My friends Heather and Patrick are now on Day Three of the Scooter Cannon Ball Run. Yes, that’s right, a bunch of scooterists are riding across country, from the Oregon coast to New Jersey. An odd contest–so odd, the Washington Post covered it.
It is technically a race, but endurance and technical ingenuity is more what’s being tested. If your scoot breaks down and you can’t fix it right there on the shoulder of some backcountry road, it goes in the support truck. Then you have 24 hours to fix it, before you lose your support truck privileges, and are left in Idaho or Nebraska or Indiana to make your own way home. "Italian engineering" and "reliable" generally don’t fall in the same sentence, and six bikes of the 30-40 registered had already broken down by the end of Day Two.
Heather–who is driving Patrick’s personal support vehicle and serving as the race’s unofficial certified massage therapist–told me last night that one fellow who had temporarily repaired a broken pipe on his scoot with, well, not duct tape, but a similar and slightly more durable quick fix, randomnly stumbled onto a welding shop in Idaho later that day. The shop guys had never worked on a scooter, but with a little guidance from the scooterist/mechanic, the shop guys welded it up like new.
To give you an idea of what this race is about, Patrick built a bike completely from scratch with help and support from First Kick Scooters in SF. It’s a small frame–just 125cc and one of the smallest in the race. But Patrick welded an extra three-gallon gas tank onto the frame, giving him a total of five gallons. See, speed only gets you so far. It’s the number of stops that sucks up your time. Stops to refuel every two gallons (or 150 miles). Stops to replace parts so the scoot still operates in high altitude. Stops for repairs. Patrick’s blog, OopsClunkThud (which I stole the pictures below from), gives you an idea how much work and knowledge this takes.
And Patrick is doing well, so far. He’s come in first and second for his scooter class, and Heather claims he would have come in first overall on day one if he hadn’t run out of gas.