Today was the day!! Gulp.
Our little class of about 12 people spent a couple of hours in the classroom, reviewing the answers to the questions in our Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s Basic Ridercourse handbooks. That’s right up my alley! No stress or anxiety there!!
But, then… Time to hit the parking lot!! Hopefully only figuratively, not literally!!
I was tickled to find that the course was built in an RSTP fashion, starting out slow, with small building blocks, building discreet skills incrementally. We started out with some very simple rules to follow while “on the range,” meant to keep order and people from getting hurt. Then, we literally sat on the bike, turned the engines on, and walked the bikes back and forth across the parking lot, doing the “friction zone duck walk,” letting out the clutch just enough to putter back and forth across the course.
We progressively built our skill and stretched our comfort zone – stopping and starting, shifting and stopping, cone weaving and turns, cornering, engine braking, emergency stopping. It was shocking to me how quickly terror turned into a comfortable level of confidence (in a closed parking lot, mind you, not out on a road or with traffic – unimaginable to me that I could ever possibly feel comfortable with that!!)
By the end of the day… Oh my GOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It had been AWeSOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What a blast – on a super high – I realized I’d ridden a motorcycle!! In first AND second gear!!! Whoot whoot!! About a blue million degrees out, melted down to my underthings, sporting sopping wet helmet head hair, but it was soooo worth it!! Can’t wait for class again tomorrow!!
Stretch: EVERYTHING!!!!!!
Lessons: If you sneak up on a new skill, it actually comes around very quickly.
Smarter-Not-Harder U 