From Parasocial to Real: Why a Rally Is Good for Men Over 50

2026 USA ADV Cannonball Rally Plymouth, MA to Monterey, CA Sept 16 to 23, 2026 News

You have listened to the podcast, read the regulations, and argued in the Facebook group. In two weeks the people behind those voices will be standing in a hotel parking lot in Plymouth. Here is what the evidence says about why that handoff matters, and how to get the most out of it.

Road book7 checkpointsTotal: about 23 min

CP / timeTulipInstructionsDanger

1. CP 12 min
   What a parasocial relationship actually isStraight on. Read the definition before you argue with it.
2. CP 24 min
   Why this matters more for men over 50Caution. Hard numbers on friendship, loneliness, and mortality.
   !!
3. CP 33 min
   A mission with room for different goalsFork. Win, ride dirt, finish, or just ride. All routes rejoin at Monterey.
4. CP 45 min
   The preparation is half the benefitLong climb. Body, bike, and data. Do the work here or pay for it later.
   !
5. CP 53 min
   Two regulations about being an adultCrossroads. Regulation #1 and #2. Straight on, no complaints.
   !
6. CP 64 min
   What happened after 2025Loop. The road goes parasocial, real, and back around again.
7. CP 72 min
   A word from the organizer's sideFinish. Parc fermé, banquet, and a handshake.

On September 16, riders will leave the official rally hotel in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and point their motorcycles at the Pacific. Eight riding days and roughly 4,000 miles later, the ones who finish will roll into Monterey, California, in time for the awards banquet.¹ Between those two parking lots there are GPS checkpoints, optional dirt sections, mountain passes, a desert, and a very simple rule that shapes everything else: support crews and chase vehicles are not permitted. Riders rely on themselves, or on resources that anyone could use along the route.²

That is the mechanical description of the ADV Cannonball. The human description is different. Some of the people arriving in Plymouth already know each other, in a way. They have heard each other's voices on the podcast. They have traded advice and opinions in the Facebook group and in the private WhatsApp chat that grew out of last year's inaugural rally. Some have read Chasing Legends. For many of them, the rally is where a relationship that has existed only through a screen or a set of earbuds turns into a handshake, a shared IPA, and a long conversation about tire pressure between two men who both need reading glasses to check it.

That transition is worth taking seriously, because for men in their fifties, sixties, and beyond, it is one of the rarer and more valuable things a hobby can offer.

The 2026 route. Plymouth Rock to the Pacific, sea level to sea level, with everything in between.

Look at the map for a moment before reading about parasocial anything, because the mission itself deserves respect. The line runs from Plymouth Rock across the Catskills and into the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania on the first day, then deep into Appalachia through Kentucky, then out across the plains through Kansas to the foot of the Rockies at Pueblo. From there it climbs over Cumberland Pass toward Moab, threads the Burr Trail and the Utah backcountry to Las Vegas, drops through Death Valley and up into the Sierra, and finishes with a final day of three elevations down to the Pacific at Monterey.¹ Depending on which paved or mixed-surface options a rider chooses, the cumulative distance works out to roughly 4,400 to 4,600 miles in eight riding days, with several days over 500 miles and the longest around 650. The first two days alone carry roughly 17,000 and 22,000 feet of elevation gain.¹

That is a continent, crossed by one person on one motorcycle in a little over a week, with no support vehicle, in September, when the same day can start in fog on the coast and end in heat on the plains, and when a Colorado pass can see its first snow of the season in the same week that Death Valley is still near 100 degrees. Nobody carries your luggage, fixes your flat, or waits for you at the top of the hill, and nobody cares that your back was fine at 40. Reaching Monterey at all is an accomplishment most riders will never attempt. Everything this article says about friendship, purpose, health, and preparation rests on that fact. The rally works on people because the mission is real.

CP 1What a parasocial relationship actually is

A 1956 idea, a 2020 meta-analysis, and one experiment that shows exactly what a podcast can and cannot do for you.

