Bassil Duwaik
Tue Sep 5th, 2006, 12:36 AM
By peter Egan, from cycleworld
Gone on a press trip last week, I returned home to Wisconsin to be greeted with the astounding news that I'd missed a warm winter day on which it was virtually possible to ride a motorcycle, if you didn't mind the road salt eating your rimes.
Yes, it was all of 51 degrees, so you can see that "warm" is a relative term here in the upper Midwest. Loosely translated, it means "not so cold that you'd die right away if you locked yourself out of your car."
Family picnics, badminton games and watermelon-eating contest are not part of the picture. No one has a mint julep on the veranda. The ground is still frozen.
Nevertheless, several of my friends went for rides while I was gone. One even found time to crash.
Now, this is a guy who never makes mistakes like this. He's been motorcycling for 40 years, and I ride with him all the time. He's quick on a backroad but always seems to know when it's time to go slow and live. The very picture of maturity.
"So how did you happen to misjudge the curve?” I asked, intrigued by this anomalous event.
"Well, I was riding with a couple of other guys," he admitted, "and following a really fast rider on his new sportbike. I just went into a corner too fast."
"Ah," I said, the light bulb lit brightly at last, "a group ride with a fast guy. That explains everything."
And it did. I've been riding for 43 years and have observed that nearly every solo crash within my experience has been caused by one of two things:
Drinking a bunch of beer.
Trying to keep up with-or ahead of someone else.
Sometimes those factors combine, of course, and then you've got real trouble.
In this case, however, my friend doesn't drink-never has. He was simply trying, by his own admission, to keep up with someone else.
And this is the problem with group rides, which are both one of the true pleasures of motorcycling and one of its great hazards at the same time.
I actually ride in small groups all the time-usually with two or three close friends whos riding habits I know quite well. This helps a lot. We all like to go about the same speed, and ride within the same narrow band of talent (if "talent" is the right word for not having any).
I would call our sportbike rides "reasonably swift without the threat of imminent death." We're all older then 50 and see motorcycling as the sustaining infatuation that will take us blissfully into our retirement years. Also, we've all seen the insides of ambulances and don't like them much. But I've been on many rides exactly like the one that took my friend on his recent off-road adventure. In fact, I've ridden with so many competitive groups where you have mismatched of adrenalin, courage and skill that I can now almost predict Tragedy during the first five minutes of a ride. I'll leave a parking lot in a group of six or seven sportbikes, observe the riders around me and say to myself, with some certainty, "This day will not end well."
How do I know? Because I get infected with the same red mist as anyone else, and I can sense the tension in the air around me. There's an almost-palpable electricity in the atmosphere, and it soon starts to manifest itself in sparks off mufflers, and missed apexes, crossed centerlines and twitches in steering. Nowadays, when I feel this happening. I back off a notch.
Keeping up with someone who's slightly faster or smoother then you is admittedly a great part of the sport, because it helps you improve. But struggling to keep up with a rider who's a lot better-or in saner-is an exercise in futility.
Riding over your head to lead a group can be a problem, too. It engenders a "Watch this!" mentality, where the thing people usually end up watching is a big crash. I think the clinical term for this is "showing off."
Either way, the symptoms are easy to spot: sudden cold sweats, a tightening of neck muscles and a tendency to shout expletives in your helmet that would get you ejected from a decent restaurant. Or swatted by your mom.
Some years ago, I was on a group ride with my friend Bruce Finlayson, who was one of the best natural riders I ever knew. He made speed look easy. When the two of us rode together he calmed himself down to my level, just out of politeness, but in a large group of fast guys he liked to run at the front.
Why? Because he could, and most of us hate to follow riders who are markedly slower then we are. It's almost painful. We are most comfortable dropping into our natural spot in the Great Mandala, and, in Bruce's case, that spot was generally in the lead.
Anyways, at a rest stop on this fast-moving ride, one of the guys (who I will call Bob) walked up to Bruce and said, "You've gotta slow down, man. You're gonna get someone killed."
Bruce looked at the guy thoughtfully for a long moment, then put his hand on his shoulder and said, "Bob, ride your own bike."
That phrase has stuck in my mind ever since. Even now, when I get pushing too hard to stay with another rider and things get a little loose, I calm the situation down by saying to myself, "Egan, ride your own bike."
Naturally, no one really likes to admit being slower than someone else, at least not in a group of friends off for a sportbike ride though the countryside. But, as age and enlightened self preservation (i.e., mortal fear) set in,
I've developed a psychological defense for that problem, too.
When someone pulls away from me these days, I just shrug and say, "So what? He's still slower then Rossi."
