One of the most important things to remember when riding a motorcycle is that the amount of risk you take varies in direct proportion to your level of confidence when you drive. The rule of thumb is always "ride your ride."
This simply means you can set up for your next jump across Niagara Falls or plan to rip through a burning barn if your name is Evel Knievel. If it's anything else, then don't plan on riding your motorcycle the way these grizzled veterans of the stunt industry do it.
In fact, most of us will probably live through the rest of our lives never even getting to ride the way these stuntmen and daredevils go about their death-defying feats. Unless you plan on making motorcycle riding a livelihood, for the most part it will serve the most basic function: as a means of transportation.
Getting to your destination safely should, therefore, be your goal. Getting there faster or with chutzpah should be a far afterthought.
"Ride your ride" means riding no faster than you are comfortable doing, staying in your lane at a constant speed even if there's a sudden enticing chance to pass another vehicle. But most of all, "riding your ride" to me means making sure your motorcycle is doing exactly what you want it to be doing, and nothing of what you dread it might do.
I fnd that the best way to achieve this is to maintain a constant attitude of control. This works best if you know the exact destinatin you are going to, and if you've driven the route before. You could be retracing the same routine commute everyday and still be safer (meaning not get tired, bored or complacent) by knowing exactly what to expect at every point along the route. This forward-looking attitude means your mind is already thinking about the left turn you have to take a couple of blocks ahead. You don't rush yourself drifting to the left lane, coming from the fast lane because you can plan and appropriate the distance you need to execute that maneuver. If you're familiar with the route, and you know that the left turn rises to a steep hill, then you can have the lower, more powerful gear in waiting by the time you come out of the curve. You never stall on a small gear and, especially, you are never forced to grind your clutch trying to find the right power gear when you're already halfway up the incline.
Even when you're going down an unplanned route, this attitude of control is still necessary. You should contemplate in your mind an "escape space" in three directions about you--on both sides and up ahead. Have a "space budget" that you know is adequate for you to execute a quick maneuver that could save your life in an emergency. Imagine that a child chasing after a ball suddenly cuts your path, emerging out of nowhere and sudenly popping out of some bushes on the side of the road, chances are you will not run over the kid if you were pretendng to intend to stop in front of the bush to begin with. This is what I do. I really don't stop in front of every bush but I pretend to intend to do so---especially with bushes large enough to hide a child, an animal or another vehicle.
Have an attitude to stop, an attitude to slow down, even an arttitude to ditch the bike in an extreme situation. And keep the attitude in your mind while driving, ready to be triggered by the most sudden and relevant incident. Sometimes I go around a wide looping curve thinking, "If I hit a small oil slick on the pavement about now, I want to roll toward that clump of bush on the right and not bail out into the steep ravine to my left." In time, you will see every moment of your ride as an infinite possibility of outcomes, and none of it will catch you by surprise because you have already planned to deal with the worst one if it ever comes.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Full-face helmet: a most private space
It's a noisy world! Everywhere you go today you are assaulted from all angles by all minds of noise. The din of traffic, jet planes overhead, piped-in music and mindless chatter. If you wanted to be in a quiet place to do some deep reflection, you probably have to clamber up to some mountain top and hope no camper with a boombox has beaten you to it.
I'm a lawyer and some would say noisemaking must be an element of the job. Courtrooms are notorious places to hear booming arguments. So are conference rooms where you hold union negotiations, etc. To put it cynically, someone in my profession might be hearing-impaired to some degree just because the risk comes with the territory.
You'll be surprised how we covet silence--some free time for our ears so we can appreciate other sounds other people take for granted. The sound of raindrops on a tin roof. The wind rustling through some blades of grass. Birds chirping and flapping their wings in flight.
But there's another kind of sound I want to hear--the sound of my own voice. Before you conclude that I'm some kind of egomaniac in love with himself, hear me out.
