Let's Ride (17 page)

N
ow that you’ve learned enough about motorcycles to decide what type you want, you’ve learned how to ride, and you’ve bought a motorcycle, I’m going to talk about the most important thing you can do while riding a motorcycle: staying alive. In this chapter we’re going to discuss advanced training and riding techniques, including cornering, braking, and coping with other vehicles.

More than anything else in this book, the information that follows will help keep you alive. But as with the information in chapter 3, your best bet is still to get professional training. Once again, the Motorcycle Safety Foundation is a good place to start when looking for advanced training: in the late 1980s MSF developed its Experienced RiderCourse (ERC), a half-day course for newer riders and seasoned riders alike that’s designed to hone bikers’ riding skills as well as help develop the mental skills that will keep people alive out on the meat-grinding public highways. I took the ERC back when it first came out in the 1980s. I’d sent so many new riders to the basic RiderCourse that I thought I should take a course myself. I had nearly thirty years of experience when I took the ERC, and I still found it extremely helpful (even though I was the only rider in the entire class who fell down).

If you want to take your riding skills to the next level, you might want to consider going to one of the many high-performance riding schools available. These usually are held at racetracks and use motorcycles provided by the school, though some, like Lee Parks’s Total Control Advanced Riding Clinic, take place in large parking lots and require you to provide your own motorcycle. (See the appendix for more information about riding courses.)

The fact that you’re reading this book bodes well for your future survival as a motorcyclist. I’m trying to share a lifetime of experience with you, and I hope you’ll find it useful, but I can’t stress strongly enough the need to get proper training. Ideally you’ll use the information in this section of the book in conjunction with what you learn in an advanced riding course.

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

A
WARENESS OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS
will usually be the critical factor that determines whether you live or die out on public roads. You need to be aware of what you are doing at all times, you need to be aware of what other people are doing, and you need to make other drivers aware of what you are doing.

Being aware of your own actions is the element over which you have the most control. An obvious way of doing that is to ride sober. Normally I don’t care what people do. I figure it’s their business. If they want to have a beer or three, I don’t see a problem with that. Likewise I don’t really care if they like to burn a marijuana cigarette now and then. Hell, I don’t really care if they’re drunk and high all the time, if they snort Drano or bang rat poison. It’s their business, and it really doesn’t matter whether or not I approve. Abuse yourself in whatever way you see fit, but when it comes time to ride a motorcycle, I highly recommend riding sober.

The Hurt Report found that alcohol was involved in nearly half of all motorcycle fatalities. That was thirty years ago, but the number has remained relatively stable. In 1998, 45 percent of motorcycle fatalities involved alcohol; in 2004, 48 percent involved alcohol. The problem is that alcohol and other drugs slow down your reaction time, and reaction time is everything when it comes to crashing or not crashing your motorcycle. When something happens—when that deer jumps out in front of you or that car swerves into your lane because the driver didn’t see you—you have only a fraction of a second to react. If your reactions are an instant too slow because you have had even one beer, that could easily mean the difference between life and death.

Last year on the way home from Sturgis a couple of deer—a doe and a fawn—ran out in front of me. I was able to slow down just enough to miss the mother as she ran across the road, but not the fawn. Luckily for both of us the fawn didn’t cross the road, but instead, ran alongside me before turning back into the forest. I was stone-cold sober and paying attention, and even then, I barely reacted fast enough to avoid hitting the larger deer. Had I drank even one beer, that might have slowed my reaction time just enough to cause me to hit the deer.

But other distractions can impair your reaction times almost as much as alcohol and other drugs. The main cause of distracted driving these days is the cell phone. If you’re calling on your cell phone or, worse yet, texting while you’re riding your motorcycle, well, you deserve to be killed, preferably sooner rather than later. That’s all I have to say about that subject.

Still other distractions exist that are less obvious because they’re inside your own head. When you ride, are you focusing on what you’re doing and the potential hazards that are all around you, or are you thinking about giving your boss that beat down he’s deserved for all these years? Are you thinking about the condition of your motorcycle, or are you thinking about the condition of your marriage? If you’re concentrating on the fight you just had with your wife when you told her you were going for a motorcycle ride, you’re probably not concentrating on that cell-phone-yakking half-wit in the SUV that’s barreling down on you.

I lost a good friend this way. The guy was a skilled rider and extremely safety conscious—he was one of the first people I ever knew who wore a helmet. His motorcycle was always in tip-top condition, and he never rode when he was drunk or high. But one day he got in an argument with his girlfriend, took off on his bike, lost control in a corner, and hit an oak tree.

It’s impossible to clear your mind of all distractions all the time—if we could, the makers of sleeping pills, Prozac, and other mental medications would be out of business—but before you head out on the road, you have to do everything you can to empty your mind of anything that will disrupt your focus on riding. Do whatever it takes to clear your head, including going to the bathroom. (You’d be surprised how much your concentration can suffer when you’ve got a full bladder.)

Anger is another huge distraction, but it’s hard not to get angry when you’re sharing the road with the collection of simpletons known as other drivers. Anger clouds your judgment and slows your reaction time. You’ll often have every reason in the world to be angry at other drivers, but you need to remain calm, cool, and collected in every situation, regardless of who is right and who is wrong. Above all, don’t get into road-rage situations with other vehicles. They may be completely wrong, but they have your life in their hands. Right or wrong, you can’t win an argument with someone who has the ability to end your life by simply turning his or her steering wheel.

Buddhist monks spend entire lifetimes trying to figure out how to clear these sorts of distractions from their minds. Maybe it works for them; maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know—I’ve spent my life doing other things. Like riding motorcycles. Since I don’t expect to become a Buddhist monk anytime soon, I’ve had to find other ways to clear my mind when I’m on my bike.

