I still haven’t finished the Thailand addition to my website. But there’s something else I wanted to post about that I won’t put on the site (because family members read it including my mother, and you know how mothers worry). When I was in Thailand I came off the bike - not badly, but enough to make me very grateful for my protective gear and to rethink aspects of my riding technique.
I was coming down a mountain and was a bit tired (having got up at 4 a.m. to ride up the mountain to get back the camera I’d accidentally left up there the night before, then done a bit more sightseeing). It had made my leg a bit cramped to cover the back brake with my foot, so I wasn’t doing so. I was coming round a tight left-hand corner when a pickup track came barrelling up on the other side. He was within his own lane, but I was surprised enough to pull the front brake quite firmly. The dual front discs bit, the wheel locked and the bike went down (lowside - front end slid out & bike was in front of me). I think the bike slid about 7 meters - me about 5. The very surprised pickup driver and his mates helped me and the bike up and made sure that things were OK before driving on.
On inspection, the Cordura (tough, abrasion-resistant material) on my jacket was worn completely through at the edge of the elbow armour. Had I not been wearing it, I would have had severe grazing and possibly bone abrasion. My Cordura pants were a bit scuffed and because the knee armour wasn’t firmly in place, my knee ached for a day (but was fine after).
The front forks of the bike were bent and needed to be fixed before any more serious riding. I took it pretty slowly down rest of the mountain to the little town where we were staying (if you’re wondering where my brother was- he had taken the Honda Baja up a long dirt road for the morning). Our wonderful landlady’s cousin ran a bike shop and they managed to fix it by lunchtime the next day.
It made me think about my riding techniques. The immediate cause of the accident was that the combined braking and cornering forces were on the front wheel and the tyre slipped out. If I had used a combination of back brake and a little front, it probably wouldn’t have happened. Alternatively, I could have just tightened the turn a little and cornered without any braking - there was enough space because as I said the pickup was within his own lane.
There was a physical and a mental lesson I learned. The physical one was that when coming downhill, or on the level, I should always cover the back brake with my foot. I should get used to using the brakes in combination- my brother recommended me to try thinking of it as a right-side-of-body action, rather than a hand or foot one. I should also consider the balance of braking - most times a bias towards more front brake is better, but sometimes, as in this accident, an equal balance or even a slight bias towards back brake would be better. To aid this, when coming down steep hills I started to cover the front brake with only two fingers, to reduce the force that could be applied, even in a panic reaction situation.
The mental lesson I learned was really a development of the process of anticipation and defensive riding. I realised once again that when riding a motorcycle, there is no time when one can afford to be complacent. I thought I had the road to myself and my panic at suddenly seeing the pickup caused the accident. Simple anticipation of situations defuses panic reactions and enables better decisions to be made.
Connected with this is something called ‘target fixation’ which I have read about on motorcycle safety and advanced riding sites. Target fixation is that situation when something is coming towards you and you panic and kind of ‘lock on’ to the thing, unable to make a rational decision to turn left or right to avoid it. On motorcycle safety courses they give you tips that can help avoid this, but for myself, for the moment, I’ve just been focusing more on my anticipation and defensive riding techniques. So sometimes when I’m riding I’ll think to myself ‘What if somebody is coming the wrong way down this road just round this corner; what will I do? Is there anyone coming up behind me who might be trying to overtake me? Would there be space on the inside?’ I think that conscious practice of this kind of thinking can help the body’s automatic reactions when things do get tricky. It’s all about instilling habits.
Hope this has been of some interest/use and I haven’t bored everybody.