The term is not a modern insult for people who like podcasts, which is a relief, because I would be first in line for it. I love podcasts, and the ones I love most are the least defensible: the behind-the-scenes shows about other shows. My current favorite is the Breaking Beard Podcast, in which Adam Moran, the competitive eater behind the BeardMeatsFood YouTube channel, and his friend Josh Gudgeon talk about what it is like to make the BeardMeatsFood YouTube channel.³⁰ So I am a grown man in a home office, at an age where I should know better, listening to two men in Leeds discuss the making of videos in which one of them eats a ten-pound breakfast. That is a parasocial relationship built on top of another parasocial relationship. I am not proud of it. I am also not going to stop. The point of this article is not that any of this is bad. It is that it has a ceiling.

Parasocial relationships, available weekly The ADV Cannonball Podcast Adventure riding, rally life, and the people who refuse to stop. Hosted by Taylor Lawson and Aaron Pufal. Listen on Spotify

The term itself comes from a 1956 paper by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, who described the one-sided sense of "intimacy at a distance" that audiences feel toward the personalities they see and hear through mass media.³ The performer talks as if to a friend. The listener responds as if to a friend. Only one side of the conversation is real.

Podcasts are especially good at producing this feeling, and researchers now study host and listener bonds as their own category of parasocial relationship.⁴ That is not a bad thing. A 2020 meta-analysis of 120 studies found no meaningful link between social deficits and parasocial relationships; people who form these bonds tend to be socially engaged, and the authors described parasocial relationships as an extension of real social life rather than a substitute for it.⁵ Podcast listening is also not a young person's habit anymore. Edison Research reports that 38 percent of Americans age 55 and older now listen to podcasts monthly.⁶

0measurable effect on loneliness from thinking about a favorite media figure. A real friend helped.Stein et al., 2022

The catch is what a parasocial relationship cannot do. In a 2022 experiment, people who were asked to think about a favorite media figure got the same mood boost as people who thought about a real friend. But on loneliness, the media figure did nothing at all, while the real friend measurably helped. The authors called the parasocial condition "utterly ineffective" at reducing loneliness.⁷

So a podcast can make your commute better. It cannot make you less alone. For that, the voice on the other end has to become a person you can actually sit across from.

Kitty Hawk, October 2025. Check-in was the first time I met most of the competitors face to face, after a year of knowing them through the podcast, the Facebook group, and their entry forms.

CP 2Why this matters more for men over 50

The friendship recession, the Surgeon General's numbers, and why men make friends side by side rather than face to face.

15%of American men report no close friends at all, up from 3 percent in 1990.Survey Center on American Life, 2021

The numbers on male friendship in America are not encouraging. According to the Survey Center on American Life, the share of men with no close friends at all rose from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2021, a fivefold increase. The share of men with at least six close friends fell by half over the same period, from 55 percent to 27 percent.⁸ The same research found that work is where most Americans meet their close friends, which means that retirement, or even a career slowdown, quietly removes the main pipeline through which men make them.⁹

15cigarettes a day: the mortality impact the Surgeon General compares to being socially disconnected.U.S. Surgeon General, 2023

The health consequences are not abstract. The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness put it plainly: the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Poor social relationships are associated with a 29 percent higher risk of heart disease and a 32 percent higher risk of stroke, and loneliness in older adults raises the risk of dementia by about 50 percent.¹⁰ The meta-analysis underlying much of that advisory, covering more than 300,000 people, found that adequate social relationships came with a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival over the study periods, an effect the authors compared to quitting smoking.¹¹

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed its participants since 1938, reached the same conclusion from a different direction. The people who were most satisfied with their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. As its director Robert Waldinger has said, "Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period."¹²

84%of men chose doing an activity with a friend over just talking. For women it was 43 percent.Caldwell and Peplau, Sex Roles, 1982

