Professor Hall rode his bike almost 1400 miles in a single day on his way out west from Virginia. Guess he prefers mountains to plains...

Wait a sec... assuming he rode 24 hours straight with absolutely no stopping, that's averaging over 58 miles per hour. On a bike. HUH??

I couldn't open the link, so there may be more to the story than meets the eye. Is this a motorcycle??

Looks like the link should have been:

From other parts of the blog and website, yes, he's got a motorcycle.

Looks like the comment system ate the link...

http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~cdhall/Space/archives/2003_08.html#000093

Sorry, link's fixed. I accidentally pasted the URL to the gif that represents it rather than the URL to the post.

@ss of steel is fairly appropriate, actually. Although there's an assiciation that prefers the term Iron Butt, as they founded the Iron Butt assosciation. Basic qualification is 1,000 miles in 24 hours or less. Then there are annual rallies/contests, where some people ride over 35,000 miles in under 2 weeks. Those people are, in a word, nuts. IMHO.

well, that last bit is something of an exagerration. they'd have to average over 100 mph!

actually it's more like 11,000 miles in 11 days, in the Iron Butt Rally, which is going on right now.

anyhow, on my 1400 mile ride out west, I pretty much rode freeway speeds, a little faster than prevailing traffic usually, but there were always cars going faster (gotta watch out for them!). i saw quite a few cops writing tickets and saw quite a few cops trolling and was never the object of their attention.

however, i spent very little time *off* of the bike. i stopped for gas every 200-300 miles, and had a snack while gassing up, and stopped for a couple of power naps. i had a platypus with water so i could drink on the road. i would have made it cheyenne wy (1536 miles) if it hadn't been for the big thunderstorms in nebraska.

i don't think of myself as nuts, and i know that i could not do the same thing in a car. as bob higdon said in discussing the Iron Butt Rally: "A big road trip on a bike is an adventure; a big road trip in a car is
idiocy."

i compare this kind of riding to backpacking, bicycling, canoing, climbing. it's demanding but fun, but then it is a personal thing.

chris