Pushing Miles: Two Riders, One Impossible Idea
Adventure Rider Radio
Canoe West Media
4.9 • 915 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2025
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2022, long-distance riders Wendy Crockett and Ian McPhee set out to break a Guinness World Record for the longest motorcycle journey completed in a single country. Their plan: ride to all 50 U.S. state capitals in alphabetical order, linking them into a continuous route. It sounded simple on paper, but almost nothing went the way they expected. Mechanical failures, illness, a cracked frame, a visa issue, breakdowns every few days — the ride kept falling apart. What kept it alive were the people they met along the way and the unexpected ways strangers stepped in. Their book about the experience is called Pushing Miles, and in this episode they tell the story of what really happened on the road and what kept them going when most riders would have stopped.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Most of us at some point have had a big idea in our head that really doesn't make sense to anyone else. |
| 0:06.6 | Maybe it's riding across the continent, starting a business, writing a book, or maybe just taking |
| 0:11.7 | the summer off when everyone around you thinks you should stay home and be sensible. |
| 0:15.6 | You know, on paper, there's no prize at the end, there's no big check. |
| 0:18.7 | There's no safety net if you screw up, you're out some |
| 0:21.0 | money or maybe out your time or both. But maybe the reason people don't get it is because they're |
| 0:27.1 | asking the wrong question. They want to know what you're going to get at the end. What's going to be |
| 0:32.8 | better when you come home, what you're going to gain. But that's not really the point. The point is in the |
| 0:39.0 | doing. Wendy Crockett is a motorcycle technician and long-distance rider from South Dakota. Ian McPhee is a |
| 0:47.2 | diesel mechanic from Queensland, Australia. Both of them are Ironbutt rally veterans. Riders used to |
| 0:53.9 | riding thousands of miles a day, |
| 0:55.8 | riding alone, pushing their limits. The idea started with Ian. Ride every U.S. state plus |
| 1:02.4 | Washington, D.C., in alphabetical order, linking the state capitals, and turn that into a |
| 1:07.7 | world record attempt for the longest journey ever completed in a single country on motorcycles. |
| 1:13.3 | And here's the thing. Wendy and Ian weren't a couple. They weren't old friends. They weren't family. |
| 1:18.6 | They barely knew each other. But on a previous iron butt rally, they just somehow stumbled into the same route at the same time |
| 1:25.9 | and discovered completely by accident that their |
| 1:28.6 | riding rhythm was almost identical. Same pace, same movement, same thought process, a long-distance |
| 1:35.8 | synchronicity that neither of them have ever experienced before. And that unlikely match is what |
| 1:41.4 | led them to team up for this ride. Now, there's no support truck |
| 1:45.5 | for them, no factory backering, no fanfare, meeting up with them at different points on the road. |
| 1:50.1 | They just did this on their own. Two older bikes, two mechanics, and it's sort of a quiet |
... |
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