There is a wrinkle that matters for a motorcycle rally specifically. Men tend not to make friends the way women do. In a classic study published in Sex Roles, Caldwell and Peplau asked men and women whether they would rather do an activity with a same-sex friend or just talk: 84 percent of men chose the activity, against 43 percent of women, and men were far more likely to want a friend who "likes to do the same things" than one who "feels the same way about things." The authors concluded that men's friendships emphasized joint activities while women's were oriented toward sharing personal information.¹³ A 2024 review by Robin Dunbar and colleagues in Evolution and Human Behavior reached a similar picture from a different angle: women's closest friendships tend to be intense one-to-one bonds, while men's social lives are organized more like clubs, built around shared activity and a wider web of looser ties.¹³ Researchers have long summarized the difference as face to face versus side by side. A checkpoint rally is the purest side-by-side activity imaginable. Nobody has to open up. Everybody has to get to Moab. The knees will complain either way, so you might as well have company.

Nobody has to open up. Everybody has to get to Moab.

CP 3A mission with room for different goals

How the scoring works, why friendly competition beats pure support, and what happens on the last day.

The ADV Cannonball is built as a checkpoint adventure rally. Points come from reaching GPS checkpoints on a curated route: 10 for a standard checkpoint, 21 for an extreme one, with a 25-point daily bonus for the first Pro-Class rider to the final checkpoint. The Optional Extreme Checkpoints are there for the truly sadistic and the truly fast, and are worth exactly what they cost. I will not pretend that bonus does not matter. Some riders ride with real spirit, and the daily scoreboard is exactly why. A rider who wants to hunt the bonus can, and a few will. A rider can enter Pro-Class with assigned start times and chase the overall win, or Mile-Crusher Class and ride the same route with group starts and no daily bonus at all.²

That structure is deliberate. It means the field is full of people with different goals who are nonetheless on the same mission. Some are there to win. Some are there for the dirt sections and the Rough Rider trophy. Some want the finisher medal and nothing else. Some are there for the adventure and the company, and would be happy to be the last bike into the hotel every night as long as there was a good story to tell and the hot tub was still open. What they share is the route, the rules, the self-reliance, and the fact that they all chose to spend eight days doing something hard.

+90%attendance in groups built on friendly competition versus support-only or control groups.Zhang et al., 2016

Research on motivation suggests this mix is healthier than pure support or pure competition. In a randomized trial of nearly 800 people in an exercise program, groups organized around friendly competition attended 90 percent more sessions than either a control group or a group organized only around mutual support. The researchers described it as a "social ratcheting up effect": each person's effort raised the bar for the people around them.¹⁴ Anyone who has watched two riders discover they are three points apart on the live scoreboard on the morning of Day 6 will recognize the phenomenon.

Something else happens by the final day, and it happened in 2025 without anyone planning it. By then the scoreboard has mostly settled. The riders who were going to win know it, the riders who were chasing the Rough Rider award have either earned it or not, and the daily bonus has lost its urgency. So the competing quietly stops. Men who spent a week trying to beat each other to the last checkpoint ride the final miles to the coast together, stop for the same coffee, compare the same aches, and roll into the finish hotel as a group. A week of shared difficulty turns out to be a faster route to friendship than a year of comment threads.

The final riding day of the 2025 rally. With the standings settled, the competition gave way to riding together.

2.4xhigher mortality among adults over 50 with the lowest sense of life purpose versus the highest.JAMA Network Open, 2019

Purpose itself carries weight. A 2019 study of nearly 7,000 American adults over 50, published in JAMA Network Open, found that people with the lowest sense of life purpose were about two and a half times as likely to die during the study period as those with the highest.¹⁵ A study of more than 600 New Zealand men over 60 found that lower purpose in life was one of the strongest indicators of loneliness, and concluded that building purpose is a likely way to reduce it.¹⁶ A rally on the calendar is not a life's purpose. But a mission, a date, a route to learn, and people counting on you to show up is a very good stand-in for a few months.

CP 4The preparation is half the benefit

Body, bike, and navigation: the year before the rally does as much for a rider as the eight days.

The rally lasts eight days. Preparing for it lasts most of a year, and much of the value is in that part.

