Learning to Ride the Hard Way

A popular saying among motorcycle riders is, "ride within in your abilities". Meaning, don't push yourself beyond what you're comfortable with.

That statement became a point of discussion yesterday.

Five of us were sitting down eating hamburgers at Nessie's in Bonsall, CA, after a ride around the back country. One of the guys had crashed his bike during the same ride.

I had said that you can't look at it as having damaged your bike, or having injured yourself. But rather, look at it as gaining knowledge. Besides, he needed to come up with an explanation for his wife, who he felt certain was going to give him an "I told you so". And what better explanation than to say, "Well Honey, I'm a better rider now"?

We were on a stretch of road here in SoCal known as "Mesa Grande", in northern San Diego County, and popular with motorcycler riders. The first few miles of this road is straight, with almost no traffic, encouraging people to crank the throttle. Then it takes a hard turn to the left in a 20mph switchback. Many riders have gone down here, with yesterday being the latest.

The bike got the worst of it, but it turned out to be rideable. He suffered only some scrapes and bruises. And despite the CHP, the Sheriff, and the ambulance, we pulled the bike out of the ditch, and he continued on with the ride.

One of the coincidences, is that another guy riding with us made the same statement I made on this blog last month, "There are riders who have crashed, and there are riders who will crash."

The guy who crashed responded back with, "I always wondered what it would feel like, going down." Well, he knows what it feels like to go down easy into a ditch, around 35mph, even though it was still a painful experience. Hopefully he won't experience a more worse accident.

But let's get back to the conversation at Nessie's.

He said "While I should definitely ride within my ability, how am I supposed to improve if I don't try pushing myself?"

This guy had been riding for about a year. I had ridden with him several times, mostly in the past couple of months, but I've known him for about a year. He's witnessed how most of us in our riding club ride, and used us to measure his skill level.

He's always been a cautious rider, riding slower than most people I normally ride with. I can't fault any of that. But I was in the same place he had been in, riding slowly and cautiously, until I started riding with a group. I noticed most of the riders possessed quite a bit more skill than I. I would push myself beyond the comfort level because I wanted to improve.

To answer his question, he certainly should push himself. Part of the benefit of group riding is to improve your riding skills. He simply went into the switchback faster than he was accustomed to handling, and scraped his floorboard. Hearing the sound of the scrape jarred his conscience and caused him to straighten up, and into the path of the ditch. He just needs to spend more time scraping his floorboard and getting used to the sound.

You could also argue that Mesa Grande is not the place to scrape your floorboards if you're not used to the sound. Maybe. But then again, I'd argue that roads in and of themselves are not dangerous; it's how hard or soft you ride that makes it dangerous. I think pushing himself on Mesa Grande is fine, he just pushed himself too hard than what he was prepared to handle.

One thing that some of us in our riding club have said, is that we want to spend time doing practices. That's something we didn't do in the other clubs we've been in. Brian and I actually spent some time doing this about a couple of months ago, riding up and down Wilson Valley about three times in each direction, each time practicing how we approached the curves, and each time discussing what we could do to improve.

I'm going to start doing more of those practices in this club.