Pushing Miles: A Chronicle of Motorcycles, Mayhem, and Mettle

Book by Wendy Crockett and Ian McPhee

Our plan was simple: ride 160,000 kilometres across three countries in under five months. OK, perhaps “simple” isn’t the word most people would choose, but as seasoned long-distance motorcycle travellers with a combined three million kilometres under our belts, we had full confidence that this journey would be straightforward and trouble-free. Oh, how very wrong we were.

This adventure began with an email from my friend Ian McPhee back in 2019. Attached was a spreadsheet outlining his wild vision: a ride visiting 49 US states in alphabetical order, documenting the feat by photographing the corresponding capital building of each state.

We began fleshing out the plan and discovered that our 96,000 km base route was only 25,000 km shy of qualifying for a Guinness World Record in the category of “Longest continuous journey by motorcycle in a single country (team).” We added the requisite distance, plus a bit more as a buffer, and the North American plan was finalised at 135,000 km. We also decided to replicate the alphabetical state quest in Australia as a shake-down, and just for fun, we would attempt to execute the entire 160,000 km challenge at an Iron Butt pace of 1,600 km per day.

After a few years of pandemic-related delays, we finally hit the road in April 2022. Things began to go wrong almost immediately after departing our first capital in Canberra, ACT. While my bike was new to me for this ride, Ian’s had been rock solid for years.

Regardless, it seems the two bikes had conspired to develop all manner of electrical and mechanical faults at the worst possible time. We struggled to overcome these rapidly multiplying obstacles as we collected capital photos in Sydney, NSW and Darwin, NT, but on our return trip towards Brisbane, QLD, we found ourselves facing another foe: an historic storm ploughed through Channel Country, washing away many roads and burying the rest in deep mud. We aren’t the types to back away from a challenge, but the most important tenet of long distance riding is acknowledging when it is no longer safe to push on.

We were disappointed that the wheels had come off our Australian attempt so quickly, but we dusted ourselves off, made some much-needed repairs to the bikes, and continued on to visit the remaining four Australian states at a much more relaxed pace. We were optimistic that we’d worked out the kinks and that our North American ride would go off without a hitch.

That chipper outlook was quashed a few days later when I found myself having emergency kidney surgery in Australia at about the same time as Ian was boarding the plane to America.

The clock on Ian’s 90-day tourist visa began ticking the moment he cleared US Customs, so he began the American ride by setting out to visit the first two states of Alabama and Alaska on his own. I caught up to him 11 days later; I’d visited Alabama along the way, but there was no way to include Alaska without throwing our entire plan timing into disarray.

On top of that, our World Record miles only accumulated when we were riding together, so our distance already needed to be heavily augmented in order to make up for the miles lost while riding apart. Nonetheless happy to be reunited and confident that we’d gotten all of our bad luck out of the way early, we set out to make motorcycling history.

But nothing about this journey was destined to come easy. By the time our planned 80-day, 135,000 km American ride was finished, we managed to document 129,082 km as a team over the course of 119 days, with a full 51 days lost to sundry delays and failures. Two tire blow-outs, one tacoed rim, three new clutches, one new starter, one catastrophically broken frame, one bout of Covid, one more surgery gone awry, one roo strike, one deer strike – and that’s just the very tip of the chaos iceberg.

Nothing about this trip went to plan, but we still somehow managed to drag it, kicking and screaming, through to a successful World Record. And in spite of being pummelled by fate at every turn, our spirits – and our friendship – remain intact.

Would we do it again? Maybe not this exact ride, but we’re always plotting our next big adventure. Let’s just hope we get all of our bad luck out of the way before then!

The full story of our ill-fated ride can be found in the illustrated book Pushing Miles: A chronicle of Motorcycles, Mayhem, and Mettle by Wendy Crockett and Ian McPhee.