Chasing Legends Wins the International Impact Book Awards
Chasing Legends Wins the International Impact Book Awards
Winner · Outstanding Literary Achievement · Biography – Motorcycle Biographies & Memoirs · May 2026
It's official: Chasing Legends: Motorcycle Stories from the Podcast Trail has won the International Impact Book Awards, taking home Outstanding Literary Achievement in the Biography and Motorcycle Biographies & Memoirs category. I am floored, grateful, and grinning ear to ear.
The International Impact Book Awards recognize books that make a genuine mark on authorship and storytelling. Work is judged for its significance within the global literary landscape, not just its sales numbers. To have Chasing Legends named an Outstanding Literary Achievement among that field is the kind of honor I didn't let myself imagine when I started. It tells me the book did what I hoped it would. It connected.
If you've followed this journey, you know Chasing Legends was never meant to be a typical motorcycle book, all torque figures and border-crossing logistics. It's part memoir, part oral history, part meditation on what adventure actually means. Three years of interviews. Tens of thousands of miles. More than twenty chapters.
From a betrayal to a book
This story didn't start in a writer's studio. It started with a yacht, a billionaire family, and a severance check that arrived a third of the size I was promised. After two decades captaining superyachts and solving impossible problems for the powerful, I was shown the door, a loose end to be tied up. I could have chased another wheelhouse. Instead, I built the ADV Cannonball Rally and Podcast out of whole cloth, picked up a microphone, and went looking for the people who define adventure motorcycling.
What I found surprised me more than anything else in the book:
"Every legend I chased turned out to be an ordinary person who simply refused to stop. That was the most terrifying and liberating discovery of my life."
The legends inside
The book profiles an extraordinary roster of riders, filmmakers, and wanderers: Sterling Noren, Lyndon Poskitt, Austin Vince, Charley Boorman, Claudio von Planta, Elspeth Beard, Sam Manicom, Joey Evans, Jeremy Kroeker, and the late, irreplaceable Ted Simon, interviewed on his 94th birthday as he wondered aloud "what motorcycles talk to each other about in the night." There are the Blood Bikers and the 59 Club, the rebels-turned-lifesavers. And running underneath it all is a single thread: this community is far smaller and far more interconnected than anyone realizes, fifty years of riders quietly influencing one another across continents.
I tried to write it with a literary sensibility the genre doesn't always get, finding the stillness inside the motion. A muezzin's call rolling across Dal Lake in Kashmir. Whiskey catching the late afternoon light. The accident of where we're born and what we're taught to believe. An award like this tells me those moments landed.
Thank you
An honor like this is never a solo ride. Thank you to the International Impact Book Awards for recognizing the work. Thank you to every legend who sat across from me and trusted me with their story. Thank you to everyone who helped haul this manuscript into the world. And thank you, the readers and listeners, who turned a pile of podcast conversations into something worth holding in your hands.
If Chasing Legends isn't on your shelf yet, there's never been a better time to grab a copy. And if it already is, a review or a share goes further than you know for an independent author. As I wrote in the closing chapter: "The road isn't an escape. It's where life is lived most honestly."
I'm not finished with the road, the microphone, or the page. Not even close.
Keep the rubber side down, Aaron Pufal
