If the title didnt give it away....I'm a NooB. This is a collection of experiences and advice I have to fellow noobs after my first 6,000km.
Im writing this as I think you will find it very helpful. Someone did it for me and it saved my life many times over and is continuing to do so every time I head out.
Ive spent a lot of time and effort trying to learn about safe motorcycling proactively. Rather than invest the same amount of time I did in scouring internet forums, reading books and articles about motorcycling, and just trying stupid things on the road, I think you will appreciate a cross-section of the most important things I’ve learnt up until now. I am still learning though as are we all.
The most important thing is attitude, I’ve found. This is especially true for me personally because I’m an unsafe person by nature, I do crazy and risky things. So for me, drilling a proper attitude into my head has saved my life I HAVE NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT. That’s because I’ve already had some close calls and that’s IN SPITE of my drilling into my own head a proactively safe attitude on AND off the road.
On the road having a safe attitude is straightforward enough so I wont bother explaining what I mean. Off the road, it becomes a little more muddled. For me, primarily, it is research. When I get home from a ride I pick a handful of areas or situations in which I was unclear of what was EXACTLY the right course of action. I post on internet forums in the form of questions and after reading the many responses I get, learn quite a few new things every single day. People that have been riding for 30 years learn something new and extremely helpful very often every day they ride. So for us beginners, even after you have spent maybe 5k km or 2 years on a bike (or less at this point) I have found it EXTREMELY helpful to proactively learn and ALWAYS keep a humble attitude about your own skills and abilities. Things I have proactively asked questions about have saved my *** later that week. It is seriously amazing how many things factor into safe motorcycling. The course you took was great, I took something similar, but it is an introduction, not an indepth look at everything.
Real world lessons:
These are things Ive learnt (some of them from you internet peoplez ) when out on the roads and while at home. Some were extremely close calls that could have ended badly, some were me actually falling, some were things I learnt from my proactive approach which helped me out tremendously in real world Edmonton driving. It is a summary of the most important things I learned but isn’t everything. Ill post some helpful links at the end of this eventually. In the meantime remember im a noob. This is my take on my first 6,000km and the things that helped me out personally more than anything else and lessons i learned. The most helpful things will be different for every noob and I might be a touch inaccurate in some places.
1) Dangers in corners:
-When beginning a corner, take a late-apex approach to the corner. What that means is when you are approaching the corner, try to delay your beginning the actual turn as late as possible. You’re line of travel should take you to the outside of your lane on approach. But contrary to the line a racer takes to a corner, you delay entry into the corner as long as it is safe to do so, and then you enter the corner. This gives you maximum visibility of debris in the corner, potholes, tar-snakes (road repair patches), traffic in blind corners, spilled oil near intersections, things that fall off the back of trucks, anything and everything. This picture shows you what Im talking about:
the green line is the optimal racing line on a racetrack. Dark blue is the worst way to enter a corner on the racetrack or on the roads. And light blue is THE LATE APEX approach Im talking about. That’s the one you want.
2) Use of brakes:
- You have 3 forms of braking in your bike. Front brake, rear brake, engine brake (dropping your gear and letting off clutch to use the transmission to slow the bike). Each have their uses. And Im not even gonna pretend to be able to give you proper advice here. Use the internet to learn from people that have been riding for 30 years. In a nut shell these are the WORST case scenarios I experienced PERSONALLY so it’s a place to start.
- Inadvertant engine braking in mid-corner: sometimes you have to slow down mid-corner. You can do this safely with the front brake if you use it properly. The danger I experienced was after having slowed down you will now be in too high of a gear to re-accelerate and avoid the dangers behind you (as traffic is now bearing in on your *** from behind). You will need to downshift and then resume acceleration while still in midcorner. This happened to me on groat road in the middle of a traffic ball at normal traffic speeds. Lesson to be learnt is know your gears, know your speeds in diff gears and which rpm works best for diff speeds in diff gears, and feather the clutch gently if you are even slightly unsure. I dropped into first gear from second after having decelerated when the person in front of me braked for no reason. Then mid-corner I had a car bearing down on me from behind. I had to accelerate now but since I was in second gear I wouldn’t have gotten any power at the speed I was at. So I dropped into first and in my rush to accelerate again I let off the clutch too quickly and my revs were too low. My bike pitched forward and I was lucky not to lock the rear tire. What happens when you do that is your rear tire is moving SLOWER than your front tire and wants to slide outwards. If it slides out too far (mine didn’t slide that far but if it had slid any further I would have been in trouble) then your bike will highside. And highsiding on groat road with its blind corners could very well mean game-over.
