Visual Discipline

It's a truism in motorcycling that where you look determines where you go.  If you focus on a a tree, the edge of the road, the bumper of the car in front of you, that's exactly where you'll steer the bike.  You can find lots of discussion out there on motorcycle forums and in other literature that explains that, but let's just call it a given, and refer to it as target fixation.  Below is a classic, if somewhat chilling, example.  The rider visually locks on to something that frightens him, then crashes straight into it.

 

There may be riders who've never experienced target fixation, but I'm not one of them.  Come to think of it, most riders I know well will admit to having experienced it one time or another.  Truth be told, I've experienced target fixation at least once per year for as long as I've been riding.  Yet for me and most of these same riders, target fixation does not always result in crashing.  Why is that?

Looking at the above video gives us a classic example of how target fixation typically begins.  In the video it appears that the rider brakes for the upcoming turn / intersection and inadvertently looks the rear brake causing the rear wheel to slide, and the rider to panic - stiffen up, foot off the peg, etc. - the rider sees the wall, stares at the wall, and proceeds straight into the wall.  Ouch!  The critical point being that target fixation is typically preceded by something happening that scares the rider, causing the rider to stare at whatever is the object of fright, then steering straight into it.

If it's fairly common for riders to target fixate, but not that common for them to crash as a result, what is it that enables a rider to recover from target fixation incident, and safely avoid a crash?  My experience is that somehow the rider recognizes what is happening, and breaks the fixation by choosing to look where he wants to go rather than at what he wants to avoid. 

This ties to the topic of visual discipline - knowing where you're looking, knowing where you need to be looking in order to safely pilot your motorcycle, having the presence of mind to recognize when the two don't match and that corrective action is required, and having the discipline in the face to fear to put your eyes where you need them to be.  No mean feat.  

How do you accomplish this?  Going back to an earlier post on self-awareness, it begins with knowing where you're looking as you ride.  Where am I looking?  Are my eyes scanning the road out to the vanishing point?  Am I looking at the ground just ahead of my front wheel?  Am I locking on to roadside objects that scare me?  Some self-awareness and self-critiquing will go a long way towards establishing a baseline of experiential knowledge regarding where you need to look.  

The next step is recognizing when your normal pattern of looking at the road has been disrupted.  A good clue for this can be seen in the video - it's noticing that you're frightened.  Have you suddenly stiffened up, stopped breathing, felt a jolt of adrenaline and a rise in your heart rate?  Are you staring at something?  

And this is where the "discipline" part comes in.  Having noticed this, it's time to force yourself to look where you want to go.  There are times when I've felt like I need to reach up and grab the chin bar of my own helmet to yank my head in the direction I needed to look!  You know what?  If that's what it takes, that's what you do.  

Lee Parks has an exercise he describes in his book, Total Control, that helps out with this.  You'll need a friend and a parking lot to pull this off, but it will greatly help you in developing the ability to recover once you target fixate.  Lee suggests that you figure out where you can comfortably ride in a circle with your friend standing in the middle.  As you ride around the circle, your friend rotates in the middle so that the two of you can maintain eye contact.  Every time you break eye contact your friend will point it out and tell you, "look at me."  Keep doing this until you can consistently ride the circle without breaking eye contact.  When you can do that, tighten the radius of the circle until it begins to be difficult to maintain eye contact, then stay at that radius until you master it, then tighten the circle again.  Do this turning both clockwise and counter-clockwise, trading places with your friend so that you both gain experience looking consistently where you want to go, and recovering if you get distracted.  

This is a great way to develop and sharpen the visual discipline that will help you recover when you start to target fixate, assuring that your ride home is on the bike and not in an ambulance.  

Friuli?

An area in northeastern Italy near Slovenia and the Adriatic that I've not visited, but now I feel compelled.  My favorite videographer of alpine riding is a German fellow whose YouTube channel name is TheMimoto, and he recently posted a video taken in August of riding in Friuli.  My mouth is watering!

It's definitely worth a watch, and when you're done, if you still want some more, here's a video made by one of his companions on the same trip.

