Riding the bike like a champion
(Michael writes)
What a day! And what a start to the day! The alarm sounded at 5 am, giving me enough time to recombobulate myself, shower, eat, dress and then discover that it was 41°F outside! Yowzers! So, I plugged in my heated jacket liner, fired up the heated grips, and set off.
Ten students showed up today, including one who left Norfolk at 4 am and rode his super sport the 3 hours to Quantico this morning. When he arrived, his hands barely worked, his lips were blue, and he was beyond cold, so the first order of business was to warm him up inside and out.
Yamaha Champions Riding School is owned and operated by Nick Ienatsch, who is someone that people who follow motorcycle racing might know. He and one of the other instructors (Mark Schellinger) have numerous podium finishes under their belt in several classes of racing, so they are well-qualified to teach performance motorcycle riding skills.
I appreciated the time they took to explain the theory behind the skills they were introducing to the novice riders and reinforcing in the more experienced ones, and they did so in an engaging manner. We learned about trail braking (turns out I already do this, I just didn’t know there was a name for the technique), about loading the tire before working the tire and the trade-off between lean angle and braking. We learned about proper braking technique and then practiced aggressive braking from high speed. Combining these lessons with a few others, we then applied all that we had learned, attacking the various corners of the circuit that had been setup on the large tarmac square.
The instructors gave constructive, specific feedback as we practiced our techniques. By the end of the day I was screaming around corners, leaning over to the point of scraping my footpegs a time or two, racing around the track with more confidence and skill than at the start of the day. Well, maybe not quite screaming, but I did scrape my footpeg.
Now, I will not be riding like I did today on my commute to work, but that’s not the point. The point is that I have better riding habits, I understand better the limitations of my bike and myself, and I’m less likely to commit the sort of errors that get riders injured or killed. And that, my friends, is worth a free course and riding out in the pre-dawn hours at near-freezing temperatures.
After we helped to pick up all the cones the defined the day’s course and said our goodbyes, it was time to head home. Retracing my steps from the day before, I found myself caught in rush hour traffic all the way to Fredericksburg, but once past there, the roads were almost devoid of traffic. Sadly, my helmet comm unit’s battery isn’t what it once was, and it didn’t have enough juice to entertain me on Thursday’s ride up as well as today’s ride home, and so I had to endure the sound of my own thoughts for the last two hours of my ride home.
