I recently came accross a text on riding motorcycles and the danger that comes with it. I hope that the text below makes you realize that in some hobbies, the danger is actually the point:
People who do not ride think the danger is the problem. They are wrong about that. The danger is part of the point. Not in a reckless way. Not in a death wish way. In an honest way.
A motorcycle does not pretend to be safe. It does not wrap you in steel and airbags and tell you everything is fine. It puts you out in the open and it tells you the truth. This is real. Pay attention. That is the thing nobody talks about.
The thrill and the danger are not two separate things. They are the same thing. The reason it feels so alive is because it actually matters. Mistakes have consequences out here.
The stakes are real and something happens to a person when the stakes are real. You wake up, you focus, you stop thinking about everything else because there is no room for it. There is only the road and the bike in the next corner.
Most of modern life is built to remove risk, to smooth everything over, to make sure nothing can ever go wrong. A motorcycle gives it back to you. The danger, the focus, the feeling of being awake.
It is not safe. That was never the point. The point is that it is real.
For me this resonates very much with riding the S1000RR on several tracks in Europe with the awesome Racing School Europe. Nothing comes close to trying to hit your brake point at the end of the Mugello Straight while going over 300kph and forcing your head and eyes to look at the next markers so you actually make the corner. The importance of getting it right makes the fog in your brain disappear.
For a while now, my Triumph Speed Triple 1050 from 2009 was refusing to start every now and then. At first I thought this was a motormanagement or battery problem, or the sidestand switch, but it turns out there is another switch which prevents the starter engine from turning over. The clutch handle!
I’ve been struggling to get routes into my Garmin Zūmo® in such a way that it matches the plans of the original author, while at the same time setting the Garmin to “recalculate” so that when I take a wrong turn, it will send me back to the track. After reading a lot on the Garmin forums, and experimenting with this on my two recent road trips (one to Eifel and one to Sauerland in Germany) I can say I have found a way to do this. It’s a bit of work, but it will make your trip a lot more trouble-free. Here’s the recipe.
In some biker magazines you’ll see some cheap journalists write that the “dish washing soap anti-fog is an urban myth”, and that it will “blur your vision”, some may even say it’s downright dangerous. This blogpost is to show that if done right, dish washing soap is actually the absolute best anti-fog treatment money can buy. If you’ve tried this and still don’t like it, there are some easier alternatives at the bottom for your convenience.