The reel starts with a gray haired man in dark sunglasses and a navy T-shirt talking into his phone, a backpack strap over one shoulder and a garage full of motorcycles behind him. One line of text sits on the screen and stays there for almost the whole clip: “Which would you take?”
It was posted by @jaypelkey with the hashtags #gymtime and #gymrat and the same question in the caption: “Which one would you take?” What follows is a 37 second walk past seven motorcycles, each parked on its own printed floor mat, several of them with his surname worked into the design.
The first stop is by the open garage door, where a gray touring bike with a big frame mounted fairing sits in the sun. The mat under it reads “Pelkey’s Road Glide ST SE.” He gives it about three seconds and moves on.
Next is a red Ducati with a white number panel on the fairing. Its mat is lettered “Panigale V2 Bayliss,” with a line about a 20th anniversary underneath. Beside it is a naked bike finished in pink and black, parked on a mat marked “1000 R” in blue and red stripes, the BMW M 1000 R of the group.
The fourth bike is a dark green Triumph cafe racer with a rounded fairing, a yellow headlight cover, gold forks and a small bag on the tail. The mat says “Pelkey’s Thruxton.” Then come two orange machines. One is a KTM dirt bike wearing the number 17, on a mat that reads “350 EXC-F” and “Pelkey’s KTM” next to a Red Bull logo. The other is a taller KTM in Red Bull colors with a windscreen and hand guards, on a mat that ends in “Adventure R.”
The last one in line is the outlier, a pale gray Vespa with a black leather bag buckled to its front rack, standing on a yellow honeycomb mat.
The walls get almost as much screen time as the bikes. Helmets hang on hooks in rows above the Ducati and the BMW, a dozen or more of them in different colors, and riding jackets and suits fill clothing racks along the far side behind the KTMs and the Vespa. A spare set of handlebars is mounted on the wall like a trophy.
At 33 seconds the text changes to “Winner winner Chicken dinner” and the camera is suddenly outside, looking back at the garage from the driveway. He rolls out on the red Ducati, the number 21 visible on its side, wearing a red helmet with the backpack on, and rides across the driveway past a basketball hoop. That is his answer to his own question.
The question he put to viewers is a fair one to think through, because the seven choices cover most of what a motorcycle can be. For a short hop with a gym bag, what matters most is where the bag goes. His solution is the simplest one, a backpack, which works on anything in the garage. Two of the bikes also carry luggage of their own in the video: the Vespa has that leather bag on the front rack and the Thruxton has a small pack on the tail.
The garage itself offers ideas that apply to a one bike household as much as a seven bike one. Every motorcycle has its own mat. A mat marks where the bike lives, keeps the stand and any drips off the floor coating, and in his case doubles as a nameplate, since each one is printed with the model it sits under. Parking the bikes at an angle in a row, as he has, lets any one of them be rolled out without moving its neighbor.
The gear storage is the other detail worth borrowing. Helmets are on individual wall hooks instead of stacked on a shelf, and jackets are on hanging racks at the same end of the room as the bikes. Everything needed to leave is within a few steps of the motorcycle, which is what makes a quick ride to the gym quick.
He also made the choice easy to follow for anyone watching with the sound off. The question is on the screen from the first second, the mats name most of the bikes as the camera passes them, and the result is spelled out in text when he rides away. Viewers who would have picked the Road Glide or the Vespa instead have his caption as an open invitation to say so.