It is true that motorcycle riding becomes dangerous once you are over a 3 month term into it. Tonight I had yet another close call in my short riding career.

To refresh your memory I had a number of them already when

• I was attacked by a Prius
• I was attacked by a woman driving an SUV
• a passenger decided to get out of a car right in the middle of the freeway
• a cell talking woman merged right into me

All these cases fall under the same category - the “it wasn’t my fault” category. it was always someone else who’d get me in dangerous situations. I was just a rider in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, today’s close call was entirely my fault.

I was riding from work today, splitting lanes at a moderate pace when I saw a rider on the opposite side of the freeway. His riding posture looked strange as he was leaning forward way too much. I got curious and concentrated my attention on him while he zoomed by. Less than a second later when I took my eyes off of the opposite side of the freeway and looked ahead I saw a pickup truck right in my way and its right side mirror flying towards me. Again years of competitive sports played to my advantage. Not being able to change my trajectory that quickly all I could do was dodge my head left. And the right side mirror almost stuck me on my beloved Arai helmet. The truck bed was so close to me, or rather I was so close to it that I had to lean right to avoid scraping it with my left arm. Once I got past the truck I altered the path of my bike a little to the right to stay in between lanes and continued on.

Target fixation is a very dangerous thing. And tonight I truly experienced its wrath. I will make sure to remember this lesson. I also hope you’ll learn from my mistakes and not yours.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Motorcycles, Street, Riding, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.