One trick I’ve developed is to focus my attention on potential hazards. I study my surroundings and imagine what might go wrong. I look for brush or other growth along the road that might block my view of a deer or other critter that might run out in front of me. I watch other traffic, looking for other vehicles that might swerve into my lane, or trucks with loads that might come loose or tires that might blow out, sending debris onto the road.

I look for any element that might pose danger, then I check to see how prepared I am to deal with that danger. Have I placed my motorcycle in the best position to deal with potential hazards? Do I have enough room to maneuver out of the way of danger? (I’ll talk more about lane positioning later.) Am I covering my front brake with my right fingers so that I don’t lose a fraction of a second reaching for my brake if the situation goes south in a hurry? Is my engine in its powerband so that if I need to accelerate out of the way of danger, I won’t twist my throttle only to have the engine bog down? Am I traveling at a safe speed in the first place?

In addition to assessing how prepared I am to deal with potential dangers, I devise plans of action in case something does go wrong. I look at the way a load on a truck is tied down to try to determine which way the debris is likely to fall if the ties come loose, then look for a clear, safe space to move in the opposite direction of where the debris will likely fall. I try to determine possible paths of travel of even the most errant vehicle. I allow plenty of room between me and the vehicle in front of me, and I position my bike so that I have the best view of any potential danger. If I spot potential danger, I reposition my bike so that I have the least exposure to that threat and the best possible escape routes if the worst-case scenario comes to pass.

This exercise helps me prepare for potential danger, but it does more than that: it focuses my complete attention on that moment in time, so that I’m not thinking about anything other than riding my motorcycle in that place in time. It might not be the same as spending a lifetime in some Buddhist monastery, but the concentration required while riding a motorcycle is a form of focused meditation that makes all the petty distractions of day-to-day life melt away. It might seem morbid to concentrate on potential danger with such intense focus, but it clears my head. When I’m finished riding, I feel relaxed and recharged, so morbid or not, I consider it a beneficial activity. Some people ride with stereos blasting at top volume, but to me that would interrupt my meditation on the ride. The only sound track I need for that is the music my engine makes when it’s running in peak condition.

DEFEATING ROAD HAZARDS

T
HINK OF GOING OUT
on public roads aboard a motorcycle as a form of going to war. As in any form of combat, the only way to win is to know your enemy. You can better understand the nature of the threats you’ll face if you break down the types of hazards into three broad categories:

• Vehicles.
  These include everything from a fast-moving bicycle to a double-trailer semitruck. This category has the most potential to kill a motorcycle rider, so you should never trust any other vehicle. Obviously the bigger the vehicle, the more potential harm it can do to you; but when you’re on a bike, you are so vulnerable that even an errant bicycle rider can potentially take you out. Learn to identify the vehicles that are most likely to kill you, and when you’re riding among them, always look for possible escape routes should things start to go wrong.
  
• Debris and potholes.
  This category includes any stationary object that can lead to your losing control of your motorcycle if you hit it. This could be the road alligators from one of the thousands of blown truck tires that you’ll be dodging as long as you ride motorcycles, or it could be a sign post at the edge of the road, or a box of bolts that fell off a flatbed truck. You’ll need to perfect your control over your motorcycle to develop the riding skills that will help you avoid hitting this type of hazard.
  
• People and other animals.
  People and other animals move slower than vehicles, but they can be almost as deadly—and even more erratic. They can change direction quickly, and they don’t follow normal patterns of movement, as vehicular traffic does. When you’re moving down the road on your motorcycle, you’ll often ride in conditions that make it difficult to see animals and pedestrians until they pop out right in front of you, so you’ll need to learn to recognize the situations in which two- or four-legged critters are likely to appear.
  

When riding on public highways, I recommend adopting the attitude that every single person on the road is a sociopathic serial killer who has just escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane. This might seem a little pessimistic, but you’ll live longer if you assume everyone else on the road is a homicidal moron whose sole purpose is to kill you.

Face it: an unsettlingly high percentage of American drivers are unfit to be behind the wheel in the best of circumstances. What else would you expect in a country where the hardest part of the driving test is parallel parking? Parking is the opposite of driving, so there’s not a hell of a lot of actual driving involved in getting a driver’s license. Technically it should be called a parking license, but it’s not, and the end result is a nation of people who think of the driver’s seat as a place to make phone calls and send text messages while they are going somewhere else. There’s not much you can depend on anymore, but you can be virtually certain that someone is going to do something incredibly stupid out on the road. The best way to deal with the situation is to make certain that person is not you.

You need to have complete awareness of every single one of the idiots with whom you’re sharing the road while you are out on your bike. You need to learn to read traffic and learn to recognize the clues that will alert you to potentially dangerous situations. You need to develop a feel for the circumstances in which other drivers are likely to do something stupid.

For example, when you are on a multilane road, pulling up to an intersection alongside a line of cars, you can be sure that at least one of them is going to pull out into your lane to get around that line, and you can be just as sure that the person will not have checked his or her mirror or looked over his or her shoulder to clear the lane, so he or she has no idea you are there. Or when you’re riding along a row of parked cars, expect at least one of them to pull out in front of you or even beside you.

When you’re riding alongside slow-moving or parked traffic, always position your bike as far away from the line of cars as possible to give yourself room to react when the car inevitably pulls out right in front of you. Constantly scan for safe space in which you can swerve around the damned fool. Monitor your rearview mirror to make certain no one will run you over if the only safe course of action is to brake hard. Create circumstances in which you have the most possible options in the event of any dangerous situation.