If you've ever wondered whether you should ride the Alps, these videos should make clear that the answer is an emphatic, "Yes!"

Self-Reflection

No, not that clown in the mirror.  Well, sometimes.

Self-reflection in this case is your ability to evaluate your own performance of any skill, activity, knowledge, whatever.  In this case, let's assume it has to do with riding motorcycles, and evaluating your own abilities, and based on that evaluation, make positive changes in the way you ride.  Is this something you do?  Is it something you think about?

Assuming you're not a riding god, and assuming you know that, and you're not a victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, most of us have some room for improvement in our riding.  Barring having regular sessions with a riding coach who observes your riding and provides useful feedback, we're pretty much stuck with evaluating our own riding.  We may read all the best books on becoming better riders.  We may post questions on internet forums and eagerly sift through the answers.  We may even ride with more accomplished buddies who demonstrate how they get up and down the local racer road.  But even after we do all that, we still have to compare these ideals with an unvarnished look at the way we're riding now before we can hope to figure out the steps to take to improve.  Yep, self-reflection. 

Here's what got me thinking about this.  A few weeks back I was with some motorcycle friends talking about (what else?) riding.  One of these friends - who will remain nameless for now - knows more about what it takes to ride a motorcycle quickly and well than anyone else I have the pleasure to know.  When the topic of conversation moved to embarrassing events, I related what happened when I crashed my motorcycle about a year ago.

Crashing my motorcycle is not something I like to do, and it had been 5 years since my prior crash, and 20 years back to the one before that.  Last year's crash had been a bit of a mystery to me, and the only thing that seemed to explain it was too much throttle in a low traction situation, but the quickness and violence of the crash made that explanation a bit unsatisfying, and no one I'd talked to about it had any better of an explanation than that one.

When my friend heard how the crash happened, he said that he'd seen a lot of people crash by getting back on the throttle before they finished setting the lean angle for the turn, and in those cases these riders experienced losing the rear tire and low-siding even though their lean angle wasn't terribly steep and traction was not that bad.  This seemed odd, and it stuck with me.

The next day a group of us were riding over the Sierra headed back to the Bay Area, and I began to reflect on what he'd said, asking myself, "Am I opening the throttle before I've finished setting the lean angle?"  I didn't think about it every turn, but when I had time to think, I posed the question.  Any time I felt like the rear tire had been squirming or skittering across the road, I posed the question.  Here's what I found: yes, in some cases in some circumstances, I sometimes start opening the throttle before I finish setting the lean angle for the turn.  Exciting!  A new insight! Once home a brief exchange of messages confirming what had been suggested, and some helpful feedback, and more to work on.

The moral of the story is that it doesn't matter how much Code, Parks, Ienatsch, Hough or others you read, you've got to bring them with you when you ride.  The only way to do that is save a little bit of bandwidth to observe and record your own riding, then - perhaps later - reflect on what you observed and how it compared to what you read.  Is there a gap?  Can you learn something from that gap?  Can you bring that gap back to another reading of the book to see if you learn something else?  I hope the answer is in all cases "yes"!

Self-reflection is a key skill to develop in becoming better at pretty much anything, including riding, just don't let staring in the mirror overwhelm everything else.  We all know what happened to that Narcissus character. 

Hawthorne!

Tomorrow begins the annual Bay Area Riders Forum (BARF) Rydther Rally bound for Hawthorne, NV.  I think this is the 5th annual, or thereabouts.  We travel to Hawthorne each year in memory of a deceased member whose motto was Ride There, wherever it might be.  Going there by motorcycle is better than going just about any other way.  We ride to Hawthorne every year to remind ourselves of the truth of his motto.

Why Hawthorne?  Lots of reasons, but I'll start with four:

1. Tioga Pass
2. Sonora Pass
3. Ebbetts Pass
4. Monitor Pass

Any of those can be on the way to Hawthorne and back, and they are among the highest, wildest, and most beautiful passes in the Sierra Nevada.  Throw Yosemite NP in there if you're taking Tioga Pass, and there's another reason.  We're going to make those passes even more fun by taking some entertaining goat trails leading up to the high Sierra to avoid the car traffic, and to have some fun!

