I am definitely becoming a better rider. With the weather becoming increasingly better I choose a bike over my car almost every day logging over 30 miles daily. Today was not an exception. I left my house and started going down the street, my bike still cold and me still getting to the state of being fully alert. As I was approaching an intersection the light turned yellow. I was probably a couple of hundred yards away, I decided not to beat the light and to slow down instead. What happened next was the reflection of how “good” of a rider I really am.

I can’t stress enough how much I love my new Aprilia bike. Now that I am selling my Suzuki I figured that I’d much rather ride my new toy and keep the old toy stored for prospective buyers. There is one major difference between riding the SV650S and the Futura - the latter is much heavier. That imposes a different style of riding. What comes with that is a longer distance to stop.

So back to my morning incident - as I am slowing down I start down shifting. The bike slows down. I down shift from 4th to 3rd, then to 2nd as I am braking. Everything is fine up till this point. And then being not fully alert and probably still in a somewhat sleepy state I make a big mistake - while in 2nd and still applying front and rear brakes I forget to depress the clutch lever. Bike starts skidding, tires are screaming something unpleasant, my brain state morphs into a total freeze (or brain fart rather), people are staring, the bike stalls. Despite the total brain freeze one thought still pulsates in the back of my head - is this going to be the case when I drop my bike for the first time. A split second later I safely stop approximately 15-20 feet away from the pedestrian crosswalk. Didn’t even get scared. Brain goes back into the state where I can start analyzing what happened.

And what I believe had happened is the fact of someone half asleep and not alert getting involved in a inherently dangerous activity. Obviously had I been driving a car and been half asleep I could have made mistakes too. The only difference is that driving is more forgiving. The lesson of the day - make sure you are in the right state of mind when you want to go riding. From now on I’ll make sure I am.

Happy Monday. Stay safe.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Motorcycles, Street, Riding, 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.