Upper Midwest Trials Association

As we all look forward to the next event in Theilman on September 2nd & 3rd I would like to urge everyone to come out and meet a new group of riders who will be visiting from other Midwest clubs. Our discussions about a regional club competition have produced the “North Central US Regionals”. The UMTA will be hosting the first round 9/2 & 9/3. We will ride it as a regular club event and anyone who chooses to compete in the regional event will pay an extra $10.00 that will go toward end of season awards for the regional series. Those who choose to ride the regional series can look forward to participating in events hosted by the Mid America Trials Team (MATT) in Missouri and the Midwest Trials Association (MWTA) later this year. There is a possibility that other clubs may join the group as time goes on. Please be at the Theilman event with enough time to learn about this new and exciting opportunity at the riders meeting.

Mike Hendrickson

See the Results Page for current standings as of last weekend’s Haggis event in Faribault.

UMTA member Jim Winterer is featured on the front page of today’s StarTribune region section.

The piece is titled Going the distance, year after year: Iron Butt Association members take pride in criss-crossing the world on motorcycle. A 7,000-mile rally starts Tuesday.

Click the image to see a larger view (a photo I took of the newspaper). The original photo is online next to the article.

Here are a couple of snippets from the article:

“You start off knowing you’re going to push yourself,” said Jim Winterer, a veteran of the ButtLite and the Iron Butt. “You’re in a competitive frame of mind for 11 days. Every minute of the 11 days you have to be doing something right, even when you’re sleeping.”

By day, Winterer is a mild-mannered public affairs officer at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Off campus, he spends vacations roaring around the continent. Last spring he rode through 49 of the 50 states, more than 8,000 miles, in just over eight days. Over Memorial Day he rode from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to his home in St. Paul.

“I had to be back at work on Tuesday,” he said. “I stopped once, for a 15-minute nap.”

Winterer, who has written magazine articles about his motorcycle trips, says that riding 1,000 miles a day is “easy.” “As long as [you] never get tired, never get lost, never have a head wind, never have to deal with rain or fog, never have to fix the bike, and never have to stop for gas, food, water, sleep or visit a restroom,” he wrote after the 2001 Iron Butt.