Once you're over the passes, the fun doesn't stop.  You can have lunch at The Whoa Nellie Deli at The Mobil in Lee Vining to experience fine dining in a truly improbable setting.  If that doesn't suit you, there's always Mountain View BBQ in Walker, CA, a worthy destination even if you chose to turn around and head back home.  

While you're taking in the natural beauty, you'll pass right by the legendary Mono Lake, which is slowly returning to its earlier water levels.

As for Hawthorne itself?  Well, Hawthorne is an old munitions town, with bunkers dotting the hillsides surrounding the town.  It's a remote spot, a relatively quiet (unless they're disposing of old munitions) spot in the desert.  It's inexpensive to stay there.  It's inexpensive to eat there.  The locals have always been happy to see us, and to share their hospitality over the course of a few days of days of riding and hanging out by the pool, and evenings of having fun over in Joe's bar.  It's tough to beat.  

See you when I get back.  

Hairpins (again!)

Two weeks ago I enjoyed a great goat trail ride!  Some of my favorite Marin and Sonoma roads, little traffic, nice weather, and ripe blackberries by the roadside for a little al fresco feasting.  Combine that with riding with good friends, and that's just about ideal. Throw in a new learning, and it gets even better.

I've posted before on the topic of hairpin turns on a couple of occasions because they cause problems for lots of riders.  One of the varieties of hairpins that I've seen cause the most difficulty are downhill right-handers, and I devoted a post to that particular variety earlier this summer.  Our ride two weeks ago demonstrated that uphill right-handers can be problematic too, and that's the topic of this post.

What do the two varieties have in common beyond the obvious fact of turning to the right?  In the ones I've seen cause the most problems the other common feature is very short sight-lines - the rider can't see where the road goes beyond some obstruction (tree, hillside, wall, house) that is on the inside of the turn.  The result of that short sight-line is one of the following, or some combination; the rider slows (not a bad idea), stiffens (not so good), stares at the ground in front of the front wheel that is visible, stares out the opposite side of the road which is also visible, forgets to shift down to a gear appropriate for the slower speed, etc.  With the exception of the first one, not optimal responses.  Let's examine them.

Slowing down is not a bad idea.  The conventional wisdom is that you should travel at a rate at which it takes you four seconds to reach the edge of your line of sight so that you have adequate time to react to any obstruction of your path.  It's pretty hard to argue against that even when your line of sight is so short that your speed drops to what feels like a crawl, however unless your path actually is obstructed, I can't remember seeing a hairpin so tight that you need to get your feet off the pegs.  Keep your feet in the pegs, shift to a gear appropriate for your road speed, cover the clutch if necessary, and be very careful of using the front brake unless you actually have to stop.  You're going uphill, so you should  be able to control your speed by rolling off the throttle and/or using the rear brake.

Stiffening is pretty much always a bad idea, in hairpins or otherwise.  It your elbows are stiff and/or you have a death grip on the bars, you're too stiff, and nothing good can come of that.  This is the time when you need to be a little self-aware (difficult if you're frightened), and wiggle your fingers and waggle your elbows to loosen them up.  Two of the most common causes are the following:

Looking at the ground.  The old saying in motorcycling that shows up as more and more true the longer I ride is that you go where you look.  Meaning in this case that if you look at the ground, that's where you're going.  Looking at successive spots eight feet in front of you will mean that even at very low speeds the world will be a continual surprise, you'll be frightened, you'll stiffen as a result, and you make bad things more likely to happen.  Get your eyes up.

Looking at the outside of the turn.  Where you look is where you go, right?  If you're looking at the opposite roadside, where do think you're likely to end up?  Bingo!  Across the road and in the ditch, unless you're really unlucky, in which case the local in the F350 heading to pick up the day's second sixpack may turn you into a hood ornament before you get there.  

