Doing my first Iron Butt style Rally on Saturday
 

A while back I signed up for the Garden State Rally in NJ. It is an Iron Butt Style Rally, except much shorter, clocking in at only 8 hours. I figure a shorter rally is a good way to get my feet wet into the sport.

I got my rally packet last night and pretty much have been planning routes ever since. I am pretty much settled on a southern NJ route since the points are equal as a northern NJ route but there shouldnt be nearly as much traffic, lights or other time costing things like that. I think I planned a conservative route that google maps says should take me 7 hours (adding in an hour of fudge factor for fuel, bathroom, and bonus location stops (14 in all) for a total of 8 hours, and a short loop at the end to grab extra points if time allows. This route has me running 315 miles. I scouted them all out on google maps and printed off a photo of the photo that I need to take, as well as the scoring (earning) requirement.

This rally seems to have fully adopted technology, and are allowing emailed (to facebook) photos to count as meeting the requirement. Its neat you just send the photo with the rider number and it gets scored as you go. Plus for submitting photos like that you get extra points per photo (250).

My route has me grabbing just under 49k points without the photo sub bonii which should be worth another 3500 points. I really dont know if that is a place worthy score, but it is the best I could come up with that gets me to the finish with time to spare. I managed to map out a 7hr 49min ride (without counting stops) and riding for 422 miles which would have required me to do a second gas stop, also not counted for in the time. That route also require me to hit a number of locations that were required to get them all to collect the big points. Even accounting for the fact that google maps is shows the slowest possible speed I don't think I could have made up the time and missing any of the combination locations would have killed my score.

https://www.facebook.com/TLGardenState

Cool have fun

Good thing you are going around the Pine Barrens as that is where the Jersey Devil is supposed to live. The prizes look good, especially the Total Control class, so good luck.

Just finished re-editing the route. I managed to add 6000 points by adding 10 minutes. And I created some cuttoff places that I can figure out how much time I have to shave time off if needed while only looseing a little points.

This is stressfull.

So I didn't quite win.

I didn't do bad either, wound up placing 5th in the amature class, 12th overall out of a 28 man field. Also with my "detention" at the state jail I walked away with a case of oil. Overall a damn good time at a damn good event.

Started out with a 6am wake up at my parents house, everything was ready all I had to do was to load up the bike with my GPS and tank bag and get going. I already had 1000 points for submitting a photo of my bike through facebook, so I was at this point effectively tied for first. The ride 50 miles north to the rally headquarters was uneventful except for a check engine light that kept coming on (there is something screwy with my tach, I think it is getting moisture inside it causing the engine code), I ignored it and made it to the headquarters with plenty of time to get gas before they opened doors for the morning. The theme for this rally was right (or wright) and wrong, basically most of the locations had a link to constitutional rights, jails (wong) police (right), wright brothers, Frank Loyd Wright, that kind of stuff.

Check in was easy and again uneventful breakfast was served and was complementary. I'm not a donut person, but managed to get an egg mcmuffin. Rally packets were handed out, rules were explained, questions were asked and answered and wild card bonuses were thrown into the mix. I had my route already planned with 14 locations to hit worth a total of 14,000 points. Plus I would have 1:30 left to pick up 3 other locations that were (round trip) 40 miles or 1 more higher value location (round trip) 25 miles away from the finish. The wildcard bonus's were 3 photos of 'no right on red', 3 photos of 'wrong way' signs, and 3 photos of a police officer holding the rally flag, each of those were worth 1000 points, but if you could get the cop to turn on his lights they were worth 3000 points. There was also a way to substitute one type of bonus with something similar that you found during the day.
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Start was at 9am and again it was an orderly start with no complications, each group of 5 riders was let go every 2 minutes. I started in the third wave. I had to be back by 5:06pm, but I had fully planned and made all my time calculations for a 5pm return.
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The first 3 locations were close, all within 3 miles of each other in Trenton.