Humility, in our sport, starts in second spot on a GP grid and works its way down, one hero at a time.
Gone on a press trip last week, I returned home to Wisconsin to be greeted with the astounding news that I'd missed a warm winter day on which it was virtually possible to ride a motorcycle, if you didn't mind the road salt eating your rimes.
Yes, it was all of 51 degrees, so you can see that "warm" is a relative term here in the upper Midwest. Loosely translated, it means "not so cold that you'd die right away if you locked yourself out of your car."
Family picnics, badminton games and watermelon-eating contest are not part of the picture. No one has a mint julep on the veranda. The ground is still frozen.
Nevertheless, several of my friends went for rides while I was gone. One even found time to crash.
Now, this is a guy who never makes mistakes like this. He's been motorcycling for 40 years, and I ride with him all the time. He's quick on a backroad but always seems to know when it's time to go slow and live. The very picture of maturity.
"So how did you happen to misjudge the curve?” I asked, intrigued by this anomalous event.
"Well, I was riding with a couple of other guys," he admitted, "and following a really fast rider on his new sportbike. I just went into a corner too fast."
"Ah," I said, the light bulb lit brightly at last, "a group ride with a fast guy. That explains everything."
And it did. I've been riding for 43 years and have observed that nearly every solo crash within my experience has been caused by one of two things:
Drinking a bunch of beer.
Trying to keep up with-or ahead of someone else.
Sometimes those factors combine, of course, and then you've got real trouble.
In this case, however, my friend doesn't drink-never has. He was simply trying, by his own admission, to keep up with someone else.
And this is the problem with group rides, which are both one of the true pleasures of motorcycling and one of its great hazards at the same time.
I actually ride in small groups all the time-usually with two or three close friends whos riding habits I know quite well. This helps a lot. We all like to go about the same speed, and ride within the same narrow band of talent (if "talent" is the right word for not having any).
I would call our sportbike rides "reasonably swift without the threat of imminent death." We're all older then 50 and see motorcycling as the sustaining infatuation that will take us blissfully into our retirement years. Also, we've all seen the insides of ambulances and don't like them much. But I've been on many rides exactly like the one that took my friend on his recent off-road adventure. In fact, I've ridden with so many competitive groups where you have mismatched of adrenalin, courage and skill that I can now almost predict Tragedy during the first five minutes of a ride. I'll leave a parking lot in a group of six or seven sportbikes, observe the riders around me and say to myself, with some certainty, "This day will not end well."
How do I know? Because I get infected with the same red mist as anyone else, and I can sense the tension in the air around me. There's an almost-palpable electricity in the atmosphere, and it soon starts to manifest itself in sparks off mufflers, and missed apexes, crossed centerlines and twitches in steering. Nowadays, when I feel this happening. I back off a notch.
Keeping up with someone who's slightly faster or smoother then you is admittedly a great part of the sport, because it helps you improve. But struggling to keep up with a rider who's a lot better-or in saner-is an exercise in futility.
Riding over your head to lead a group can be a problem, too. It engenders a "Watch this!" mentality, where the thing people usually end up watching is a big crash. I think the clinical term for this is "showing off."
Either way, the symptoms are easy to spot: sudden cold sweats, a tightening of neck muscles and a tendency to shout expletives in your helmet that would get you ejected from a decent restaurant. Or swatted by your mom.
Some years ago, I was on a group ride with my friend Bruce Finlayson, who was one of the best natural riders I ever knew. He made speed look easy. When the two of us rode together he calmed himself down to my level, just out of politeness, but in a large group of fast guys he liked to run at the front.
Why? Because he could, and most of us hate to follow riders who are markedly slower then we are. It's almost painful. We are most comfortable dropping into our natural spot in the Great Mandala, and, in Bruce's case, that spot was generally in the lead.
Anyways, at a rest stop on this fast-moving ride, one of the guys (who I will call Bob) walked up to Bruce and said, "You've gotta slow down, man. You're gonna get someone killed."
Bruce looked at the guy thoughtfully for a long moment, then put his hand on his shoulder and said, "Bob, ride your own bike."
That phrase has stuck in my mind ever since. Even now, when I get pushing too hard to stay with another rider and things get a little loose, I calm the situation down by saying to myself, "Egan, ride your own bike."
Naturally, no one really likes to admit being slower than someone else, at least not in a group of friends off for a sportbike ride though the countryside. But, as age and enlightened self preservation (i.e., mortal fear) set in,
I've developed a psychological defense for that problem, too.
When someone pulls away from me these days, I just shrug and say, "So what? He's still slower then Rossi."
Humility, in our sport, starts in second spot on a GP grid and works its way down, one hero at a time.