Day Three

Another early start. We finished our workbook stuff as homework last night so we started the day out on the bikes. That all went fine up to and past lunch. We did swerves, emergency braking, cornering, and the dreaded U-turn and various combinations of all of them. One guy didn’t show up for class so we were down to 9. After lunch we started on obstacles. These are inroad obstacles that you can either go over (like a 2×4) or very quickly go around (like a stopped bus). Everyone was cruising around, rolling on the throttle, up a bit in the seat, and over, down on the throttle. We were pushing maybe 15mph. As I approach the 3rd turn I notice the guy in front of me has stopped and the guy in front of him has stopped. We hadn’t done any stops away from the cones/parking area so I look to the left and there’s this lady, Cindy, lying face first on the ground with her bike on top of her. The instructors come over and she hasn’t moved. They’re with her for a long time, eventually we turn off the bikes and stand beside them and another instructor from the other class comes over to see whats going on. She still hasn’t moved. Now I’m starting to feel a little nervous. Eventually they call us off the course to “take a break”. They end up calling an ambulance, which took Cindy away to some hospital and later on to Emory. She was proceeding over the obstacle, applied too much throttle at some point when the rear wheel was up over the board and then didn’t roll back, the wheel met the ground at a higher speed and high-sided her right off the bike, head first to the ground with 286 (dry) pounds of motorcycle falling shortly thereafter on her leg. She was wearing a helmet, it is a safety course! But she had a pretty serious concussion and maybe a broken leg. It was unnerving to see it, especially in a closed course with safety instructors and all of the instruction leading up to that point. You can tell how people are progressing in the course, its the same for people that have ridden before (but not on a daily basis) and those who have never ridden. At first its hard to trust the bike. There’s that grain of doubt about ability. But I found its that fear that will do one of two things; you will either be on the verge of freaking out and letting it defeat you (which in Cindy’s case put her on the ground and in the hospital) or you will constantly be thinking one step ahead of the bike, confident that *when* (not if) you do something wrong, your reaction will handle the situation. And these were only 250cc motorcycles. Some of the people in the course, who couldn’t do some of the objectives the first, second, sometimes third or fourth time through, are already “riders” with bikes that are FAR more powerful and FAR heavier. Thats a scary thought. Everybody made substantial progress over the 3 days but that is lightyears from being ready to ride on the street… or anywhere near the street. The only other incident was that Gabrielle dropped her bike on an emergency stop because of a front-brake lever grab (she didn’t progressively apply the front brake). She was unhurt and standing about 2ms after it was over, looking around like “You guys didn’t see that did you?”. As for me, I passed the riding skills course and the written test thus exempting any state test necessary to get the license endorsed. That said, there’s no way in hell I’d even THINK about riding anywhere but a parking lot for the next I don’t know how long. The Basic Riders Course was a great course. The information in the course is good for riding motorcycles but much of it applies to driving cars too. Unfortunately it can’t give you the experience you have to have to survive on the street, that only comes with practice which comes with falls and perhaps other unpleasant incidents.

Kofi (not pictured) took this photo of the class and emailed it to me. That’s Bob on the right and Jeff in the back, the two instructors.