By the time these thoughts are published, the vast majority of US motorcyclists will have already begun this year’s riding season, if only recently. The seasonal weather where I live in East Tennessee has traditionally provided pleasant conditions for riding intermittently through the winter, but such instances were extraordinarily rare this past year. In addition to the scarceness of these opportunities, I was blocked from taking advantage of nearly every one of Mother Nature’s occasional gifts due to unavoidable obligations on those few golden days. I ended up in the unfamiliar position of contending with a level of riding deprivation typically reserved for those poor motorcyclists who live further north and must put their bikes in storage for an extended stretch during the coldest months. I’ve always been sympathetic to their plight but now have a more vivid understanding from first-hand experience.
Motorcycle enthusiast media has historically generated a flurry of “Spring Thaw” articles, reminding riders of the need for prudence as we resume our beloved avocation. Long-frustrated yearnings can propel us to forgo careful preparation of our machines and ourselves in our rush to get back in the saddle and hit the road or trail. Unfortunately, we may hit said surfaces more literally than intended if we get ahead of ourselves. Depending on the winterization procedures performed (or neglected), our bikes may need significant attention before they’re ready to hold up their end of the safety contract as our hemisphere warms. Likewise, our bodies cannot be trusted to perform at the level they did last fall. They will be rusty from lack of use, with diminished strength and coordination in those muscles we use almost exclusively for riding, along with flexibility lost to the inert passivity of hibernation. We may be clear in our minds about what must be done in this or that situation with wheels turning, but that doesn’t mean our bodies will respond with the speed, accuracy and precision of our thoughts. For that matter, our thoughts may not even be terribly clear after a months-long hiatus. Such breaks tend to pare back recent learning and reinstate older, less enlightened habits.
Both physically and mentally, riding skill is definitely a “use it or lose it” affair, with decay occurring much more rapidly than most folks imagine. These are evergreen considerations whether we’ve been away from riding due to inclement weather, illness or injury, lack of discretionary resources, or any other factor. Although we’ve all no doubt heard such preaching many times over the years, repetition doesn’t make this message any less critically important. Resist the temptation to ignore it as “old hat.” Would you want your pilot to skip a tedious pre-flight checklist because they’ve already performed it countless times in the past? Do you think that, just because aviators can recite those line items in their sleep, there’s no need to go over them again while awake? People commonly refer to riding as the closest thing to flying we can do without leaving the ground. That’s true not only in terms of the visceral sensations involved, but also the life-or-death requirement for consistently rigorous attention to detail if we hope to enjoy those sensations in the future.
All that said, the part of the re-entry process I’m going to talk about here isn’t what we normally associate with finally thumbing the starter after an eon of forced abstinence. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. I’ve noticed this before when circumstances prevented me from riding for extra-lengthy periods. While certainly a peculiar phenomenon, I’m sure I’m not unique in experiencing it. When gloriously beautiful spring weather eventually arrived here, I felt little excitement about riding; I actually had to push myself to go do it. Absence can make the heart grow fonder, but enough absence can also prompt the heart to adopt a “sour grapes” stance (see Aesop’s fable).
This is absolutely not what I expected in the depths of winter. When I was stuck inside, watching the relentless succession of cold, gray, wet days through my window, I felt like I’d crawl out of my skin with riding desire. I thought about it constantly and bemoaned the absence of my usual mid-winter fixes as though I were starving to death. But, as I’ve experienced with literal food deprivation, if I go long enough without eating, the hunger pangs reach a climactic crescendo and then begin to fade. Eventually, I don’t have any appetite at all, even though I might feel weak and despondent as a result of my lack of intake. Of course, I know I need to eat, and I do so as soon as possible, despite the fact food has lost its appeal. It’s only after I’ve “primed the pump” and consumed some nourishment that I feel hungry again – with a vengeance! For the first half of that initial meal, the more I eat, the hungrier I feel. Usually, only after I’ve overdone it do I begin to feel sated.
So it was with my return to riding after this (for me) extremely long interruption. I was worlds more excited at the end of that first outing than I was at its start. Instead of “priming the pump,” the better analogy would be “getting a kick-start,” with me kicking my own butt to get moving. I remember going through my pre-ride rituals as though they were onerous chores, rather than titillating foreplay to the exhilarating activity about to take place. Going over the bike bored me. Pulling on gear felt laborious. Even selecting a route seemed like an unfair burden. I knew from having plowed through this process several times in the past this was all illusory, or at least temporary, but it would have been easy to call off the whole endeavor and return to the zombie-esque detachment to which I’d become accustomed. Like a withered plant receiving a long-overdue watering, it took some time for my desiccated soul to rehydrate and perk up.
