I've always been good at denial, or so the, wives, girlfriends and people whom I apparently deny always tell me... No seriously, I have always been good at that control and self-discipline necessary when travelling long distances on a a motorbike, so that while friends and colleagues are getting off and going for a piss, a coffee and a fag every 40 minute fill up, I'm more than capable of pulling in, tanking up, getting straight back on and counting down the clicks to the next services, while my mates have to pull in half way to the scheduled next stop to relieve their bladders of the coffees they drank at the last one. Sacrifice and reward. It's one of my perversions.

Long distance travel on a motorcycle is thus an attitude of mind as much as an attitude of behind and, to be honest, though good at long distance colonising and pillaging a few hundred years ago, Brits as a whole have really gone a little bit soft these days. They think too much about it, and the idea of being mid point between two sets of creature comforts, fills them with dread.

I like to be a bit more old style. A bit more rough and ready, self-reliant, a bit more spontaneous and make-it-up-as-you-go-along, as indeed you need to be in a country where the transport system is now so bad that it's not worth booking a flight till you're within sight of the airport perimeter road, or reserving a train ticket until the pullman has emerged onto the platform.

In my opinion it all only starts to go wrong when you don't travel by motorcycle. In these days of regular two hour traffic delays, 25mph train top speeds, and 50 miles long gridlocks on our peripheral motorways, motorcycles are the only thing that time over distance can always be relied upon. You know that come what may it takes an hour and a quarter from London to Dover; no more than two hours from Calais to Paris, and around 3 to Metz, or 4 hours to Strasbourg, without even trying too hard but instead holding your speed at a steady 200kph. In other words, it doesn't matter what the traffic is like, the weather or even the police surveillance, give or take ten minutes, you can rely on the kilometres counting down in a steady linear, stream.

The tales of the video trips we did in the old days are rooted deep in folklore. When Shakey, Gazza and co were on the firm, we'd think nothing of working a 10 hour day and then travelling six or seven hours to the next location or even next country. Checking in in the middle of the night was (still is) par for the course; driving the entire distance from London to Bologna in darkness and then going straight out on track to ride some new wonderbike without so much as half an hour's kip is standard behaviour. Common brags exist of eight hours from Calais to Cannes; the same from Calais to Milan; nine and a half to Ducati at Bologna, and my own personal best, six hours 50 mins from Calais to Le Luc on a Super Blackbird - mind you, I also did 6hrs 45mins in a BMW 323i diesel (only 1 fuel stop!) which takes some of the glamour away. OK, so everyone exaggerates a little - give or take ten minutes. But Coming back from WDW (World Ducati Weekend) even on the ludicrously uncomfortable 996BP I was in Basel in five hours from Bologna and that included stopping twice just to make sure my arse was still connected to my legs.

So our latest challenge, five countries in five hours, shouldn't have presented that many difficulties, really, and in fact it didn't, especially on two such intercontinental ballistic cruisers as the Hayabusa and the ZX-12R. Like the Blackbird on which I set my best across France, these two bikes have that optimum combination of tank range to performance, so that while you're still very definitely on the lookout for petrol every 160kms when getting up them, they don't reduce you to paranoia every 120kms as on the R1 or the old TL1000, or even the current CBR600, mainly because you don't have to ride them anywhere near flat out to establish a good cruising speed.

Anyone who does a fair bit of long distance riding will tell you that anyway, there is an optimum touring speed over which it's pointless to go any faster simply because of the increase in petrol consumption. On a 600, for instance, the time gained travelling at over 200kph is not worth the extra gas a high-revving middleweight sucks in. Big bikes such as the Blade, or the Gixxer Thou are better proportionally at these speeds than the 600s, but nowhere near as good as the lower stressed big bore bikes on which 190-200kph cruising is just about perfect. The key is to maintain that momentum, in a way that you can't do in a car, simply because neither traffic, road maintenance or even weather means you have to slow down that much.

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