BodyPhysically

Eight consecutive days of 450 to 650 miles, some of it standing on the pegs through rough terrain, is a legitimate athletic demand, and standing on the pegs is much easier to describe than to do after lunch on Day 5. Nobody over 50 swings a leg over a fully loaded adventure bike gracefully. The goal is to be able to do it eight mornings in a row. Riders who prepare with strength and balance work are doing something with benefits far beyond the rally. A 2022 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that 30 to 60 minutes a week of muscle-strengthening activity was associated with a 10 to 20 percent lower risk of death from all causes, and that combining it with aerobic exercise was associated with a 40 percent lower risk.¹⁷ A Cochrane review of 108 trials found that balance and functional training reduces the rate of falls in older adults by about a quarter.¹⁸ Falls, on and off the bike, are the thing that ends riding careers. A rider with a reason to train is a rider more likely to train, and "I have a rally in September" is a better reason than anything a doctor has ever said to me.

There is a sober reason to take this seriously. An analysis of more than 61,000 injured motorcyclists in the National Trauma Data Bank found that riders over 40 went from 28 percent of the injured to nearly half over a decade, with the 50 to 59 age group growing fastest, and that older riders were one and a half to two times as likely to die from an injury of the same severity, largely because of existing health conditions.¹⁹ Nobody is claiming that fitness prevents crashes. But going into a long rally in the best shape you can manage is the closest thing to a margin of safety a rider can build for himself.

BikeMechanically

With no support vehicle and no sweep, the rally forces a rider to know his motorcycle: tires, chain, fluids, luggage, electrics, tools, and what he will actually do at the side of a road in Nevada when something fails, which is rarely what he said he would do in the Facebook group. The regulations make the point in their own way: expect self rescue.² That kind of competence is hard to acquire from a screen, and the process of acquiring it, from a winter of wrenching in the garage to a shakedown ride in the spring, is a project with an end date.

DataNavigation

The official GPX routes publish no later than 30 days before the start, and the rally's scoring app runs on a dedicated smartphone that must never be used for navigation.² So every rider has to build and understand a navigation setup, load and check track data, plan fuel and daylight, and decide which Optional Extreme Checkpoints are worth the points. For a man who still has a paper atlas somewhere in the garage, learning a new navigation unit, with menus clearly designed by a 24-year-old, is an extreme checkpoint of its own. This is real learning, and real learning in later life is protective. The Synapse Project, a controlled study of older adults who spent three months learning a demanding new skill, found measurable gains in episodic memory that did not appear in people who simply socialized for the same hours.²⁰ Learning to navigate is a particularly good candidate. London taxi trainees who successfully memorized the city's layout showed growth in the hippocampus, the brain structure that handles spatial memory, and the lead researcher noted the result offers "encouragement for adults who want to learn new skills later in life."²¹ A separate study found that habitual reliance on turn-by-turn GPS was associated with worse spatial memory, and with a steeper decline over three years.²² A rider who studies a route, understands it, and uses the GPS as a tool rather than a crutch is doing his brain a favor.

Before Plymouth: what the regulations and the schedule actually ask of you

• A bike you have serviced yourself and shaken down on a long ride, with the tools and spares to handle a flat and a chain at the roadside.
• Eight consecutive days of 450 to 650 miles in your legs, back, and hands, some of it standing on the pegs.
• A dedicated scoring phone with power, data, and GPS on, used for nothing else.
• A separate navigation setup with the official GPX loaded, checked, and understood, not just followed.
• Fuel, daylight, and weather plans for each leg, including the paved fallback if an Optional Extreme Checkpoint is not worth the points that day.
• A plan for self rescue, because there is no sweep and no chase vehicle.
• Reading glasses. The route file does not get bigger because you can still see the horizon.

Preparation also lowers stress in a measurable way. Research on the stress hormone system has shown that knowing what is coming, and having a plan for it, blunts the body's cortisol response as effectively as actually having control over the situation.²³ Making specific if-then plans (if the chain needs adjusting, I do it at the hotel on Day 3; if it rains through Kentucky, I switch to the paved option) has a medium-to-large effect on actually following through, according to a meta-analysis of 94 studies.²⁴ That is exactly what a rally schedule and a route file give a rider: months of concrete things to plan for.

