In my essay “Points of Interest,” I described how a well-chosen perceptual focus, such as a specific point of contact between body and bike, can transform a riding task from a collection of disparate elements into a much more streamlined, graceful and efficient process. I used an example from low-speed cornering: attending to my outer sit bone pressing into the seat as I leaned my bike one way and used my body to counterbalance the other way. I still had to perform all the other components of such maneuvers—head turned, eyes looking far around the arc I intended to carve; throttle, clutch and rear brake coordinated to maintain my speed and balance, etc. That’s a lot of balls to juggle, and I’d been struggling to integrate them into smooth and coherent action. Even though I was already leaning my torso to the outside, it was finally focusing on my outer sit bone that somehow pulled everything else together. My execution quality and confidence level increased immediately. I don’t know whether this exact focus would yield the same benefits for anyone else, since focus target value can be highly idiosyncratic, but I’m certain this type of phenomenon occurs across a vast spectrum of situations for virtually all riders. Otherwise, riding instructors wouldn’t bark pet commands along these lines, and I wouldn’t have heard so many fellow motorcyclists mention how they use various attentional foci to good effect.
Whereas “Points of Interest” was about the usefulness of highlighting particular sensory inputs, here I’m going to discuss how the same principle works with ultra-pithy action strategies punching way above their verbal weight. For example, in his Cornering Confidence book and video instructional series of the same name (free to MOA members!), Jon DelVecchio repeatedly stresses the importance of wielding “the secret weapon” in corners. To drive home the lesson’s imagery, he makes a gun shape with his hand: first two fingers extended straight, third and fourth fingers curled to his palm. This is the same hand arrangement used for trail braking, which he asserts (correctly!) is key to reliably and subtly—or powerfully—controlling our speed through curves.
When we feel confident in our mastery over velocity, we can pay more attention to the other variables involved in turning a motorcycle, such as forward scanning, line selection, lean angle and body position, since our minds are no longer crowded and scrambled by anxiety about whether we’ve entered too hot. If we did, the means of scrubbing off speed is literally right at our fingertips, which are still resting (or applying faint pressure) on the front brake lever after we’ve slowed. We needn’t grab at the lever in a panic—and thereby induce more terror as the bike slams its front suspension and perhaps even breaks traction at the tire’s contact patch—because we’ve already got a touch of braking friction working in our favor, gently maintaining optimal forward suspension compression for turning (reduced rake and trail) and pressing/spreading the front contact patch against the ground for maximum grip (abrupt braking is much more likely to blow through traction limits than the same force applied progressively). All these variables are tidily addressed with a single mandate to routinely cover—and in many cases, lightly apply—the front brake well into corners until we eventually initiate our exit by adding throttle and decreasing lean angle. Instead of being a discreet task completed prior to corner entry, this approach makes braking a continuously relative matter of degree, which is much easier on us both mentally and emotionally, as well as being far more effective/safe in mechanical/physical terms. To be clear, Jon obviously doesn’t reduce cornering a motorcycle to just this one action, but he presents it as a tactic well worth our focus. Developing this single habit (so it no longer requires deliberate focus) yields a multitude of advantages.
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.
Also to be clear, Jon didn’t invent trail braking, nor is he the only riding instructor to encourage its use. For instance, trail braking features quite prominently in the Yamaha Champions Riding School and Champ U curricula developed by Nick Ienatsch and his crew (MOA members can get a discount and rebate on Champ U online training). I singled out Jon’s reference because it’s so compact, catchy and evocative; the packaging makes it especially compelling and memorable (he is a career educator, after all!). Such pedagogical gems, or pearls of wisdom, turbocharge learning because they stick in our minds and they’re so easy to use later as cues in the saddle. Just like those POIs for sensory attention, these action triggers distill a large number of individual elements down to an absolute minimum of conscious deliberation.
