Depending on where you live, you’re probably familiar with the phenomenon of off-season “rusting” to some degree. Winter tends to reduce our saddle-time, and riders in the far north may end up forfeiting parts of autumn and spring, too. As temps climb out of the frozen abyss, riding resumes, but this can involve considerable awkwardness. Our bodies don’t seem to remember what our minds recall—and expect. It can take a surprising number of outings to get back into the groove we inhabited pre-hiatus. When we’re rusty, coordination doesn’t return instantly or to the level where we left it and certain muscles have atrophied with disuse, not to mention the flexibility losses that set in during hibernation. Riding-related cognitive faculties have dulled as well; regaining sharpness and concentration stamina takes time and perseverance. Of course, all these deficits stand in sharp contrast to pent up anticipation and excitement! It’s not uncommon for rider enthusiasm to exceed rider patience, prudence, and competence early in the re-entry process, resulting in especially unfortunate mishaps just as liberation seemed finally within reach.
Now zoom out to what may be a less welcome vantage point. Instead of the season of the year, this vista includes the season of our life. Age brings another type of decay, with waning physical and mental abilities at a more fundamental/global level. It takes greater effort to simply maintain the same level of fitness—or merely slow our descent. Motivation and vitality can ebb as both cause and effect of increasing bodily limitations. Vivid awareness of our mortality reduces our tolerance for risk, regardless of any associated potential rewards. We can find ourselves, wittingly or unwittingly, retreating from challenges, and possibly even activities we had previously enjoyed without hesitation. This is a partial definition of clinical depression, by the way, and a seriously foreboding development.
For a motorcyclist like me who’s moving into the early autumn of life and contending with the inevitable dip in riding acumen that follows winter’s restrictions, it’s a double whammy. That could be discouraging, even demoralizing, and one might be tempted to “go gentle into that good night,” when it’d be better to “rage against the dying of the light” (thank you, Dylan Thomas). I’m going to call this condition “crustiness,” and it goes beyond normal spring rustiness. The antidote is pursuing lifelong learning in multiple domains, but here we’ll focus on those related to riding. Accumulated crust interferes with such pursuit and completely precludes it if there’s enough buildup. Crust compounds the deterioration described above, whereas forcefully scraping crust off—deliberately opening ourselves up to new learning and investing in our own perpetual development—is rejuvenating.
Crustiness often accompanies advanced aging, but it’s an attitude folks can adopt long before they’re truly up against the aches and stiffness and fog of—er—seniority. Take, for instance, the person who eschews rider training because they’ve done without it over decades of motorcycling and haven’t died. They’ve jettisoned curiosity about what they might not know and think they’ve got it all figured out, at least well enough. One of the most common experiences among riding school trainees is the discovery that what they thought they knew, or were actually able to do, turned out to be problematic and in need of change. (Dodging the necessity of growth and change is at the heart of crustiness.) Maybe they hadn’t yet encountered a situation that required a better approach, so this deficit wasn’t apparent. But such an event might be right around the corner tomorrow and impossible to predict. Or maybe they had already dealt (incompetently) with exactly such a situation, but didn’t realize the problem was their technique—not “the tires” or some other consideration that was, at most, only a tiny, peripheral factor in their accident. They may have also thrown up their hands and treated it as an outcome impossible to avoid, since they didn’t know how to handle it and couldn’t imagine a workable solution. Such a failure of imagination does not mean a solution didn’t/doesn’t exist. If all we’ve ever practiced are the procedures involved in our routine riding through familiar settings, we cannot possibly be prepared for something anomalous, especially if that something appears suddenly; “good enough” skill is only good enough until the unexpected proves it isn’t. All of us can only do quickly and reflexively those things we’ve done often and recently, regardless of what we may grasp in theory. To believe otherwise is to have delusions of grandeur. Take it from a clinical psychologist, that’s not hyperbole.
The argument that I don’t need rider training because I’ve survived all these years without it just doesn’t hold water. I’ve been a motorcyclist for over half a century, yet I still learn ways to improve my riding with every exposure to instruction, whether it’s in the form of a riding school, written explanations and advice, online videos, or feedback from more advanced riding buddies. I also learn by doing drills in parking lots and empty stretches of road, practicing techniques I may already “know” conceptually, but which I’m always dismayed to find my body quickly “forgets” without continuous repetition; muscle memory can fade rapidly. Then there are those disturbing discrepancies between what I believe I’m doing on the motorcycle and what I’m actually doing. It’s quite humbling to be excited about the dramatic lean angle I achieved, only to see myself in a much more upright posture in the GoPro recording [wince!]. There are many ways we can be mistaken about our own level of mastery. Expert guidance corrects those misconceptions and fills in the blanks we didn’t even realize were there. It’s quite possible, as the saying goes, for someone who’s ridden for 20 years to have really just ridden their first year 20 times, advancing no further than whatever they initially figured out about the most rudimentary operation of a bike’s controls. I know that was definitely true of me.