And then there is the riding itself. A 2019 UCLA study funded by Harley-Davidson, which should be read with that funding in mind, measured more than 50 experienced riders and found that a 22-minute ride lowered hormonal biomarkers of stress by 28 percent and sharpened sensory focus compared with driving a car.²⁵ Most riders did not need a study to tell them that. But it is nice to have one.

CP 5Two regulations about being an adult

Regulation #1, Regulation #2, and why "expect self rescue" is a philosophy, not a disclaimer.

The 2026 regulations run to dozens of numbered rules about scoring, start times, the app, and conduct. The first two are shorter than the rest.²

2026 ADV Cannonball Rally RegulationsSection 1 of many. The rest are longer and matter less.

Binding

Reg1

Don't be an ADV Weenie.

Five words. Everything else in the document is a footnote to them.

Reg2

If you are considering making a complaint about the rally, rally staff, volunteers, weather, mileage, or any competitor, refer to Regulation #1.

In case Regulation #1 was unclear.

No support. No sweep. No chase vehicle. Expect self rescue.

The rally glossary defines an ADV Weenie as "an adventure bike rider who spends an inordinate amount of time lecturing and commenting about adventure bikes and less time actually crushing miles," and notes that the species tends to open with "Well, technically" or "According to what I read on the internet."²⁹ It is tongue in cheek. It is also the most serious thing in the document.

Everything that follows those two rules is consistent with them. The rally offers zero support: no chase vehicles, no sweep, no rescue from the organization, and a flat prohibition on using any resource that is not available to everyone. Riders route around their own road closures. The regulations sum up the expectation in three words that have become the rally's motto: expect self rescue.² Read together, the rules say something simple. You are an adult. You chose this. Prepare properly, ride within your limits, solve your own problems, and do not complain about weather you could have checked or mileage you could have read on the schedule.

That message lands differently coming from a rally than it would coming from a screen, and the difference is the point of this article. The internet, including the parts of it that are about motorcycles, rewards commentary. It is cheap to have an opinion about tire choice, a suspension setup, or another rider's line, especially from a heated garage in February, and expensive to find out whether the opinion survives contact with the Land's End switchbacks in a rainstorm. A checkpoint rally with no support is a machine for turning commentary into experience. Nobody at the hotel in Lawrence, Kansas, cares what you read. They care whether you got there.

Motorcycling has been a traditionally masculine world, and this rally does not pretend otherwise, though the rules are clear that every rider on any motorcycle is welcome.² What the rally does with that tradition is worth stating plainly. It does not use it to exclude. It uses it to expect. The regulations treat competitors as capable men and women who can be pushed, politely but firmly, to do something difficult and to own the result. There is good reason to think men in particular need that push and respond to it. The friendship and purpose research above points the same direction: men do best when they are handed a hard shared task and a group of people who expect them to show up for it, not when they are handed sympathy.^{13 14 15} Regulation #1 is that push in five words. Regulation #2 closes the loophole.

It is also, quietly, a description of the preparation season. A rider who takes "expect self rescue" seriously in March is the rider who arrives in Monterey in September with a bike he still knows, a body that handled eight long days, a navigation setup that worked, and no complaints. He did the hard part months ago. So did everyone else at the finish. That shared fact, more than anything else, is what makes strangers into a team by the second night.

CP 6What happened after 2025

WhatsApp, ride-outs, a record run crewed by former competitors, and a film that closed the loop.

The 2025 inaugural rally ran from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the Pacific over eight days and more than 3,500 miles, with 40 riders.²⁶ 2025 rally results and history What has happened since is the strongest argument I can make for any of the above.