3) Rear-tire slipping out mid-corner:
- This happens when you hit a patch of oil, or tar snakes (those tar strips they use to repair bits of road), or small patches of gravel, or patches of ice from dew on the road, or a puddle of water that makes you hydroplane a little bit, or anything else that would make your tire slip out but only momentarily. What your instincts will be telling you is let off the throttle a little bit, or brake just a little bit, or stand the bike up a little bit. ALL of those are the worst thing you could do there. The best thing to do is not fight the bike. Loosen your arms, hold your throttle steady, hold your line (unless there’s more hazards ahead of you obviously), and let the bike bring itself back on line (don’t stand it up too quickly). When your rear tire is slipping out a little but is going to come back on line, if you let off the throttle or straighten the bike too quickly, or even brake a touch (with any of the 3 types of braking) you will be very likely to highside. How that happens is when your rear tire goes from slipping out to being brought back on line too quickly and it snaps back the other way, then back the other way, and then back again (sometimes it only snaps back once, sometimes it snaps back and forth a few times, but the end result is always the same….you go flying over the top of the bike as the bike snaps sideways….you “highside”). Also, tightening your arms or grip will increase the likelihood of a highside in this scenario. Loosening my arms while this was happening may well have been what saved me from highsiding that day.
4) Loosen arms let bike work for you:
-a BIG noob tendancy is to tighten your grip on the handles or stiffen your arms, especially in emergency or poor-traction or unstable moments….that is the worst thing you can do in those situations because your rider input is fighting the bikes natural tendencies. I was doing this ALL of my first 1,000km in those unstable moments even though I was ACTIVELY trying to loosen my grip/arms. It is a natural bodily reflex which is BAD for motorcycling. Here’s a good way I found to look at the situation. If you’re going 150km/hr….and you TRY to make the bike crash on its side……you can’t. It is rock solid stable because the sheer speed it is travelling at is the root of its vertical stability. The centrifugal force of the tires spinning is where a motorcycles stability comes from. Work WITH it not AGAINST it. In a lot of scenarios (pretty much all scenarios) you need to loosen your grip, and your arms and rely on appropriate rider inputs of handle bar turning, leaning, braking, etc etc. That works WITH the bike and not AGAINST it. It is easy to say, hard to do because your natural responses act against what the motorcycle wants to do. In number (3) above I loosened my arms and increased throttle. That’s what brought the bike back on line and the rear tire back where it was supposed to be. IF I had just increased throttle and tightened my arms (As my natural instincts were telling me to do) I would have highsided because I would have pointed the bike where it didn’t want to go. Loosening my arms is what let it follow its natural stable course of travel as dictated by the force of the tires spinning keeping the bike upright (basic force acting on a bike keepin it upright).
5) Natural instincts are bad
- In a surprising amount of scenarios, your natural instincts are the worst thing you can do in that given situation. From letting off the throttle when hit by a big gust of wind on the highway, to standing the bike up too quickly when your footpeg scrapes the ground in the middle of a corner, to tensing up on the handlebars….natural bodily responses are among the worst things you can do when confronted with different situations. The only way to counter them is, according to what people have told me, time and experience. It happens gradually over 30-40 years of motorcycling, and even then you need to practice it. Learn about everything that can happen and the appropriate response to it. That way when it happens you have something to fall back on. That way when something happens you aren’t being governed by your natural responses….you are applying a response as a thought-out effective solution to the trouble you find yourself in.
6) Wind on highways
-first time I got hit by a big gust of wind on the highway scared the **** out of me. I let off the throttle abruptly and the bike went flying to the other side of the lane and I almost crashed (natural response of slowing on throttle almost caused a crash). Proper response: hold your throttle or increase it (you want the bikes natural stability at speed to work for you) and lean INTO the wind to hold a straight line.