So, if it's okay to slow down, but it's bad to stiffen, or to look at the ground, or to look at the other side of the road, and your line of sight is blocked, where in the world are you supposed to look?  I'm glad you asked.  You want to keep your eyes probing the place where the road is about to appear.  You're always pushing your eyes out in front so you can see the road surface at the earliest possible point of visibility.  Your eyes won't be in just one place, you'll scan to the farthest point you can see, then let your eyes come back, then scan ahead, moving quickly to take it all in.  Ideally, you should be scanning the roadside, the trees, the local geography to see what other cues about that emerging road you can pick up.  I'll post something in the near future about reading the road, but for now keep looking ahead to where the road disappears (the vanishing point), keep on looking for the right-hand edge of the road, keep your eyes up, and your elbows and grip loose, and keep the bike on your side of the road.  Enjoy!

Why France (and Italy)?

In my last post I addressed the question that comes up about why it's so great to ride in the Alps.  Next up is the follow up question, of all the alpine countries, why France?  Good question.  The Alps span France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and you could even include Liechtenstein and Monaco in that list.  You'd think that surely there must be great riding in those countries, and you'd be right.

After all, Austria is the country of The Sound of Music and its expansive alpine scenery.  Austria is home to many roads - often toll roads - that seem to exist primarily for the pure joy of riding or driving them.  The Grossglockner is a case in point.  Austria is also home the greatest concentration of Biker Wilkommen signs I've ever seen.  It seems the whole country is filled with restaurants and hotels competing for the business of vacationing motorcyclists.

Then there's Switzerland, the archetypal alpine country, all beautiful lakes, perfect houses with exquisite flower boxes, perfectly trimmed lawns, and roads without a speck of litter.  Combine that with it being the home of some of the most legendary alpine roads (Furka, Bernina, etc.), and it would seem to be the one perfect place for an Alps motorcycling vacation.

Germany is a classic portal to the Alps.  It's easy to get air connections from the US to Munich, visit the BMW factory, and take off into the Alps.  The reality is that Germany is only a tiny portion of the Alps, and while there are nearby places to ride in Germany that are great such as the Black Forest, if you want to experience much of the Alps themselves, you won't be restricting yourself to Germany.

I can't really speak to Slovenia because I haven't ridden there yet, but what I know about it makes Slovenia very attractive, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.  It looks wild and rugged and remote, and that's just what I most enjoy.

This brings us to France and Italy, and the things that are great about both of them.   This may not win me any friends with the ministries of tourism for these two countries, but here goes.  What I most love about France and Italy is that they are just a bit wilder, at bit less controlled, a bit more rugged,often a bit more remote, a bit more ragged than the other alpine nations.  This is true in many ways, but seems particularly true around attitudes towards motorcycle traffic.  It seems that both police and other road users in these countries understand that you're on a motorcycle and that you're going to be going quickly, and they make allowances for that.  That hasn't been my experience in Austria, or particularly Switzerland - where it is joked that everything that is not obligitoire is most certainly interdit.  France and Italy are just a little more like the wild west. 

Where else can you come flying up behind a police car, have the officer look in the mirror, then wave you around?  All this in a no passing zone!  Where else do car drivers routinely move to their right a foot or so to enable you to easily overtake them on narrow mountain passes (truth be told, a lot of California drivers are pretty good about getting out of the way)?  Where else is it acceptable  to split between lanes of traffic moving opposite directions?  Where else in the Alps can you find passes as wild, rugged, and simultaneously perfect and imperfect as the Col de la Cayolle or the Passo di Gavia?

An exaggerated  analogy might be that France and Italy are to Switzerland as California is to Disney's California Adventure.  One is the real thing; wild, imperfect, chaotic, and maybe a bit more dangerous.  The other is refined, perfected, triple-distilled, constrained, controlled, and safer.  Fair?  No, not really, but fun. 

For me, the greater wildness and tolerance of France and Italy make the experience of actually riding there ever so much more intense and enjoyable.  As a rider it also requires me to be more on my game, more vigilant, more flexible, and more responsible for my own conduct because traffic enforcement isn't going to save me from myself. 

