Motorcycle Skills Day 2

Today's weather:  High = 24 Low = 14

Partly Cloudy

 

Well the good news is I passed the low-speed skills test for motorcycles in the parking lot.

 

The actual test was a lot easier than the drills that Pro-Ride set out for us to practice on.  This was a smart teaching tactic, and one I often use in my own classes.  That is, make the practice drills harder than the real test.

 

The test involved doing a U-turn, then slalom through cones.  The next was a U-turn, acceleration, followed by an emergency braking maneuver.  Each maneuver had to be done twice.

 

To get us pscyhed up for that, we did things like figure-8 maneuvers through cone boxes, tight turn boxes, and the most interesting and challenging of all:  emergency braking in a curve.  The way to do this is never to brake while the bike is leaning in the curve, but to first straighten out the bike, then go for the front brakes.  This technique basically involves picking a secant line to the curve, ideally one that makes you 'land' away from the direction that cars would likely be going on the curve.

 

As an aside, a secant line is one that cuts from point to point within a curve, whereas a tangent line goes off the curve at some fixed point.  The tangent line would occur from losing control of the bike within the turn.  Who says calculus isn't useful in real life??!

 

It was a great day of skills, and now the next phase of my training comes in:  real road riding!!

 

At this point I'm absolutely exhausted and dizzy from all those skills maneuvers and riding in circles in the parking lot.  Take that Shanghai police, I'm doing things legally now.