After an 18 year hiatus from motorcycle riding, I decided in my late 40s to begin again. I decided to take a three day safety riding course that, if passed, would exempt me from displaying my skills at the local DMV, when applying for my Virginia driver’s license endorsement as a legal two wheeled rider.
The first day in a class of 23 mostly rookies was spent in a classroom. There were lots of white board diagrams, simple to remember rules regarding technique, quizzes, and lots and lots of riding video. These last were like unbelievably good. I became obsessed with them. They were like porn films. They had an almost exhibitionistic and gymnastic quality. I provided rhythmic classical music accompaniment inside my head to what I was seeing. God, it felt great watching them as if I was on one of those bikes as they performed their tight turns, emergency evasion and stop maneuvers.
The following two weekend days would be spent from 730 AM to 5 PM on 250cc motorcycles on a large empty parking lot dotted with orange cones to build and test our skills.
These are some of the highlights of that weekend.
– Marlow
So there we were, standing there on a quiet, clear, cloudless fall day in Northern Virginia. And our motorcycle teachers, true road-tested instructors, came out and announced their former lines of work from professor, to plumber to doctor and pipe fitter. Now they weren’t quite retired, but they were finally doing what they always really wanted to do, teaching motorcycle riding. “And aren’t you all lucky to be here on one of this most beautiful of days in America,” he said like a bizarre, joy-filled drill instructor, “standing next to your first rides, under a cloudless, blue sky, looking out over an Arlington ridge towards the skyline of our national Capitol.” And so we were, and it was spectacular.
We began to do the first moves on an elongated, first gear, oval course with long easy turns. As we started down the back chute, some found it a bit awkward coming out of the turn, but I stayed balanced and maintained a good riding posture. My handlebar grip was firm but not tight, I was not clenching the bike with my legs and was able to easily keep the bike at the directed 10 MPH speed. The bikes, while worn and dinged from past classes, were in fine tune and purred like Singer sewing machines. By the third circuit, everyone was doing fine. Then we were told to shift into second and increase our speed to 20 MPH and go into the turns at a bit faster pace.
Then they added another oval to our first one to make us do figure eights and turn both left and right. Major complexity increase for true riding rookies.
More than a few people then started going wide, shallow, right, left, and I found that for some reason — I never have found out why — I could turn left effortlessly but had some guidance issues going to the right. But I was doing that fine after the first circuit. I was ready for weaving. But that would come later in the day.
Some found the tighter figure eights difficult when the instructors reduced and then eliminated the straightaways. I knew from past riding that you should not think your way around this. You needed to feel your way and lean and shift, back and forth, through this course skill. Those who had difficulties were given personalized instruction by our pros. All mastered it after another 5 minutes.
Weaving: DayGlo orange cones were set up in long, loose weave patterns, and we endlessly rode back and forth between them. They then put them closer which made us slow down further and move our eyes back and forth rhythmically. Riding through this decreasingly spaced orange cones forced us to develop a trusted no look down rhythm. That was tough, and cones started to fly and/or get flattened. Touch a cone during the final exam and you flunked the course.
After 30-40 minutes of this, we confronted the emergency stop drill.
As an aside, poor eye discipline nearly tripped up the rawer rookies up that first day. As in look there, go there. So look through a turn, but do NOT look down. The punishment for falling was instant sidelining. We had only one fall that first day.
Sitting on their bikes’ saddles as the instructors gave us finely pointed directions about emergency evasion and stops, some students showed signs of dejection, or even hopelessness. Several looked like they had descended into a deep slough. Before even trying this, they were going “Oh no, failed again.”
The instructors picked up on this and had us prior experienced riders do the techniques first in front of the rest. For the emergency stop they had us ride straight at the instructors at 20 MPH and upon a surprise signalling immediately lock up our brakes and skid straight to a stop in front of them. You then did this at ~ 30 MPH. They sure went through a lot of smoking rubber on this drill, but the point was crucial to surviving these situations on the road. I was glad when the class finished this section without any falls or instructor collisions.
The emergency evasion took even more guts on the part of the instructors as this drill had students barrel straight at them at 25-30 MPH and move right or left when signalled. They often did this with less than 40 feet between the riders and them. I saw more than a few of these pros leap when a student vapor locked his directions and headed straight at the instructor.
One rider, however, did something the instructors had apparently never seen before. No matter how many times this rider was signaled to evade right, the rider went left and then performed an emergency brake locking stop. Was he fearful that going right would involve him going into some imaginary patch of bushes, coming out the other side with branches in his mouth like a Botticelli? This rider was taken off to the side and given some patient one-on-one instruction until he demonstrated the correct braking-free reactions.
Now, for a brief period at the end of day 1, four of us were sent off the far end of the lot and were allowed to set up our our weaving pattern and tight maze with no instructor. We took turns trying these difficult patterns on our own.
That this all came back so quickly after a two decade absence was amazing. So much of it was just steady eye scan, a shift of weight, lean angle change or decreased elbow bend. It was sort of the same experience I had on a summer day in the early 1950s when I first learned how to pump on a swing. It was so beautiful. It was like zen, but not as subtle.
If you weren’t present, you crashed, and the road hit you or you hit the road. I realized at that point that all my life I’d been doing a kind of subtle suicide to myself. I had always been somewhere else in my head. I was always thinking, oh, I could be there. Or I could be there. I could be there. Or I wish I was there. But now when I’m motorcycling, I can’t do that as long as I’m on the bike.
I was so excited that the second day passed in a blur. It was mostly taken up with refining all the skills we had learned the first day. Final tests were a time of anxiety for the shakier members of the class. Two flunked with cone hits and while one fell and one put his foot down before stopping during the emergency evasion check.
It was a great day for the rest of us who passed. It was a bit windy like the old timey cartoons that had clouds with faces and a wind puffing out of their lips onto our backsides. As we moved up in each line for another skill test, we weren’t talking other than telling each testee to pass as he or she left the group. We had motorcycled together for two days but these tests were us against the standard.
Those who flunked were flat-lining until the instructors told them they could come back the next Sunday afternoon and get a free do-over on the entire test, since they had only flunked a single skill check.
The following day, I woke up and thought, oh, my god. Now, there’s motorcycling, and there’s life. And I don’t want to live anymore. I don’t want to come back from endlessly motorcing backcountry roads. I gotta figure out how to stay out there. I now had a mission.
I wanted to crisscross America and Canada. Endlessly. The fat lady was never gonna sing.
I would pick up my new Harley FatBoy the next day across the Potomac River.
Now, I would be riding a bit out of control to be in control. For a second, I’d be leaning, almost falling down on the inside of a tight turn until I caught myself by a slight throttle twist or brake pressure. Small skill tips like these were like leaps of faith that would allow me to ride in good confidence of their worth due to endless repetition during the class.
These lessons taught me more than concrete skills. They helped me overcome fears.
Riding the cones
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