Take Heart......

[OTB]

I spent some time on the phone the other day with a tweener friend of mine; "tweener", cause he's not a newb anymore, but he's still in the accelerated learning mode but he's put about 10,000 miles on in the last couple years...he's not an expert, not a newb; he's a tweener......

...like me. Anyway, he rides with a group of REALLY fast guys on the street; these guys love to tear up the twisties and they are really good at it. And they make it look so easy. I ride with them on occasion, but I have to work to keep up, so it's not what I would call a relaxing ride. And I don't have the stamina of these young hot shots. And they are all "naturals". They took to it like ducks to water, do regular track days, and generally run circles around everybody else. Anyway, my tweener friend was lamenting that he had to work so hard to get what these guys considered "basic" or "just common sense" techniques; concentration, body position, setting up for turns, ect. He said he enjoyed riding, but then when he rode with these guys, he felt so inadaquate that he felt like selling the bike and giving it up.

I started riding in the seventies in my "late" teens. As a teenager I had poor coordination for team sports: I was the kid nobody wanted on their team. Thick glasses, poor hand/eye coordination for ball sports and an intolerance for having other guys slap me on the ass...................anywho....

Not exactly your prime candidate for high-speed motorsports, right?

I won't say I discovered I was a "natural" for bikes, either. Just the opposite. And to top it off, this was the days before MSF, the Hurt Report, Sportbike Magazine, Twist of the Wrist(I and II) and Nick Einatch was but a tender babe...trust to say that there was a dearth of training and literature on proper riding.

Let's see...klutzy kid, no training, little info and that which there was was mostly wrong; bikes had more engine than frames or brakes. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, eh?

I was lucky in that I hooked up with a group of guys that were experimenting with roadracing on the club level; I got to follow around some folks that could truly rock, on some truly scary machinery (not because it was so fast, but because it was so fast and shimmied and shook and tankslapped and siezed and spit us off..... a lot). We got to figure out how stuff worked on a basic level...because our stuff was so basic. "Adjustable suspension" meant cranking up the preload collar on our shocks (one on each side) or adding 15cc of 10 wt to the forks. The rest was up to the rider. There was only one DOT tire you could use on the track, it was a trigonic section Dunlop K81 and they wore out quickly on our 50 HP wonderbikes......simple times meant things mebbe didn't work so well, but things were also much simpler.

I dropped a few bikes, crashed a few times, read everything I could and experimented through the same set of turns, over and over. I spent hours and sparkplugs in the parking lot of my school, running through problems set up with sand-filled paper cups as cones. I practiced, I rode every chance I got in all types of weather.....

I got to see most of this great country on two wheels, met great people, had (and still have) great times and I'm still a tweener; I'm no expert and I learn something new everytime I go out; I love motorcycling and plan to do it as long as I'm able.

I made up for my lack of innate ability with practice and effort and got out of it the greatest experiences of my life. So if you've dumped your bike and are discouraged, or been scared by a few close calls, or always feel like you are "chasing the bike"; ie. always one step behind, and that you think you'll really like this thing, but mebbe you should forget it and take up golf......

...remember that if I can "get it" , you can, too.

Read a book on riding techniques, take another class, go out and practice in the parking lot, ride instead of driving....come ON!


I'll see ya out there.........


OTB