Continued in next post....
Im writing this as I think you will find it very helpful. Someone did it for me and it saved my life many times over and is continuing to do so every time I head out.
Ive spent a lot of time and effort trying to learn about safe motorcycling proactively. Rather than invest the same amount of time I did in scouring internet forums, reading books and articles about motorcycling, and just trying stupid things on the road, I think you will appreciate a cross-section of the most important things I’ve learnt up until now. I am still learning though as are we all.
The most important thing is attitude, I’ve found. This is especially true for me personally because I’m an unsafe person by nature, I do crazy and risky things. So for me, drilling a proper attitude into my head has saved my life I HAVE NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT. That’s because I’ve already had some close calls and that’s IN SPITE of my drilling into my own head a proactively safe attitude on AND off the road.
On the road having a safe attitude is straightforward enough so I wont bother explaining what I mean. Off the road, it becomes a little more muddled. For me, primarily, it is research. When I get home from a ride I pick a handful of areas or situations in which I was unclear of what was EXACTLY the right course of action. I post on internet forums in the form of questions and after reading the many responses I get, learn quite a few new things every single day. People that have been riding for 30 years learn something new and extremely helpful very often every day they ride. So for us beginners, even after you have spent maybe 5k km or 2 years on a bike (or less at this point) I have found it EXTREMELY helpful to proactively learn and ALWAYS keep a humble attitude about your own skills and abilities. Things I have proactively asked questions about have saved my *** later that week. It is seriously amazing how many things factor into safe motorcycling. The course you took was great, I took something similar, but it is an introduction, not an indepth look at everything.
Real world lessons:
These are things Ive learnt (some of them from you internet peoplez ) when out on the roads and while at home. Some were extremely close calls that could have ended badly, some were me actually falling, some were things I learnt from my proactive approach which helped me out tremendously in real world Edmonton driving. It is a summary of the most important things I learned but isn’t everything. Ill post some helpful links at the end of this eventually. In the meantime remember im a noob. This is my take on my first 6,000km and the things that helped me out personally more than anything else and lessons i learned. The most helpful things will be different for every noob and I might be a touch inaccurate in some places.
1) Dangers in corners:
-When beginning a corner, take a late-apex approach to the corner. What that means is when you are approaching the corner, try to delay your beginning the actual turn as late as possible. You’re line of travel should take you to the outside of your lane on approach. But contrary to the line a racer takes to a corner, you delay entry into the corner as long as it is safe to do so, and then you enter the corner. This gives you maximum visibility of debris in the corner, potholes, tar-snakes (road repair patches), traffic in blind corners, spilled oil near intersections, things that fall off the back of trucks, anything and everything. This picture shows you what Im talking about:
the green line is the optimal racing line on a racetrack. Dark blue is the worst way to enter a corner on the racetrack or on the roads. And light blue is THE LATE APEX approach Im talking about. That’s the one you want.
2) Use of brakes:
- You have 3 forms of braking in your bike. Front brake, rear brake, engine brake (dropping your gear and letting off clutch to use the transmission to slow the bike). Each have their uses. And Im not even gonna pretend to be able to give you proper advice here. Use the internet to learn from people that have been riding for 30 years. In a nut shell these are the WORST case scenarios I experienced PERSONALLY so it’s a place to start.
- Inadvertant engine braking in mid-corner: sometimes you have to slow down mid-corner. You can do this safely with the front brake if you use it properly. The danger I experienced was after having slowed down you will now be in too high of a gear to re-accelerate and avoid the dangers behind you (as traffic is now bearing in on your *** from behind). You will need to downshift and then resume acceleration while still in midcorner. This happened to me on groat road in the middle of a traffic ball at normal traffic speeds. Lesson to be learnt is know your gears, know your speeds in diff gears and which rpm works best for diff speeds in diff gears, and feather the clutch gently if you are even slightly unsure. I dropped into first gear from second after having decelerated when the person in front of me braked for no reason. Then mid-corner I had a car bearing down on me from behind. I had to accelerate now but since I was in second gear I wouldn’t have gotten any power at the speed I was at. So I dropped into first and in my rush to accelerate again I let off the clutch too quickly and my revs were too low. My bike pitched forward and I was lucky not to lock the rear tire. What happens when you do that is your rear tire is moving SLOWER than your front tire and wants to slide outwards. If it slides out too far (mine didn’t slide that far but if it had slid any further I would have been in trouble) then your bike will highside. And highsiding on groat road with its blind corners could very well mean game-over.
