IBR 2011 – The Starting Point

I stopped by the Seatac Marriott yesterday to check out the activities at the start of the 2011 Iron Butt Rally.  It was what has become a typical Summer day in Seattle, cloudy with intermittent rain.    I was perfectly comfortable walking around in full riding gear and a Seattle Sombrero.  I am a member of the Iron Butt Association but I have never participated in a rally type event let alone the epitome of endurance riding events, the eleven day Iron Butt Rally.

In the above photo George Barnes, the 1999 IBR winner and highest mileage record holder, is performing a tech inspection on one the of the rally riders motorcycles.  By noon there was less than 15 entries that hadn’t completed tech inspections.  I heard the total number of entries is around 87.  I think that there is a pretty good number of first timers in the field. 

There were riders periodically heading out and returning from their mileage checks.  That activity got dinked up a little because of an automobile accident that occurred somewhere on the mileage route (no motorcycle was involved).  About the only thing I didn’t see was the fuel tank volume checks. 

I was admiring as many of the rally bikes as I could, at least the ones that weren’t covered because of the rain.    I talked with a number of riders and some of the rally staff.  It was interesting the total difference in the conversations I had when talking to a first time IBR rider and a veteran.  With the first time riders I was usually asking the most questions and with the veterans they were pumping me for information about the local area.  Lot’s of questions about local attractions and about the Washington Ferry system. I hope I was able to help.

More than one of the veterans were anxious about the bonus location format for this years rally.  One said he had spent  hundreds of hours working with route optimization software and it was more than likely the IBR staff will have come up with something to throw a monkey wrench into his preparation efforts.  I think they are usually pretty good at that. 

I didn’t see any bikes torn down or any wrenching going on so hopefully everyone has escaped any serious last minute problems of that nature.  It will probably be a quiet day today with most of the field getting through the preliminary activities on Saturday.  The start of the Iron Butt Rally is scheduled for 10:00AM on Monday (June 20th).

The other pictures I took at the Marriott can be viewed in This Gallery.