my first highside

 boy, saying i love riding sure jinxed me...


was coming home last night, riding a 3-lane, 1-way, empty street

i was in the center lane

i noticed a white van double parked, with its lights off, blocking the
right lane

consciously, i moved to the left third of the middle lane, giving a
little room in case he pulls out without looking


almost nothing else that happened was a result of conscious thought -
i was thinking only about the sound of my engine (if you'll remember,
i never actually got around to cleaning out the carb)


the van pulled out, but instead of only taking up the right lane, it
pulled 90 degrees as though making a u-turn

it was almost perpendicular and it had blocked all of my lane

it was about 40 feet in front of me, i was doing about 40mph



i started pulling the front brake and stepping on the rear brake

i was convinced i was going to hit this guy

tried swerving left, thinking maybe i could shoot right by him, but i
wouldn't have been able to get by so i tried to just vector a little
to the left, just in case

i got about as far as the middle of the left lane, ultimately

the rear brake gripped too tightly, and i realized i was locking it,
and simply because i felt the ass sliding out to the right i let up
off it a tiny bit

THEN i felt the bike wobble as it was half-correcting itself and half-
falling over

it felt like suddenly i was going very fast, which might be because
the rear wheel engaged and was slingshotting me forward, or might have
been because i had, ostensibly, survived a potential highside (despite
that i was now going to hit the van after all, and hit it faster) and
time resumed to flowing normally

in essence, i was exactly in the same spot as a moment ago -- going
too fast to avoid this collision


on the bright side, the skid made enough noise that the driver at
least slowed down or looked, because he didn't overtake the whole left
lane, so it became possible for me to slip by after all, provided i
could vector fast enough



so i tried to big-swerve left, hoping to follow it up very quickly
with a small-swerve right (instead of crashing through the tribeca
grand hotel), but my attempt didn't progress very well

i was still putting pressure on the rear brake, subconsciously
figuring that stopping is still the idea solution, but the lesson is
it's not possible to do both - you can't brake and swerve, you'll fall
the hell over


that's when i entered the second potential highside - the rear locked
up and started sliding, but the bars weren't pointing straight, they
were pointing left, because i was really trying to swerve (and
stupidly still hitting the brake)

thing is, because i was swerving and then the back locked, my reflex
was to straighten the bars (but i only corrected very slightly, and it
was something like countersteering)

the result was a ridiculous skid, the whole bike sliding almost
perpendicular to the road, and instead of riding upright, i was leaned
away from the direction i was traveling and the bike was leaning
against its momentum also, causing a skid maybe 15 feet long and
somehow (magic?) bleeding off most of my speed


when i let off the rear brake as i tried to straighten up (both in
terms of the up-and-down and the left-right), i was able to roll by
the hood of the van, which had responded to me skidding at him
violently by slowly turning back into the flow of traffic

as i went by, maybe at 10 mph, i looked at the guy and he had an
expression half of disbelief and half of what seemed like
contempt...he was a thin black guy, very tall (his head was near the
roof of the van), probably no older than late 20's

i waved my arm at him and shouted, not that he could hear me

then i downshifted to 2nd and he was driving behind me as if nothing
happened, when i turned around again and shouted and waved my arm as
though i were some italian stereotype

he just kept looking at me ... didn't do anything

i half wanted to beat the fuck out of the guy (or his van) and half
wanted to just chill for a second and be thankful i escaped that


i chose the latter


i suspect the real lesson is that you can never tell how negligent
people will be ... i suppose we should always give as much of a margin
as possible, not just what's most practical or probabalistic ... and
yet, i doubt the extreme-caution standard will ever be a typical
behavior

but even then, no lights, it looked double parked ... i wasn't wrong
for following too closely, i wasn't wrong for speeding since i was
doing the limit on the empty street ... the scary thing is i don't
think there's anything i could have done differently - it's really
just magic that i didn't crash

-c

 

You're ready to go flat tracking now...

http://garynixon.com/images/images-san-jose-mile.jpg

 

Glad you survived.

This is totally possible if you use the front brake.  You CAN Brake and
Swerve!


--
Andrew
00 Daytona
00 Speed Triple
71 Kawi H1
05 Kiddo

 


Exactly. And if you want to survive as a long-term motorcycle rider you'd
best learn how to do so.

It's saved my bacon a couple of times.

 wrote:

They teach that at the MSF/BRC and even do a little on the track as
one of the available evasion tactics.

Sorta related...

And then I hear on a local radio station program on local riding a
call-in from a dirt track racer who calimed he almost never uses his
back brake because it'll make him crash, but always uses the front
brake. I don't know squat about racing, so I don't know if it's true
or not, but I have no reason to doubt it.

I remember p*ssing on Calgary over the issue of using the front brake
by itself, but there's one example (if true) of why you'd want to do
just that. Apologies to Calgary for my stance on that thread.

Greg