I learned to ride a motorcycle (years before I was legally licensed to do so) on the straight, level roads of Central Florida and didn’t have the slightest idea how to manage the curves and slopes of the Appalachian mountains when I relocated to East Tennessee at age 24. I’d never had any instruction beyond the (literally) 60-second explanation I got when the dealership delivery guy dropped off my first bike: “That’s the clutch, that’s the brake, that’s the gear-shift. Oh yeah, there’s another brake down there. Good luck!” I miraculously avoided any collisions, aside from the numerous soil samples I took while riding off-road, and remained a solitary motorcyclist until about seven years after my relocation, when I took the MSF’s Basic Rider Course alongside a friend I’d cajoled into buying a motorcycle so I’d have a companion. Yes, I had already learned some of the fundamentals on my own in the school of hard knocks, but I fixed several bad habits and got intrigued by the way riding techniques could be conceptualized and systematized, and how beneficial this proved in my own post-training experience. I took their advanced course and learned more, and eventually found a local group to join—riders with vastly more skill than I possessed, who were kind and generous in tutoring me. They convinced me to come along to a track school and I was hooked. I learned more in that one weekend than I’d learned in the two preceding decades. I had zero aspirations to race, but the track had so many advantages over the street, with its handy ambulance crew, extensive run-off zones, lack of oncoming traffic, and the magic of repetition, allowing me to engage the same corners over and over again, working out my strategy and technique, and watching my lap times tumble. I wasn’t exactly trying to go fast; speed simply arrived as a byproduct of smoother, more effective control inputs. By the end, much higher speeds felt safer—and actually were safer—than the lower speeds I’d managed at the start.
The Ride Inside with Mark Barnes is brought to you by the MOA Foundation. You can join the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America quickly and easily to better take advantage of the Paul B Grant and Clark Luster programs mentioned in this episode.
Since then, I’ve had the benefit of a dozen other formal rider training experiences, most on racetracks, but some involving on-road time. All have been deeply enriching, although I’ve learned first-hand how essential practice is to maintaining gains. There’s a natural entropy that reverts us back to pre-training patterns unless we wear in new grooves by doing what we learn, again and again. The best riders I know still practice basic skills regularly, despite their superlative abilities; that’s how they got those abilities and how they hang onto them. Foregoing training and practice only makes sense if your personal goals include a) embracing mental and physical decline, and b) rigidly denying the possibility (fact!) you don’t already know everything about piloting a motorcycle. Get real. Get training. Then practice to make it stick. It’s work that feels like play. Grab a partner; they’ll thank you afterward. Better yet, set up a monthly skill drill gathering with your whole riding group.
Back to the issue of crustiness. Research evidence is abundantly clear: the best ways to stave off psychological decline—at any age—are to stay physically active, nurture our relationships, and keep learning. Motorcycling offers us countless ways to do all three. Even if you can’t get to a riding school because of the expense or distance, there are plenty of online options that cost little or nothing and will undoubtedly teach you things you didn’t know you didn’t know. In the series of podcast interviews with riding instructors I launched last year (see bmwownersnews.com/category/moa-media/), I spoke with several who have developed extensive home training programs. Check out Greg Widmar’s MotoJitsu YouTube channel, books, and app (see motojitsu.com), Jon Delvecchio’s Cornering Confidence course (free to MOA members at streetskills.net), and Champ U, a curriculum developed by Nick Ienatsch and the crew at Yamaha Champions Riding School (ridelikeachampion.com). Champ U’s Core Curriculum is available to MOA members at a drastically discounted price ($39.95 instead of $99.95), which can then be recouped with an MOA Foundation rebate, making it ultimately free (register via bmwmoaf.org). All of these include clear, convenient, inexpensive, interesting lessons with integrated drills and exercises to convert conceptual knowledge into bodily proficiency. They are excellent ways to de-crustify, especially with a study buddy.
If you’re still holed up waiting for winter weather to relent, go ahead and immerse yourself in these now for relief from cabin fever, at least mentally. Then, when the world outside thaws, catch up on the physical applications of all that knowledge as you ease back into riding. Your access to the drills and exercises won’t end just because you’ve finished watching the lectures and demonstrations. Forget about trying to pick up where you left off last fall, you’ll jump-start 2024 with tangible improvements.
One final tip: The MOA Foundation offers on-request rebates to every MOA member for bona fide rider training (not lessons from Joe down the street in his driveway, but any legitimate formal instruction). These rebates cover costs up to $200 annually, meaning you can snag that money year after year, just by asking for it ahead of time and showing proof you subsequently completed the training. Visit bmwmoaf.org for more information on the Foundation’s mission and multifaceted support for rider education.
No, good rider training isn’t too expensive, or too far away, or just stuff you already know. It’s big fun in itself, and it makes the riding that follows both safer and more enjoyable. There’s really no good reason to stay crusty.
Mark Barnes is a clinical psychologist and motojournalist. To read more of his writings, check out his book Why We Ride: A Psychologist Explains the Motorcyclist’s Mind and the Love Affair Between Rider, Bike and Road, currently available in paperback through Amazon and other retailers.
