When I was younger (mid 30’s) I did two sort of endurance rides. Neither was specifically planned to be an endurance ride. I simply wanted (needed?) to see if I could get somewhere which happened to be fairly far away, in as little time as possible. I was not trying to set any speed record, though. Just wanted to get there without lallygagging.

The bike for both rides was my old R100/7. No windshield other than a small home-made fairing from the headlight nacelle ending just over the top of the instruments.  A period photo of the machine is shown at the top of this email and here (dry-stored in the basement today, near our clothes washer and dryer). This bike started out as an ‘RS’ but shortly after I purchased it from its original owner in about 1981, I converted it to a /7 naked bike and sold its fairing and everything else that was ‘RS’. I still have this bike and would guess it has about 100-150K on its odometer (which was not working for a few years, twice). It has the RS’s bigger 40mm exhaust and a few other ’RS’ items. With the help of an extremely talented friend, and over the course of several winters, I hot-rodded it the way I wanted (at that time…): /2 ‘high’ handlebars, Kehin ‘slant slide’ pumper carbs, high performance cam, bigger pistons, mono lever swingarm, oversize Heinrich tank, frame stiffener bars, extra holes in its cast aluminum airbox, drilled-out straight-through mufflers, lightened flywheel, special clutch, etc.  It made 68HP on a dyno, which is a lot for one of these, and would wheelie on the throttle in 2nd with only a light effort. Which stock versions of this bike won’t do. It’s a tank, but back-in-the day was still a lot of fun to build and ride.

One of my two quasi-accidental endurance rides involved two back-to-back 900-mile days riding home from Bike Week in Florida to Duluth Minnesota. What made it an endurance ride wasn’t the distance, though. It was the low temperature. The second day it was below freezing the entire time. When I reached my residence, it had gotten down into the low twenties, I think. There were quite large snowbanks on the sides of the roads from Chicago north, but the road itself was dry all the way. In my driveway when I got home there was about a foot of accumulated snow. I was so tired I ploughed into it as far as I could and then just left the bike on its sidestand right there, surrounded by great clouds of steam coming from the hot engine melting the snow. Then I staggered inside leaving a trail of shedded gear all through the house like a three-year-old and slept for ten or twelve hours. Woke up famished but alive. 

The other long-hard ride was the year the BMW National Rally was in York PA. I rode there from Duluth in one very long day and when I pulled up at the gate at three or four AM wanting to camp, the entrance security would not let me in, so I got back on the bike and rode down to somewhere near the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where I watched the sun come up over the water, then turned around went back to the rally site, got right in, set up my tent and slept until noon. I think the total miles of that ride was about 1,250-1,300 and the total hours was around 22 or 23.

I don’t consider myself an endurance rider, but for most of my years when riding on road trips a good day is around 750 miles and an easy day is around 500-600. Today at age 68 I’m satisfied and comfortable with anywhere in the 3–600-mile range and have nearly zero interest going for more. The well-known cliche: "The older one gets, the faster one was” is sometimes true, but both hard-ride accounts are as close to accuracy as I can remember them.

Famously, whatever doesn’t kill you hopefully makes you stronger.  What were some of your hardest/fastest/longest rides?

 - Mr. Subjective, 11-21