Sometime ago Motodisiac had blogged about him almost dropping his Aprilia. Now my turn has come. I also did not drop my bike, but again like him was really close to dropping it. Here is what happened.

Two weekends ago we went canyon riding. The total of 4 riders including myself and Motodisiac. We went to Malibu canyons. Everything was going great. It was my 3rd canyon ride. I was feeling good and confident. We were coming up to this stop sign, Motodisiac and another rider from our group were waiting for me and the 4th member of our group. I pulled up to them, stopped and put my left foot to the ground. Except there was no ground to be found. What I did not notice was the slight incline of the pavement at that intersection. As I was instinctively leaning left to find the ground my bike was leaning along with me. And every rider knows that once a bike starts leaning, aka dropping there is a certain point of no return. I went past that point. My left foot was on the ground, so was my right. But the bike kept going left. It was definitely going to drop. Again years of playing competitive sports came to the rescue. I jumped off the bike, got pretty much under it from the left side and began doing a kind of a biceps curl.

Both of us have had close calls on our Aprilia’s before. Motodisiac’s close calls were the infamous wind tunnel and the morning drop story. Mine had just one close call. We were hanging out at the previous owner’s house making a sale, the bike was standing outside on the kickstand. Then suddenly Motodisiac had noticed that the pavement was slightly uneven. As he noticed that the bike started slowly crawling off of its kick stand. Luckily all 3 of us (the previous owner, Motodisiac and Yours truly) were standing right next to it. This time around it was me against the bike, Motodisiac and another rider helplessly sitting on their bikes a couple of feet away as I was desperately trying to lift the bike back up from what was later described as an 80% lean back up.

My one and only thought at that time was - hold on. Approximately 20 seconds into the fight with an almost 500lbs dumbbell I suddenly started to gain ground. The bike slowly was going back up. Apparently I had some extra adrenaline that just kicked in or something. And long story short - the bike was back up right and put on its kick stand.

After a very thorough inspection we did not notice a single scratch or even a remote reflection of any part of the bike touching the ground. So a lot of luck with good reaction and being athletic came to my rescue this time. The score is 2:2 now. Both mine and Motodisiac’s Aprilias had 2 close calls each. Hopefully we’ll freeze this score.

Lesson for life - always see where you put your feet when stopping.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Motorcycles, Street, Riding, Life, Learning. 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.