1. Parasocial
2. 1
   The podcast, the book, the film

   One voice, many listeners. Mood improves. Loneliness does not.
3. 2
   The Facebook group and the regulations page

   Usernames, opinions, and the first arguments about tire pressure.
4. 3
   The entry form

   A date on the calendar and a year of preparation with an end point.
5. Real
6. 4
   Check-in

   Faces to go with the names. Kitty Hawk in 2025, Plymouth in 2026.
7. 5
   Eight days, side by side

   Shared difficulty, a live scoreboard, and hotel parking lots every evening.
8. 6
   The banquet

   The last time most of the field sees each other in person for a year.
9. After
10. 7
    The WhatsApp chat, the ride-outs, the record crew, the podcast

    Multi-night trips, a crew at a charging station at 3 a.m., riders coming back on the podcast as guests, and a film that starts the loop again for a quarter million new viewers.

The 2025 field. A year earlier, most of these men knew each other only as names in a comment thread.

Riders who met each other as usernames in the Facebook group, and then as faces at a check-in table, kept the conversation going in a private WhatsApp chat that never really went quiet. It is mostly about tires. It is occasionally about knees. That chat produced ride-outs. Not one-day meetups, but multi-night adventures on adventure bikes, planned and ridden by people who a year earlier had never been in the same room.

I can offer a personal example. In 2026 I set the Electric Motorcycle Cannonball record, riding a Harley-Davidson LiveWire One from New York to California in 100 hours and 17 minutes, with 47 charging stops along the way.²⁷ Read: the Electric Motorcycle Cannonball record run That run required a crew handling range calculations, provisions, and documentation around the clock. Most of that crew were competitors from the 2025 ADV Cannonball, people I had met less than a year earlier. They had gone from listening to a podcast to riding in a rally to standing at a charging station in the middle of the night helping me chase a record. There is no version of that which begins and ends on a screen.

The Red Ball Garage in Manhattan, the traditional Cannonball start line, with 2025 rally riders who came to crew the electric record run.

They had gone from listening to a podcast to riding in a rally to standing at a charging station in the middle of the night helping me chase a record.

The loop also runs in the other direction, and Robert Baldinger is the best example of it. Robert and I knew each other parasocially first: I watched his YouTube channel, and he listened to the podcast. That was enough to invite him on as a guest, which was enough to get him to Kitty Hawk in 2025 as a competitor, where the relationship became a real one. Listen: Robert Baldinger, live from Stockholm (June 2025) He rode the whole rally with a camera and turned it into a film, 8 Days. 3,500 Miles. The ADV Cannonball Coast to Coast Rally, which has since reached more than a quarter of a million motorcycle enthusiasts around the world.²⁸ Every one of those viewers is now in a parasocial relationship with the rally and with the riders in it. Some of them will be in Plymouth this month. The rest are one entry form away from the same handoff.

8 Days. 3,500 Miles. Robert Baldinger's film of the 2025 ADV Cannonball Rally. Watch it on YouTube.

CP 7A word from the organizer's side

Why I take your week of vacation personally, and what the rally does for me.

Organizing this rally is a full-time responsibility, and the part of it I think about most is not the route. It is the fact that for a great many of the people entered, this is their annual event. Some are retired and have chosen to spend a week of their year here. Many more are working, and anyone who has worked in America understands how little time off people get and how carefully they have to spend it. When a rider hands over a week of vacation and a good part of a year of preparation, my job is to make sure that time is not wasted, and that he leaves Monterey having gotten everything out of the event that he came for.

A large part of that is the social side. The hotels, the group starts, the evenings swapping stories in the parking lot, and the awards banquet are not extras bolted onto a route. They are the mechanism by which people who know each other through a podcast, a regulations page, or a comment thread become people who know each other. As we get closer to September 16, that is what I am most looking forward to: seeing the people I have been talking to all year, and taking those relationships into the real.

The 2025 awards banquet. For most of the field, this is the last time they see each other in person until the next rally, which is exactly why the WhatsApp chat never went quiet.

