Here are the pleasures and perils of compulsive long-distance motorcycling—and one man's mission to outride everyone else.
For the 50,000 members of the Iron Butt Association—also known as the "World's Toughest Motorcyclists"—long-distance motorcycling is not a pastime but an obsession. These men and women push the limits of human endurance, often in rides of more than one thousand miles a day. Perhaps the most determined of them is John Ryan, a diabetic and a man who even in late middle age loves nothing better than riding impossible distances at no small risk to himself. But why? Melissa Holbrook Pierson, herself a longtime motorcyclist, chronicles the gratifications of long-distance riding as well as the challenges and solitude that accompany it. In seeking to understand why people strive so mightily to reach a goal with no reward other than having gotten there, Pierson gives us an intimate glimpse of a singularly independent yet supportive community and a revealing portrait of its most daring member.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson should have known she was destined to become a writer ever since she was a kid hiding in the branches of the maple tree, writing action-filled stories of escape and ignoring her mother's cries to come down out of there. She largely resisted the knowledge until after college, when she realized she was unlikely to become a professor of literature, an avant-garde film director, or an art critic. Her first "book" was a ghost-writing assignment about fashion and packing light for travel, although she had never done such a thing in her life.
When she discovered motorcycling in her mid-twenties, though, she realized she had a calling: writing about human passion. Her first book, in 1997, was The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles. The next, about women and horses, was Dark Horses and Black Beauties. This was followed by The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home, her lament of rapacious overdevelopment.
And now, this coming October, she returns to the territory of her first book with The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing: Long-Distance Motorcycling's Endless Road, an exploration of obsessive riding by way of one of the most extreme practitioners of it, world-record-holder John Ryan. All her books have been published by the esteemed independent publisher W. W. Norton.