France over Italy?  Yes, by a slim margin.  I somewhat prefer French food, but Matt prefers Italian.  We both prefer French drivers, if only because they're slightly less aggressive than Italians.  Both are a huge improvement over Americans.  Oh, and I love the sound of the French language, whether I understand what I'm hearing or not, though Italian is quite nice too. 

There you have it.  Why I love riding some countries more than others.  Some of the touring companies seem to concentrate on Austria and Switzerland.  My suggestion is to try France.  All those GS's with German plates seen each summer in the French passes may be on to something.  

Why the Alps?

From time to time folks will ask what the big deal is about riding in the Alps.  After all, we've got some pretty great roads right here in California.  We've got Yosemite and we've got Tioga Pass.  We've got Big Sur and we've got the Sonoma coast.  We've got Hwy 36 and we've got Hwy 25.  We've got Mulholland and we've got teh (sic) 9.  Hell, we can even lane split here in California, and if you get bored with that we can ride to Oregon, or Montana, or Alaska ferchissakes!  So what the hell is the big deal?

Good question and good points!  There is a wealth of great riding here in California, and even more in adjoining states.  You could keep yourself busy riding new California roads every weekend for years.  In fact, you should. 

The great gift of riding in North America is space.  Once you get out of the big cities, north or south, or across the valley, suddenly you have space.  Even here in populous California you can easily find places that are empty.  Riders coming here from Europe marvel at the distances you can travel in Nevada, or Utah, or Idaho where there is nothing for miles.  It truly is a gift.

The Alps are different.  The area has been densely populated for centuries, millennia really.  And much of that time the tide of governments and cultures and armies have washed back and forth over them.  It's the inverse of the space of the West.  Not that it's what you'd call crowded, but it is developed.  The benefit of this for motorcyclists is that all this development involved building roads, and those roads go nearly everywhere.  Every river valley was a path for commerce.  Every high cirque that didn't have a glacier became summer pasture.  In between were countless farms and villages, and roads were needed to connect all of them.  So today the place is positively cross-hatched with roads and trails, and many of those roads are paved.  And most of those paved roads are positively brilliant on a motorcycle.  

What it comes down to is sort of the inverse of space.  It's road density.  You can base around one town, and ride exciting, beautiful roads day after day, with very little repetition, and not much time spent on big busy roads or and big crowded cities.  For example, one day in particular this year, Matt and I left the inn at Serre Chevalier, rode Izoard, Vars, Restefond, Bonette, Lombarde, Sampeyre, Agnel, and Izoard again in one day - and that's just the high passes!  That does not include some of the really fun roads that connect them through the countryside.  There is nowhere that I know of near where I live in California where you could ride so many amazing roads in just 400 kilometers (~240 miles).

There are other reasons to ride the Alps.  The scenery is obviously spectacular.  When little kids draw mountains, the mountains their crayons depict seem to be inspired by the Alps.  The architecture is often nearly as breathtaking as the natural scenery.  The food is great.  And in my experience, the people are wonderful.  

That said, for me there is at least one more reason to ride the Alps.  If you're a baseball fan, and you love the game and all of its history and pageantry, if you love all the great games and players that have come before, you may feel the pull to make a pilgrimage to the sport's hallowed ground.  Maybe for you it's Yankee Stadium, or Fenway, or Wrigley Field.  A place where you can go to feel connected to all that has come before, and all that is yet to come.  The Alps are like that for motorcyclists.  I recall reading about alpine touring in Cycle World when I was a kid, seeing B&W photos of tourists on BMW R69's and Triumph T100's, gear lashed to the seat, layered up against the chill, with stunning mountainscapes in the background.  I knew then at age twelve that this was where real riding happened.  This was where a motorcyclist went for great riding and to meet great riders.  This was hallowed ground.  

Now after four trips I can say with all honesty that it has been everything I'd hoped it would be.  That the roads, the scenery, the food, the people, the quality of the riders, and the quality of the riding I was inspired to do exceeded anything I could have reasonably expected, and often even exceeded what I'd unreasonable dreamed.  

The Alps, you must try them.