Iron Butt Challenges

I’m Alby, the one from Bagger’s Life on Instagram, from the Monferrato Chapter and who someone in this magazine recently called “The mile grinder”.
I’m convinced that when you think about something a lot, sooner or later you make it happen. I had actually been going to the IBA website – the Iron Butt Association – for a while now to read their challenges, but I thought that maybe I wasn’t ready yet and that they were really too much even for me, who grind out a lot of km a year.
I was thinking about it too much, especially after the 1,100km between Bilbao and Mont-Saint-Michel, in one day, during my last tour of Western Europe, and therefore on holiday in Corsica between one dive and another, I made a Story on my Instagram @baggerslife thinking to myself “nobody will come anyway, so much the better”… but, instead, my followers are “dumber than me” (I love you for this) and in no time at all I immediately received 5 registrations from Italy and Switzerland. Personal and work commitments have skimmed the initial group a bit and, as Gino Paoli sang many years ago, we are left with “2 friends at the bar”, me and Osvaldo.
2 friends, but to do what? Well, I decided to try 3 challenges, but not exactly simple ones:
– 1’000 miles (0 1’600km) in maximum 24 hours – “SaddleSore 1600k”
– 2’000 km in maximum 24 hours – “SaddleSore 2000k”
– 2’500km in maximum 36 hours (spoiler: we did it in less than 30 and therefore we also took the Silver medal) – “Bun Burner 2500k”
As usual I read the rules a thousand times, watched videos, planned the stages in detail, the maximum minutes for breaks, the petrol stations and everything in hand I realized that the only country that could make it all feasible was Germany – the fact that we often have no limits allows us to eventually recover the time lost in traffic jams for example – starting from Lugano (my partner, Osvaldo, is from Varese so perfect!).
Departure scheduled for 7 am on Saturday, but due to the adrenaline we were both already there at 6:30. A ritual photo of us and the odometers of the bikes to certify the initial kilometers, petrol with a physical receipt (which will be a constant for each stage throughout the trip) to certify the location of the petrol station, time and kilometers traveled since the previous full tank and off we go with the first sun of the morning.
The sun abandons us no later than the Gotthard (about 1 hour later) – where we put on the rain suit and then took it off (literally exploded on both of us) only after 30 hours in San Bernardino, 20 minutes from home. My terrible relationship with the sun and the heat has not yet healed and those who follow me know it well. This time I did not encounter snow, like in Andorra, but in addition to the rain also -2 degrees and fog for 2 hours on the Bavarian hills on the way back.
The tour was done clockwise, Lugano, Frankfurt, Hamburg, the border with Denmark and then down towards Berlin (it was now 10 pm on Saturday), Dresden, Monaco and Austria and then back into Switzerland near Liechtenstein, Grisons and Lugano again.
Since I don’t trust my motorbike odometer at all (as also recommended by the IBA) I planned everything on Google Maps and other applications and, in fact, the motorbike on arrival marked 2’823km, Google Maps 2’780 and Relive 2’765.
With numbers in hand, to complete the 3 records we took 18:41h for the 1’600km, 22:56h for the 2’000 and 27:22h for the 2’500km.
10 gas stops of about 15 minutes and 5 breaks of 5-10 minutes were the only stops where you had to get gas, pay, eat (protein bars and dried fruit), drink something and go to the toilet. In hindsight it is easy to think that we could have stopped longer, but, in addition to the inclement weather, in Germany we encountered an infinite amount of roadworks and at least 20km of various queues near the big cities and so, just in case, we kept the tension high until the end to avoid “losing” for nothing.
In San Bernardino my friend Aris came to pick us up – who by the time this article is published, will also have become a father, so happy birthday to you and Sabrina!! – and after taking the only decent photo of the entire trip, he drove us to the gas station in Lugano where 30 hours and 20 minutes earlier we had the photo of the receipt to certify the start time of this Tour de Force for half of Europe.
Why would anyone do something like that? Maybe to prove something to himself, maybe for the glory, maybe for a patch to sew on his vest or maybe because he is “stupid”. Maybe all together.
Osvaldo and I said goodbye and hugged each other in Lugano, destroyed, but with a really huge smile.
Follow me for more exploits like this on Instagram @baggerslife !