Grave marker for David Brearly (NJ supreme court justice)
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Trenton Capitol Dome
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A house surrounded by a prison
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Then I headed down near Dave's house to a frank Loyd Wright house. This was nice because I got to shave some of my calculated time off on the highway at speed. I wound up in the wrong parking lot and may or may not have rode down a sidewalk to get to the next parking lot to take this photo.
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Caught this state police barracks from the CVS next door and used their bathroom at the same time. This is also when I started looking for a porn magazine for my substitution of a freedom of the press bonus. I never found it and was surprised how hard it was to find a playboy or a hustler.
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The next bonus cost me some time, just about half an hour.I learned the hard way that the prison police don't like photos of their facility being taken, even though I didn't actually take a photo of their facility, just the sign out front. I wasn't arrested, only detained, but did spend a solid 10 minutes sitting in the back seat of their car. I notified the rally master and after I took the next photo bonus got the text that said not to take pictures of the prisons.
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The next location was also a prison, the requirement was a sign and the water tower, needless to say I was in and out in under 30 seconds. The rally flag was already out of my tank bag before I came to a stop.
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At this point due to the fact I spent a but load of time at the one jail I made the decision to cut out one of my planned bonus's, easy enough to decide since cape may was a little out of the way, I just deleted that point from my rout plan in the garmin and headed toward atlantic city for a shot of a bail bonds store.
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Then it was a straight shot north on the garden state parkway. I had two bonus's right next to each other and a planned gas stop at the same time. This is also where I got my first no right turn (I hadn't actually seen a no right turn on red sign so I started taking pics of no turn on red signs) and wrong way signs.
Coming off the Parkway I saw a wrong way sign in the rearview mirror and a no turn on red sign 30 feet apart (2 for 1 deal!).
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The next police barracks and the law office building were only a few miles apart, and I took a photo of an army recruiting station that I used as a substitute for a tank
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I shot north on the parkway again and got off near seaside to head inland to get this photo of the church (actually the dome and the sign). Coming off the parkway I saw a wrong way sign in my mirror, grabbed that, then 50 feet away I see a different one and shot that one too.
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Then past my parents house and over to the NJturnpike state trooper barracks.
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This was the point where I was trying to recalculate to see if I could pick up any more locations. I tried a number of different routes to pick up at least 1 location and get me back in time and none worked. Instead I went to my last location, another Frank Loyd Wright house.
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Then back to the rally HQ. I had time but not that much time so I made sure I wasn't speeding, but kept moving and it brought me back with 8 minutes to spare.
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I immediately notified the rallymaster that I made it back and didn't quite get arrested at the fist jail. Then organized all my stuff, filled out my rally book, double checked it, and went in for scoring. Scoring was easy and painless and took all of 5 minutes. The scorer took all my photos except the recruiting station which he had to ask the rallymaster for a judgement call (it was given to me). Awesome part was, is that every bonus I claimed was given to me. I didn't make any mistakes at all and left no points at the scoring table.
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I finished in 5th place in the rookie class with 55,550 points. The high scoring rookie had 90,000, the low scorer that didn't DNF had 35,700, with the majority of rookie class riders having between 49,000 and 66,000. So pretty much it was a solid middle of the group score.

Overall I had a blast, rode 350+miles in 8 hours with a bunch of stops, and no accidents and only 1 close call where I had to emergency stop to prevent from hitting a woman who pulled out in front of me, saw me then slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road. I might have wagged the tail of the bike just a little bit on that one. Yes I am going to try and do this again, it was a great day, a little stressful, but I finished with a smile on my face.

Some of the things I learned: I'm too slow at bonus locations, some took 30 seconds, some took 5 minutes. I need to pay better attention to the GPS, I made 2 wrong turns that sent me down the wrong road. I could have done a better job routing. If i would have stayed in the center of the state and got more bonus with less miles and not done a big loop of south jersey I would have done much better. Ruled out heading north towards the industrial and populated areas because I wanted to avoid traffic which turned out not to be the case. Since most of the top scorers hit a few locations south (the three in trenton and my last 2 locations) but then went and did a northern route that seemed to be the correct route.

Thanks for the write up. Looked like a good time

Rallies can be a ton of fun, and there used to be a decent selection in the northeast. If you decide to get into the "bigger" events, check out the Beast in the East :)

You had an awesome showing for your first-time, and 8hrs is perfect for your first rally. The biggest keys are making it back on time to be an official finisher, and not leaving points on the table. It all gets easier from there :)

And the oil I won at the event came in

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At least it's the right flavor!