I should be honest that I am writing this partly as a reflection on my own habits. Most of the rally, and most of the podcast, is built from a home office, and there are stretches of weeks where the only real interaction I have is with my wife, who has heard every one of my stories and can tell when a new one is being rehearsed on her. Preparing for an important podcast interview is a surprisingly solitary job. It means days and sometimes weeks of reading a guest's book, watching their films, and working through their background, which is itself a parasocial relationship, all of it leading to a single one-hour conversation. Then come the hours of editing and post-production before an episode is published. From the outside it looks like a social medium. From the inside it is mostly a man alone at a desk, with a headset, a cold coffee, and a lower back that has opinions. Writing Chasing Legends, which came out this year, was the same thing at a larger scale: more than a year of solitary work, with the only collaborative part being the editing, and even that was done remotely. Chasing Legends on Amazon And I am already preparing to do it again. The second installment of Chasing Legends is under way, this time with far more of my own biography in it, answering the questions readers have been sending me since the first book came out. It will be a tell-all. I am putting it all out there, which means another year mostly alone at that desk. So when I say the rally is healthy and rewarding, I am not only talking about the riders. It is a massive amount of work to run, and it is also the one week of the year when all of those distant relationships turn into a parking lot full of people I can shake hands with, most of whom are also stretching their backs.

A rare in-person recording: co-host Taylor Lawson and I with author Lois Pryce in the studio. Most episodes are recorded remotely and edited alone.

If you are on the fence for 2027, the entry is not the hard part. The hard part is the winter in the garage, the spring on the trails, and the summer with the map open. That is also the point. Your knees will forgive you. Eventually.

Postscript

A confession, now that the argument is made. I have just spent roughly 18 hours writing about this shit, alone, in a room, with the door closed. I read a 1956 paper on intimacy at a distance in order to explain to you, at a distance, why intimacy at a distance is not enough. I cited a meta-analysis of 120 studies on one-sided relationships to a reader I will never meet, who is at this moment forming a mild opinion of me that I will never hear. Horton and Wohl would have found the whole exercise very tidy. The article about parasocial relationships is itself a parasocial relationship, and the man who wrote it did so while demonstrating every symptom he described: the home office, the cold coffee, the wife in the next room wondering why the podcast man is now also the essay man.

There is a word for this in philosophy, and it is not a kind one. A performative contradiction is when the act of making a claim undermines the claim itself, like writing "I cannot write" or announcing through a megaphone that you are a private person. I have written five thousand words arguing that you should close the laptop and go find people, and the only way I could think of to deliver that argument was to open a laptop and not find people. The Surgeon General, I notice, published his loneliness advisory as an 82-page PDF.

So here is the honest position. The screen is fine. The podcast is fine. This article is fine, and I am glad you read it, which is itself a slightly parasocial thing for me to say. But the evidence does not say that any of this is good for you. It says it is pleasant, and it says pleasant is not the same as connected, and it says the difference shows up in your arteries around the time it stops being theoretical. I have done my 18 hours. On September 15 I will be standing in a hotel parking lot in Plymouth, and the first person who walks up and says "I read the thing" will have proven the thing right, and we can both stop reading and go check our tire pressure. Bring your glasses.

The 2026 rally is sold out. Check-in for entered riders is Tuesday, September 15, at the Hilton Garden Inn Plymouth. The full schedule and regulations are at advcannonball.com, and registration for 2027 is open at advcannonball.com/registration.

