Two days out of sixteen: A Conversation with Tyler Golletti

Who is Tyler Golletti? A Maine rider who takes a 1921 Harley J across the country, four thousand miles in sixteen days, on three gears and an oil system that dumps on the ground behind him. The first time he tried it he made two days out of sixteen and went home feeling like a fraud.

He now has that motorcycle tattooed on his hand….

There is a version of this story where Tyler quits, and he would have earned it.

In 2023 he lined up for the Motorcycle Cannonball, Virginia to California, sixteen days on a hundred year old motorcycle. He thought he was ready.

"To be honest with you, I didn't have a fucking clue what I was getting into."

The Cannonball has a rule that your mechanic cannot touch your bike during the day. So Tyler broke down, and rode back into the hotel on the sweep trailer while everybody else rode in on their motorcycles. So he stayed up until two or three in the morning working on the bike, got it running, and put it on the starting line again the next morning. Some mornings he made forty miles before something let go. Some mornings he only made six.

Out of sixteen days he got in two complete days. He finished the ride completely defeated.

But somewhere in the middle of chaos, Tyler had the best three minutes of his life.

It was a good mileage day, and the route went through Zion National Park. His bike was leaking oil badly. He had the factory rear drum and nothing at all on the front, because he had not built a front brake yet.

"You come out the backside of Zion and I am not shitting you, the road goes down this course like you would put a Hot Wheels car down if you were a kid."

Super steep, continual grade changes, tiny ass guardrails between him and the drop. With no real brakes on the bike he put his boots down and dragged the heels off a pair of cowboy boots the whole way down the mountain. He got to the bottom and had to pull over and stop, because his boots were so hot they were burning his feet.

"It was scary, but at the same time it was profoundly epic. That was crazy, I didn't die, holy shit" immediately followed by "I kinda wanna do it again."

To understand why, you have to go back to when he was five years old, and his father started bringing him around a friend's shop. The friend was Jim Harris, who has been on American Pickers, Tyler now calls Uncle Jim, and Uncle Jim still goes to swap meets with him thirty five years later. Tyler was raised around vintage bikes, and vintage cars.

The man loves motorcycles. If it puts it into perspective, Tyler set a personal goal of riding a hundred months consecutively but ended up riding a hundred and thirty consecutive months. Which means some of those months were spent on the road in Maine during the winter. If you have not spent a winter in Maine, I will tell you, it's freaking cold.

During one of those winter days he went down on the ice and tore two ligaments in his leg, meaning he spent five months in a brace. Any sane human would look at that situation and call it off, but not Tyler, he tied a string to the foot shifter on his Ultra Classic so he could push down with his heel, and pull the string with his thumb to go up one, because he could not bend his leg enough to get a toe under the lever.

"If you wanna ride, you can figure out a way to ride."

So the man was always going to ride something. The question is why he chose the hardest possible thing to ride it on. "I wanna do things in my life that other people in their seventies and eighties are saying, I wished I would have. I wished I could have. I probably should have."

The man is forty, and he’s going to use every last minute he can squeeze out of life.

Which means doing things that we all dreamed of as a little boy. Five years ago he built his wife and kids a new house, and the first thing he moved in was a fully restored 1962 Hummer Pacer, pink and white, which now lives in the living room. He told her it was the only piece of furniture he cared about and she could pick the rest.

Out of sheer irony Tyler and I have crossed paths before this interview. Last year I was standing at Wheels through Time museum when that whole group rolled in, he was part of the Motorcycle Transam, put on by Tom Banks and Sean Jackson at Competition Distributors. The ride was North Carolina to Oregon. Tyler's bike was not running right so he left the ride, hauled ass back to Kansas, tore the entire motorcycle down to nothing with those guys, built it back up, and raced back to rejoin the ride.

Clocking six complete days of miles this time.

What changed between the cannonball we discussed and this ride was not courage. He had plenty of that the first time and it got him nowhere. What changed is that he learned the machine.

A foot clutch tank shift three speed cannot be ridden like a modern bike. You roll off the throttle to shift. You burp it regularly. You do not sit on certain RPMs. It is a total loss oil system, so every other tank of fuel you drain the base and start over, which means knowing how much oil to run and how long to run it. Every altitude change is a carburetor change.

"It's like riding an old tractor slash maintaining a sewing machine."

Every night the whole bike gets gone through. Hardware, spoke tightness, tire pressures, fuel lines, oil lines, wiring. He compares it to a pre-pit inspection on a race car. These things shake so hard that you can lose a nut somewhere in Nebraska and never feel it go, and if you do not catch it that night you find out about it the next morning.

"Over time, vibration is the demise of all."

But the hardest part is not the actual tooling, it’s the complete uncertainty of failure on these bikes, and that bounces around in your head all day. You can spend thousands of dollars going through a motorcycle and still have something come apart.

"It's about three minutes of glory for about three hundred hours of work."

We would be remiss if we did not mention the man who joins Tyler in all that work, and has chased him all over the country in a chase car - Jared Leduc

Tyler is about to do it again. The next one starts at the lighthouse in York, Maine, an hour from his house, and finishes somewhere in upper Washington. They hand out the night stops in advance but not the route. You get paper directions half an hour before you leave.

In the shop right now there is a 1913 Harley single coming together that will be his next cross country bike. There is an 82 shovelhead FXR scattered across the floor that he wants at Daytona in March, currently held up behind a powder coater.

While we are talk he casually mentions that in 2028 he wants to ride from Maine to Alaska. Not shocking from a man who clearly is driven by a challenge. What shocked me was what he would ride….a Pan America.

That surprised me enough that I said so, and he shrugged it off. He thought he was buying an Africa Twin at one point, rode the Harley, and came back saying it felt like a CR500 on the street.

If he makes the trip, we will be sure to report on it!

The Takeaways

• For new riders. You are allowed to be bad at this in public. Tyler got dismantled by the Cannonball in front of sixty people and the only thing that came of it was a better rider two years later.

• For experienced riders. Tyler rides 100 year old motorcycles across the country, so maybe you don't need to wait for that bike upgrade, take the long ride today.

• For all of us. Do the thing while you still can.