Stories from the road: A Conversation with Kimba the Lioness
Who is Kimba the Lioness? An Army veteran, former professional football player, and mechanic-in-training who spent this past summer stringing together enough road to cross the country twice over - on a bike whose mileage she stopped tracking a long time ago.
Before I get started, let me paint you a picture of our interview…Kimba is wearing black cowboy boots and a black cowboy hat, locs that fall down to her shoulders, she's broad and intimidating, but carries the energy of a cowboy you would meet deep in the hills of Montana, the real ‘salt-of-the-earth’ type. Proudly rocking a WRWR jersey as we spoke on the porch of her house as the central Florida rain rolled in. (The picture of her below paints a good picture, but its from Bonneville, not our interview)
We were talking just before she started her thirty-week program at the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute, Honda and Yamaha certified as of this past March, now working through the Harley-Davidson course. "I’ve had a couple of bad experiences as far as trusting mechanics to work on my motorcycles, and I’m on my motorcycle way too often to be trusting putting my life on the line for somebody half-assing a job, honestly. So I’m like, I can do this myself."
She bought her first motorcycle, a 2003 Yamaha V-Star Classic, in 2014, on a notice board at work. A lowball offer, accepted on the spot. She couldn’t ride yet, so the seller trailered it to her for free. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation classes available didn’t fit her work schedule, and the guys around her were full of bad advice - renew-your-permit-forever logic that’s since been phased out - so she taught herself, bad habits included.
Those habits caught up with her on July 4, 2018, merging into a newly paved lane outside Atlanta. Her front tire caught the lip. Death wobble. "That’s all I remember. I just remember rolling from there." She still carries it. "I still have PTSD from it. I still have to talk myself through it. Come on, you got this, you can do it." Afterward she bought her first Yamaha FJR and finally took a real class - the one that built the confidence she’d been riding without the whole time. She’s been evangelizing for training ever since, for new riders and veterans alike. "Even the people that’s been riding for years, it’s good to take a refresher."
COVID is where Kimba became the rider she is today. She’d already been riding for years by then, a modest ten thousand local miles a year through the Carolinas and Georgia, telling herself she’d really get into it once she retired. Then the world stopped. "I’m not waiting," she decided. "I’m gonna get these states now." That’s when the long-distance riding started, and when she found the 2019 Women Riders World Relay - more than twenty thousand women across dozens of countries passing a baton around the globe - and decided she wanted in, whenever it happened again. She trained for it with the Iron Butt Association’s Saddle Sore. (A thousand miles in twenty-four hours) Pulling into her own garage afterward, she realized she could’ve kept going. So the next one, she did fifteen hundred.
"It’s messed up how I think psychologically now," she says. Riding out of Sturgis toward Mountain View, California, her GPS said fourteen hundred miles, twenty-one hours. "I knew I could do it. So I left late Sunday morning. Got there Monday morning."
But who is the woman behind the helmet? She’s an African-American, gay woman who grew up Jehovah’s Witness, and she counts coming out as the hardest decision she’s ever made. Riding runs on the same principle for her. Her mantra the year she started riding seriously, 2020, was faith over fear, repeated like a loop against the state of the world.
She didn’t see anyone who looked like her out on a bike growing up, and she thinks that’s part of why it took her until her late thirties to start. "If I had seen somebody that looked like me growing up, I would have started motorcycling a lot sooner. My parents didn’t want me to ride." Now other women recognize her from what she posts. At all-female rides, at random gas stations, some are aging out of riding and told her they’re living through her instead. "I’m just out here paying it forward."
Ask her what kind of summer she’s had and she barely knows where to start, because it never really stopped. It opened with a family trip to Hilton Head, then Texas to meet three long-distance riding friends for a run out to the Santa Monica Pier, then all of I-10 back to Jacksonville in three days flat. Back to Texas for a monument challenge with The Litas Ft Worth - more than seven thousand miles just circling the state. Then Hawaii, alone, for her fiftieth birthday, because she’d set herself a deadline: fifty states by fifty years old. She rented a BMW R nineT on the Big Island and rode a loop. "It was perfect for the island."
From there she caught the last leg of this year’s Women Riders World Relay with Liza Miller and Wendy Crockett - the Iron Butt record-holder whose example, she says, is part of what convinced her any of this was possible - rode the Sisterhood Ride into Sturgis for the induction of Bessie Stringfield with five other women, then continued to Mountain View, "because once you’re in South Dakota, California isn’t that far." From there, on to the Bonneville Salt Flats. Detroit, as many of you know from our story had invited her to be part of his pit crew. Kimba was quick to remind me about representation, specifically at Bonneville, so she was not going to miss the chance to leave an impression. From there, she came home, repacked for a different trip, and left again - three separate times this summer she rode all the way back to central Florida just to swap gear and head back out.
Her three bikes, all Yamaha FJRs, are Silver Stallion, after the Lone Ranger’s horse. Stealth, its twin. Selene, the moon goddess, because she bought her on the day of a full moon.
The one non-negotiable item in her luggage, no matter which bike, is a cowboy hat - packed in its own box on the one without a top case. "It could be an inconvenience," she admits. "But that’s the only thing I allow myself. Everything else I carry is functional."
Her word for this year is connections. "I’ve met so many amazing people just at Sturgis alone, and the Bonneville Salt Flats experience was just amazing. And being able to induct Bessie Stringfield and being in a room several times with all these other Hall of Famers. Very humbling."
I always ask everyone about the best ride they’ve ever taken. For Kimba there isn’t one single ride - there’s this whole summer, resets and repacking included. "I came back here, like, three times to get the other bike, roll back out," she says.
"Life can be so depressing if you focus on the negative," she says. "I want folks to see the positive parts of living and get out there and experience it. It might not even be motorcycling. Get out there and find your passion. But live life to the fullest. Find some purpose to wake up for."
Takeaways
For new riders: Take the class, even if the guys around you insist you don’t need one. Kimba taught herself first and spent years undoing the habits it left her with.
For experienced riders: A refresher isn’t an insult to your experience. She still credits the course she took after her accident with giving her the confidence she thought she already had.
For all of us: Kimba has spent every mile making sure the next person doesn’t have to wait as long as she did.
