9 weeks today, we leave for the USA to compete in the Iron Butt Association’s – Iron Butt Rally (IBR). For those of you who don’t know much about this, it’s arguably the pinnacle of long distance rallying in the world. This is an 11 day event where we’ll be on the clock for the entire time. “11 days, 11,000 miles” is the event’s slogan, although that’s not a strict requirement to be a finisher since that’s determined based on points earned during the rally and not distance travelled. It will be 11 days of near 1000 miles a day, some days may be longer.
This event is run every two years by the Iron Butt Association; it started in 1984 and was an annual event until 1987. From 1991 it has been held every second year.
This year’s event starts on the 19th June in the North East of the USA, 11 days later we’ll have some stories to tell, we’ll have had an adventure along the way, and all things going well, we will hopefully have collected enough bonus points to be considered finishers of this gruelling event. Stella (my wife) and I are entered as a rookie, 2Up team, one of a handful of international entrants in this, the 2023 IBR.
There’s a ban on social media posts from the riders during the event – for good reason, there’s plenty of things which we need to be properly focussing on, but the event staff do some excellent daily reports. Here’s the site’s worth of information from the 2021 event: https://ironbutt.com/ibr2021/ – When things are closer to the time I’ll share a link to similar content for this year’s updates.
We’ll have a fair bit to say after the event, in the mean time we’ve got our heads down with final parts of our prep; we’re getting very excited and we’re looking forward to it; it can’t come soon enough now. 🙂
Wish us luck!
Chris & Stella.