3) Rear-tire slipping out mid-corner:
- This happens when you hit a patch of oil, or tar snakes (those tar strips they use to repair bits of road), or small patches of gravel, or patches of ice from dew on the road, or a puddle of water that makes you hydroplane a little bit, or anything else that would make your tire slip out but only momentarily. What your instincts will be telling you is let off the throttle a little bit, or brake just a little bit, or stand the bike up a little bit. ALL of those are the worst thing you could do there. The best thing to do is not fight the bike. Loosen your arms, hold your throttle steady, hold your line (unless there’s more hazards ahead of you obviously), and let the bike bring itself back on line (don’t stand it up too quickly). When your rear tire is slipping out a little but is going to come back on line, if you let off the throttle or straighten the bike too quickly, or even brake a touch (with any of the 3 types of braking) you will be very likely to highside. How that happens is when your rear tire goes from slipping out to being brought back on line too quickly and it snaps back the other way, then back the other way, and then back again (sometimes it only snaps back once, sometimes it snaps back and forth a few times, but the end result is always the same….you go flying over the top of the bike as the bike snaps sideways….you “highside”). Also, tightening your arms or grip will increase the likelihood of a highside in this scenario. Loosening my arms while this was happening may well have been what saved me from highsiding that day.
4) Loosen arms let bike work for you:
-a BIG noob tendancy is to tighten your grip on the handles or stiffen your arms, especially in emergency or poor-traction or unstable moments….that is the worst thing you can do in those situations because your rider input is fighting the bikes natural tendencies. I was doing this ALL of my first 1,000km in those unstable moments even though I was ACTIVELY trying to loosen my grip/arms. It is a natural bodily reflex which is BAD for motorcycling. Here’s a good way I found to look at the situation. If you’re going 150km/hr….and you TRY to make the bike crash on its side……you can’t. It is rock solid stable because the sheer speed it is travelling at is the root of its vertical stability. The centrifugal force of the tires spinning is where a motorcycles stability comes from. Work WITH it not AGAINST it. In a lot of scenarios (pretty much all scenarios) you need to loosen your grip, and your arms and rely on appropriate rider inputs of handle bar turning, leaning, braking, etc etc. That works WITH the bike and not AGAINST it. It is easy to say, hard to do because your natural responses act against what the motorcycle wants to do. In number (3) above I loosened my arms and increased throttle. That’s what brought the bike back on line and the rear tire back where it was supposed to be. IF I had just increased throttle and tightened my arms (As my natural instincts were telling me to do) I would have highsided because I would have pointed the bike where it didn’t want to go. Loosening my arms is what let it follow its natural stable course of travel as dictated by the force of the tires spinning keeping the bike upright (basic force acting on a bike keepin it upright).
5) Natural instincts are bad
- In a surprising amount of scenarios, your natural instincts are the worst thing you can do in that given situation. From letting off the throttle when hit by a big gust of wind on the highway, to standing the bike up too quickly when your footpeg scrapes the ground in the middle of a corner, to tensing up on the handlebars….natural bodily responses are among the worst things you can do when confronted with different situations. The only way to counter them is, according to what people have told me, time and experience. It happens gradually over 30-40 years of motorcycling, and even then you need to practice it. Learn about everything that can happen and the appropriate response to it. That way when it happens you have something to fall back on. That way when something happens you aren’t being governed by your natural responses….you are applying a response as a thought-out effective solution to the trouble you find yourself in.
6) Wind on highways
-first time I got hit by a big gust of wind on the highway scared the **** out of me. I let off the throttle abruptly and the bike went flying to the other side of the lane and I almost crashed (natural response of slowing on throttle almost caused a crash). Proper response: hold your throttle or increase it (you want the bikes natural stability at speed to work for you) and lean INTO the wind to hold a straight line.
Continued in next post....
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