Soceity frowns on people who talk to themselves. I'm sure in many psychology books, self-conversation is a category of madness to some degree. I am not crazy, I can assure you that. But sometimes the techniques of memorization that worked for us in gradeschool can still work for us in the grown-up world today.
In the third grade, my teacher asked me to memorize a 20-paragraph poem, and recite it at a school program in two weeks. I did it by speaking the poem out loud as I can in the bathroom, piling one paragraph on top another every day until I could recite the whole thing entirely from memory.
These days, as a lawyer I don't have to recite poems. But it still builds my confidence to deliver my opening statement and oral arguments first to myself, before any judge. I figure I can do that in the bathroom again, but I discovered a better place and time: aboard my motorcycle as I zip through the rural countryside.
A full-face helmet hides your face and no one knows you're talking to yourself. Of course, very few people can actually see you self-conversing while you're riding a motorcycle where only cows graze along the roadsides. But during the brief intervals when you rejoin traffic at some intersection, I like the privacy of being able to carry on with no one thinking I was crazy. It helps that the constant drone of my motorcycle engine drowns out even the faint snippets of talk that might spill out of my full-face helmet. But for the most part, talking aloud behind a full-face helmet has allowed me to rehearse some of the most stirring oral arguments I have ever delivered in court.
In the city, in the middle of a crowd, I might be able to get away with the same stunt by wearing a hands-free earpiece. But I certainly couldn't yell--which I could behind a full-face helmet, on a lonely backroad, aboard my roaring motorcycle. No one will notice, no one will interefere. It's a paradox of circumstances that the noisiest thing you can imagine, like my 200cc streetbike, also gives me some of the most treasured private spaces I could find on this noisy planet.
I'm a lawyer and some would say noisemaking must be an element of the job. Courtrooms are notorious places to hear booming arguments. So are conference rooms where you hold union negotiations, etc. To put it cynically, someone in my profession might be hearing-impaired to some degree just because the risk comes with the territory.
You'll be surprised how we covet silence--some free time for our ears so we can appreciate other sounds other people take for granted. The sound of raindrops on a tin roof. The wind rustling through some blades of grass. Birds chirping and flapping their wings in flight.
But there's another kind of sound I want to hear--the sound of my own voice. Before you conclude that I'm some kind of egomaniac in love with himself, hear me out.
Soceity frowns on people who talk to themselves. I'm sure in many psychology books, self-conversation is a category of madness to some degree. I am not crazy, I can assure you that. But sometimes the techniques of memorization that worked for us in gradeschool can still work for us in the grown-up world today.
In the third grade, my teacher asked me to memorize a 20-paragraph poem, and recite it at a school program in two weeks. I did it by speaking the poem out loud as I can in the bathroom, piling one paragraph on top another every day until I could recite the whole thing entirely from memory.
These days, as a lawyer I don't have to recite poems. But it still builds my confidence to deliver my opening statement and oral arguments first to myself, before any judge. I figure I can do that in the bathroom again, but I discovered a better place and time: aboard my motorcycle as I zip through the rural countryside.
A full-face helmet hides your face and no one knows you're talking to yourself. Of course, very few people can actually see you self-conversing while you're riding a motorcycle where only cows graze along the roadsides. But during the brief intervals when you rejoin traffic at some intersection, I like the privacy of being able to carry on with no one thinking I was crazy. It helps that the constant drone of my motorcycle engine drowns out even the faint snippets of talk that might spill out of my full-face helmet. But for the most part, talking aloud behind a full-face helmet has allowed me to rehearse some of the most stirring oral arguments I have ever delivered in court.
In the city, in the middle of a crowd, I might be able to get away with the same stunt by wearing a hands-free earpiece. But I certainly couldn't yell--which I could behind a full-face helmet, on a lonely backroad, aboard my roaring motorcycle. No one will notice, no one will interefere. It's a paradox of circumstances that the noisiest thing you can imagine, like my 200cc streetbike, also gives me some of the most treasured private spaces I could find on this noisy planet.
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