Conscious deliberation, while certainly an essential asset in numerous other situations, is definitely not what we want to employ during high-stakes, multi-faceted riding scenarios wherein split-second decision-making must be reflexive in the interest of both safety and enjoyment. We don’t have the time or attentional bandwidth to carefully ponder alternatives when suddenly confronting a surprise hazard, nor can we enter a blissful state of flow when we’re engaged in complex analytic thought. We need to be able to initiate well-designed actions with minimal thinking in the moment to save time and subtract the least possible attention from our monitoring of immediate threats and the process of selecting from our available options. The “well-designed” aspect must happen ahead of time, when a skill is being taught and learned; we don’t build planes while flying them. Design merit is founded on both the optimal effectiveness of the actions involved and their refinement into an elegantly concise command from mind to body translating intention into the desired result. A pearl of this sort bridges our mental assessment, “A” (e.g., I need to slow right now because this turn’s radius is tightening), and the behavior, “B,” that will produce the concrete manifestation of our intent (e.g., our fingertips add brake lever pressure and the bike in fact slows). True pearls shorten the distance between Point A and Point B, creating a telepathic connection to our machines—or better yet, to our movement through space. I consider that latter experience, the elusive state of flow, the most ecstatic and transcendent motorcycling has to offer. Pearls help us attain it.
There are, of course, many minimalist guidelines for riding well. Phrases like, “Look where you want to go,” “When in doubt, turn out,” and “Slow, look, lean, roll” have been tremendously useful in rider training for decades. Some of the most familiar, like the last two just mentioned, are best suited to beginners, for whom some oversimplification is a necessary evil. Intermediate and advanced riders learn there are critically important caveats to these maxims (e.g., in some situations, chopping the throttle is the worst thing you can do because maintaining momentum is crucial for negotiating the hazard ahead; and in most corners, holding neutral throttle or sustaining braking pressure all the way to the apex is far superior to rolling on the gas immediately after leaning); it’s possible to go too far in the reducing process. And since riders encounter differing challenges, possess varying skill sets, and attach meaning to imagery based on their individual histories and personalities, what serves as a pearl for one may be worthless to another.
In psychotherapy (and elsewhere), metaphorical imagery can be extremely powerful in reframing a person’s perspective, but it has to capture something personal for the magic to happen. Worn, cliché catchphrases don’t get the same psychological traction (yes, I used the metaphor of traction here because it’s especially meaningful to an audience of motorcyclists). Jon’s “secret weapon” metaphor probably works so well for me because cornering often involves a battle between conflicting forces within me: the fear of crashing versus the desire to move swiftly. I’m sure I’m not the only motorcyclist whose internal landscape gives Jon’s metaphor plenty of, er, grip.
A metaphor’s novelty can add immensely to its power; I’ve discovered this in my work as a psychotherapist as well. It’s always a milestone of understanding when a client and/or therapist comes up with an image that feels (to the client) uniquely apropos to their hard-to-articulate experience. This is what good poetry does; it evokes something indirectly normally impossible to communicate in plain language. Even if a straightforward explication exists, it just doesn’t carry the same emotional charge or depth of meaning as the poetic version. Now I’m reminded of the exhortation to “kiss the mirror” during cornering. This action strategy is meant to get riders to move forward and to the inside as they enter a curve. When I’ve relayed this advice in colorful language to other riders, they often respond with a perplexed or dismissive look. At first, the action seems impossible, silly or both. But in actual practice, it can be surprisingly helpful. Many of those same riders who initially screwed up their faces later tell me so with a grin. Because of its oddness, the phrase sticks in our minds. Because of its correctness (it really does improve both control and confidence when riders position their bodies this way), it quickly yields rewards. And because of its conciseness, it efficiently packages a big basket of benefits into a single, deceptively simple command. Moving our lips toward the inside mirror inherently involves extensive reconfiguration of our torsos and limbs, while keeping our heads and eyes up; it allows the use of less lean angle, leaving more in reserve, improving stability, traction and ground clearance; and it gets more weight on the front tire’s contact patch—all from a tiny three-word, four-syllable prompt. Is something added by the romantic connotation? Do you love your motorcycle?
No doubt you have your own collection of pearls. Maybe they were cleverly brief instructions passed along to you in formal or informal coaching, or maybe they represent insights you arrived at on your own. Maybe the imagery would be broadly compelling and memorable, or maybe it would only speak to a select few other riders who share key aspects of your personal background. Whatever the case, the wisdom contained in those tight phrases would take pages to fully explain, and even then something would be lost in all that verbiage—utility, if nothing else. This is one of those cases wherein less really can be more.
An actual pearl is formed by the accretion of many, many layers of a protective substance secreted by the mollusk in response to a threat or irritant inside its shell. These translucent layers create a thing of beauty because of the resulting visual depth and richness. What a perfect metaphor here! A succinct action phrase is such a treasure because it’s built of many component layers, condensed into a single, compact unit making something complicated simple, and helps protect us from injury and distraction. May you ride happy as a clam!
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.
