error was, so the first 100 miles I paid attention to the GPS reading...at the 100 mile mark on the GPS, the trip meter showed 102.5 miles.  Easy math is the best math for me - 2.5% high. At that point, I knew that I can document the odometer from the bike and the GPS reading.

• I read this not long ago; boy did I like this tip - make sure the bike is on the left side of the pump. Makes it easy to access the pump, as well as the trunk. I had to fuel the bike one time on the right side; I know that took an extra couple of minutes; easy!
• The keyless entry to the fuel door is a given, but also not turning the bike OFF; use kill switch instead, so the clock/odometer is still active. As fuel is pumping, getting the trunk open to access the clipboard & bag with the receipts, pencil, etc. If your notes are good on your receipts, you should be able to complete your log after the ride is done (thanks to another rider for that tip...). I used only my receipts to fill out the log, making sure times were what the stops were (that I recorded with personal tracking software) accurate; they were also in agreement with the time that the bike clock had at the time I checked the receipt, and wrote the odometer/GPS readings on it, using the fuel pump as my clipboard.
• Don’t dawdle with squeezing every last drop of gas into the tank, unless you know you have a long ~200 mile gap to the next station (another revelation...).  It’s true, you really don’t give a whit about that extra tenth or tenth-and-a-half of gas in most cases. This *will* toss some post-ride MPG calculations for a loop.  Mine range from a low of 31.4 to a high of 38.2. I think I did an overall average of 34 in my fuel estimates; 34.4 was what it was for the entire ride
• End the ride? Don’t fill the tank. I put in $2(1 gallon) to get that last receipt to end the ride...filling would have taken another minute.
• The whole ‘pit stop’ sequence is one to work out in your head - and verify what it was you did good. The first two were without the benefit of a bio-break. First one 5 minutes; second one 6 minutes of stop time, which includes any dead-stop time. Three total bio-breaks for the entire ride. Like you needed to know that.
• Most guys use a dedicated GPS for all of this; great idea, but I’ve already got a really expensive bit of technology, so I’m using my Android phone - it only did two things the entire trip - Spotwalla tracking and monitoring the time, using an app called SpeedViewer Pro.  It doesn’t matter what tool you’re using but you need to be able to monitor your progress. early on in my ride when my overall average was as fast as 71MPH, I knew that the pace that set that would be a pace that would be BBG-achievable - recall that 67.5MPH is the minimum mark, so ending the ride with a 69MPH overall average - even with a 30 minute stop would be a BBG with a bit of time to spare. Toward the last two legs, I could begin to feel the pace catching up with me...but plotting it, I was just as fast as I was earlier in the day.

At the fuel pump at 20:02 local time - 1027 (per the GPS) - moving average @ 75mph, overall average @ 69 MPH. Finish may not show up, as I have a privacy zone that includes that last fuel stop.

GPS claims 14:45:23 total time. Bested my one (and only...) completion by about an hour and a half.





I'm really starting to enjoy this LD riding even more.  Wonder what the next ride might be?

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