The Women's Guide to Motorcycling. Lynda Lahman
are women who ride around their countries, their continents, and the world solo, known only to their friends and perhaps followers of their blogs. These women quietly navigate language barriers, challenging paved and dirt roads in their efforts to see the world in a unique and up-close way. Most report feeling quite safe; in fact, they often feel more comfortable alone on their bikes than walking city streets alone. They experience most people as open and helpful to a woman alone, and they often form friendships through unexpected encounters with strangers.
Women are making their mark on traditional motorcycle racing.
Gloria Tramontin Struck, eighty-nine at the time of this writing, has been on motorcycles, always Harley-Davidsons or Indians, since she was a young girl. Putting more than 650,000 miles on her stock bikes, Struck is one of the longest riding members of Motor Maids and credits motorcycling with keeping her mind strong.
Voni Glaves and Ardys Kellerman became the first two women in the world to document 1,000,000 miles on BMW motorcycles, and they chose to celebrate their accomplishment by meeting in Ouray, Colorado, on August 30, 2011, to ride their final miles together. Glaves, who was sixty-four at the time, learned to ride on a dirt bike before receiving her first BMW as a Mother’s Day present in 1977. She finished the Iron Butt Rally in 2003. Kellerman, seventy-nine at the time, bought her first BMW in 1985. In 2006, she rode more than 80,000 miles in the six-month BMW owners’ mileage contest, and she finished that year with more than 100,000 miles. Kellerman only began riding in her fifties, but once she started, she kept going, completing the eleven-day Iron Butt Rally four times before her untimely death at age eighty-one in 2014.
The list goes on. Drag racing, freestyle, dirt track, ice racing, and sidecar and vintage motorcycle classes, as well as the world-renowned Paris–Dakar Rally and the Baja 1000, are attracting women in increasing numbers. For those interested in learning more about these contemporary trendsetting women, check out the detailed profiles in Bikerlady: Living and Riding Free, a book by Sasha Mullins (Citadel, 2003).
Although the numerous competitive events may be thrilling, the majority of women riding today are simply hopping on a bike, as either driver or pillion, and getting out on the open road. Talk to most of them, and they speak in nearly reverential terms about the experience of two wheels, of the freedom and exhilaration of being on a motorcycle, of the desire to keep going. What is it about this particular machine that captures one’s imagination and makes one yearn to take off—and is it for you?
Ardys Kellerman (left) and Voni Glaves (right), at the conclusion of their 1,000,000-mile achievement.
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