The launch point of my default loop through the foothills outside of town is about 45 minutes from my house. Much of that preliminary journey involves negotiating stop-and-go traffic or droning down a crowded highway. Normally, I barely notice the obnoxiousness of this because the imminent prospect of sublime curves and magnificent scenery buoys me up through the monotony. By contrast, on this first outing of the season every irritant prompted me to consider aborting the mission. Again, I knew better than to take these impulses seriously and trusted my slumbering motivation to ultimately reawaken. Like a pilot flying by their instruments instead of their senses in poor visibility, I persisted on the basis of what I knew, rather than what I felt. And, as predicted, it paid off. Once I was arcing through those familiar sweepers and taking in the visual splendor I’d been missing, I could feel something thawing within me. Not only was my wooden torso beginning to move more fluidly in concert with the motorcycle, but my eyes started to look through the corners as they should, my throttle and shifting smoothed out, and my steering inputs held graceful lines more efficiently and reliably. The experience of riding gradually went from drudgery to not-so-bad and then finally to, “Oh, yeah! I remember this!” I was back in the saddle – all of me, not just my deliberate mind, but also my body and heart, seemingly in that order. Sometimes our feelings are late to the party.
Why would this be? Our psyches come with numerous “rider aids” installed at the factory. These intervening circuits operate automatically and outside our conscious awareness or control to maximize our safety. One of their most important functions is to protect us from overwhelm, just like ABS helps us avoid crashing by relieving excess braking pressure that would overshoot the limits of available traction. When something disturbing threatens to cause pain we can’t afford to bear, circuit breakers get tripped. The resulting emotional numbness and disengagement from activities and relationships we normally find rewarding is obviously not ideal, but it is often preferable – at least in the short run – to the alternative, which is sustained suffering and functional impairment in our daily routines. When this happens briefly, we’re spared some degree of misery, we can continue taking care of necessities, and the cost is minimal. Ideally, as soon as it’s safe to do so, the circuits reset and things go back to normal. However, if the anesthesia is employed over an extended timeframe, recovery is a more difficult process and we may remain psychologically “groggy” for a long time, even after the threat has passed or the cost of detachment climbs. To whatever degree we’re capable, we then need to struggle through the fog and paralysis, not unlike someone coming out of sedation. We must act on the basis of what we know, instead of what we feel, with faith our emotions will eventually catch up. We cannot wait until we feel like acting because that would be putting the cart before the horse. We start with a belief, act on it, and only then get the feeling.
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Consider the case of confidence. If I want to feel confident in my panic braking, for example, I can’t wait until I have that feeling to practice the skill. This means practice will initially be uncomfortable and accompanied by trepidation. But if I begin with the belief that practice will deliver what I want, then act on the basis of sound instruction, confidence develops. This isn’t exactly the same as what happens when our circuit breakers have been tripped by stress (including the stress of deprivation), but it illustrates the way faith precedes action and action precedes feeling, or at least the desired feeling. (We may feel lots of self-doubt and anxiety at the outset of this sequence.)
Those who’ve followed my thoughts over the years know I consider human beings to be driven much more by emotion than reason. Am I contradicting myself here? Am I now saying emotions are the laggards instead of the leaders? Not really. What I’m calling emotions exist at multiple levels. There are the feelings we experience consciously, and there are the motivations of which we may or may not be so clearly aware. In the case of pushing through numbness or fear, we are acting on the underlying emotions of hope and desire, even as we’re not yet feeling reinvigorated or self-assured. We are leveraging what rationality we can muster to modify our emotional state. I still consider logical thought to be at a substantial disadvantage in such efforts, but it’s not powerless. What we believe certainly can have a profound influence on what we feel, even if our feelings often exert even greater power. If we can deliberately and strategically accumulate experiential reference points that support a different perspective – e.g., real improvements in our panic braking or the reintroduction of enjoyable riding sensations – our emotions will shift accordingly, albeit never as quickly and easily as we’d want or expect.
My overlong riding deprivation this past winter triggered one of my psychological circuit breakers. This made some portion of the experience that followed more bearable, but it also complicated the process of re-emergence. If I hadn’t understood this for what it really was, I’d have been much slower to climb back on a motorcycle when the icy season ended and would have missed some of the best riding weather of the year. When we’ve gone without a good ride for far too long, we ought not make things even worse by extending our deprivation unnecessarily. Get going first, the fun will follow.
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.