Sources

1. ADV Cannonball, "2026 ADV Cannonball Rally" and 2026 schedule. advcannonball.com/2026-adv-cannonball-rally
2. ADV Cannonball, 2026 Regulations. advcannonball.com/2026-regulations
3. Horton, D., and Wohl, R. R. (1956). "Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance." Psychiatry, 19(3), 215 to 229. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13359569
4. Schlütz, D., and Hedder, I. (2022). "Aural Parasocial Relations: Host-Listener Relationships in Podcasts." Journal of Radio and Audio Media, 29(2). doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2020.1870467
5. Tukachinsky, R., Walter, N., and Saucier, C. J. (2020). "Antecedents and Effects of Parasocial Relationships: A Meta-Analysis." Journal of Communication, 70(6), 868 to 894. academic.oup.com
6. Edison Research, The Podcast Consumer 2025. edisonresearch.com
7. Stein, J.-P., Liebers, N., and Faiss, M. (2022). "Feeling Better... But Also Less Lonely? An Experimental Comparison of How Parasocial and Social Relationships Affect People's Well-Being." Mass Communication and Society. Author manuscript
8. Cox, D. A. (2021). "American Men Suffer a Friendship Recession." Survey Center on American Life. americansurveycenter.org
9. Cox, D. A. (2021). "The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss." Survey Center on American Life. americansurveycenter.org
10. U.S. Surgeon General (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. hhs.gov
11. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., and Layton, J. B. (2010). "Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review." PLoS Medicine, 7(7). journals.plos.org
12. Harvard Gazette (2025), on the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and Waldinger's TED talk as summarized by the World Economic Forum (2016). news.harvard.edu; weforum.org
13. Caldwell, M. A., and Peplau, L. A. (1982). "Sex differences in same-sex friendship." Sex Roles, 8(7), 721 to 732. doi.org/10.1007/BF00287568 (full text: UCLA). Dunbar, R. I. M., Pearce, E., Wlodarski, R., and Machin, A. (2024). "Sex differences in close friendships and social style." Evolution and Human Behavior, 45(6). doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.106631. The face to face versus side by side framing originates with Wright, P. H. (1982), Sex Roles, 8(1). doi.org/10.1007/BF00287670
14. Zhang, J., Brackbill, D., Yang, S., Becker, J., Herbert, N., and Centola, D. (2016). "Support or competition? How online social networks increase physical activity: A randomized controlled trial." Preventive Medicine Reports, 4, 453 to 458. sciencedirect.com; summary at penntoday.upenn.edu
15. Alimujiang, A., et al. (2019). "Association Between Life Purpose and Mortality Among US Adults Older Than 50 Years." JAMA Network Open, 2(5). jamanetwork.com
16. Neville, S., et al. (2018). "Loneliness in Men 60 Years and Over: The Association With Purpose in Life." American Journal of Men's Health, 12(4). journals.sagepub.com
17. Momma, H., et al. (2022). "Muscle-strengthening activities are associated with lower risk and mortality in major non-communicable diseases." British Journal of Sports Medicine, 56(13). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35228201
18. Sherrington, C., et al. (2019). "Exercise for preventing falls in older people living in the community." Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. cochrane.org
19. Brown, J. B., et al. (2010). University of Rochester Medical Center analysis of the National Trauma Data Bank, The American Surgeon, 76(3). Summary: sciencedaily.com
20. Park, D. C., et al. (2014). "The Impact of Sustained Engagement on Cognitive Function in Older Adults: The Synapse Project." Psychological Science, 25(1). journals.sagepub.com
21. Woollett, K., and Maguire, E. A. (2011). "Acquiring 'the Knowledge' of London's Layout Drives Structural Brain Changes." Current Biology, 21(24). Summary: sciencedaily.com
22. Dahmani, L., and Bohbot, V. D. (2020). "Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation." Scientific Reports, 10, 6310. nature.com
23. Abelson, J. L., et al. (2008). "Effects of Perceived Control and Cognitive Coping on Endocrine Stress Responses to Pharmacological Activation." Biological Psychiatry, 64(8). pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
24. Gollwitzer, P. M., and Sheeran, P. (2006). "Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119. researchgate.net
25. UCLA Semel Institute and Harley-Davidson (2019). "Riding a Motorcycle Improved Metrics of Focus and Decreased Stress Biomarkers." Industry-funded study released by press release, not peer reviewed. prnewswire.com
26. ADV Cannonball, press release on the 2025 rally. advcannonball.com/news
27. ADV Cannonball, Electric Motorcycle Cannonball record run. advcannonball.com/news/cannonball; EVcannonball.com
28. Baldinger, R. (2025). 8 Days. 3,500 Miles. The ADV Cannonball Coast to Coast Rally (film). youtu.be/9glA5GU17iY. Audience figure as reported by the rally organizer.
29. ADV Cannonball, Glossary, entry for "ADV Weenie." advcannonball.com/glossary
30. Breaking Beard Podcast, hosted by Adam Moran (BeardMeatsFood) and Josh Gudgeon. Apple Podcasts; Spotify. Channel background: Wikipedia.