Steady on the Humble

I haven’t touched my motorcycle in over a month. I haven’t started it, haven’t visited it in it’s parking space. I haven’t even looked at it. Why? For a couple of reasons actually, but the main reason is because my head and heart just weren’t in it. Losing my 15 year old dog really affected me and the thought of being out on the bike without my head and heart in it didn’t sound like a very good idea.

Though some of you may think that all that time spent off of the motorcycle during the peak summer months may be a bad thing, in semi hindsight it turned out to be just what I needed. Instead of throwing my leg over my motorcycle, I started riding bicycles again after a long long time away.

To that end, I thought I might write about bicycles and how they’ve changed my life, how they’ve given me the necessary skills to be able to ride a motorcycle with a certain degree of grace, and how similar yet different the two modes of transportation are. For now, I’m going to give you some background…

I learned how to ride a bicycle without the help of training wheels when I was 6 years old. To a 6 year old kid such as myself, the new found freedom was a revelation. See, I was a latch key kid and when I left school for the day I was left to my own devices. Instead of limiting myself to playing stickball and “Kill the Man” with the other kids on the block, the entire cityscape was mine to explore on 2 wheels. I’d often find myself in neighborhoods that seemed so far away, places that I’d only ever been to with my parents and the family car. I’d be out well past dark on my bicycle and there was never a thought about the stupidity of riding around the city by myself on a bicycle with no lights or reflectors. Helmet? Yeah right.

Over the summers my friends and I would spend the majority of our days on our bicycles – having races around the block (the losers bought the Marino’s), building ramps and having jumping contests, playing riding versions of Kill the Man and inventing a game that would have a profound effect on me much later in life. The game? We called it Submarine and it was played like this – we’d divide into 2 groups, group A was lined up on either side of the street armed with footballs, soccer balls, tennis balls and skateboards. Group B were on their bicycles. The goal of the game for Group A was to hit anyone in Group B riding by. For folks in Group B, the goal was to survive as many runs through the gauntlet as you could without getting blasted by a ball or getting taken out by a speeding torpedo (skateboard).

Thanks to this sometimes bloody game, I learned how to truly control my bicycle – I learned how to balance, how to stop short, how to jump over things, how not to target fixate. Though the bike riders all eventually got hit, I was, for the most part, always one of the last ones to suffer the indignity of a ball in the face or a skateboard in the wheels which would always result in scrapped up knees and elbows at best.

Not too long after that, I entered my very first BMX race. For my first couple of years racing, I was never able to claw my way out of the “Novice” class. In order for me to bump up to the next class, I’d have to win at least five races within a calendar year. Dejected, I was ready to quit and be content with riding bicycles just for the fun of it. But then something clicked. Maybe it was the hormonal kick of puberty. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d finally grew strong enough to learn how to speed jump (a technique used to ride over all the jumps as fast as possible, often times without stopping pedaling). By my third year of racing I shot out of the Novice class, past the Intermediate class, and into the Expert class.

By this time, my folks really couldn’t stand each other and the weekends away at the races afforded my father the time away from home that he felt he needed. The more races I won, the more often I’d race and it turned into a vicious cycle. Pretty soon I stopped racing locally and began racing the national circuit. I’d race both ABA (American Bicycle Association) and NBL (National Bicycle Association) nationals. At the height of that period of racing, I’d achieved a national rank of 23rd in the country and had a full factory sponsorship from the then tiny company called Elf.

My daily life sort of went like this – go to school, go home, train, go to sleep and repeat Monday through Friday. Saturday, travel to the race and on Sunday do the race then go back home. By the time high school hit, I was burned out and too interested in having a “normal” life – meeting girls, hanging out and going to parties so my racing weekends tapered off, eventually stopping altogether despite my sponsorship commitments and my father’s need to be away from home.

I didn’t ride a bicycle at all for those 4 years of high school, well, except that one time I was very late for my biology regions test and had no choice but to sprint down to school to take it. Once out of high school, I worked as a bicycle messenger while I went to community college (I’d taken to partying like a fish to water in high school, hence the community college).

Like the game Submarine I played as a kid, being a bicycle messenger in NYC during the heyday of messengers taught me some valuable lessons. Though I’d developed plenty of muscle memory from years of riding bicycles, spending 40 hours a week cutting through NYC traffic on a bicycle taught my how to read my environment. It taught my how to be constantly aware of everything going on 180° in front of me.

Being a bike messenger also helped to rekindle my love of bicycles and before I knew it, I found myself spending all my free time on one. Once I landed a job that allowed me to buy my first real mountain bike, I was off to the woods every chance I got and so began my foray into the world of dirt.

Though I’d spent time on smaller capacity dirt bikes in the past, riding around landfills of Brooklyn and Queens doesn’t exactly qualify as true off road experience. But thanks to mountain bikes, I began learning the lessons that would carry over into riding motorcycles. I learned how to string a series of corners together, I learned how to trail brake, I learned what it feels like to push the front and slide the rear and how to save yourself from a crash in either scenario. I learned how to be patient and I found my ideal inner pace during the 24 hour races that I’ve done.

From racing downhill bikes I learned how to use my body weight to preload the suspension to make the tires stick, I learned how to use smoothness and momentum to go faster without much more effort. I learned that subtle weight shifts have huge effects on the bike and how it handles. I reinforced my past lessons of target fixation, but most importantly, I learned how to control my fear. 50mph on a bicycle through the woods on a meandering trail no wider than 18 inches will do that for you.

Alas, my downhilling came to end when I wrapped my leg around a tree at 30mph. I was on a mountain in the Catskills and it had been raining all day. The trail’s surface was made up of mud, broken shale and the occasional patch of wet grass. Despite my bike having the best disc brakes money can buy, I wasn’t able to slow down for an upcoming hairpin because the trail’s surface wasn’t conducive to slowing down. In fact, with the wheels fully locked up, both front and rear, the mud and broken shale only increased my speed… needless to say, I didn’t make the corner, but I managed to hit a tree instead.

It took me about 2 months just to be able to get myself out of bed with the help of a cane. Thanks to the generous help of some family, a few great friends and a month or so of physical therapy and I was at about 60%.

With a custom made carbon fiber knee brace, I was back on a bicycle! But instead of being on the dirt, I was on the road trying to build up the muscles that had atrophied after spending such a long time being entombed in various braces.

Fast forward a couple of years and I find myself chasing my friend Squid going the wrong way up 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. See, we were in the middle of one of the year’s biggest alleycat races, a race dubbed Monster Track. Monster track is a race specifically for a very special type of bicycle called a track bike, also known as a fixed gear. A track bike only has one speed, has no shifters or functioning brakes and they’re meant for use on a velodrome. When you ride a track bike, you can’t coast because the pedals are directly connected to the rear wheel via cranks and chain. In essence, your drivetrain and gear selection are “fixed” and cannot be easily changed without a few very specific tools.

So what’s it like to ride a fixed gear? Well, you can’t coast and there are no brakes. True, you can always throw a brake or 2 on but that defeats the whole purpose IMO, might as well ride a regular bike. The best way I can describe riding one of these is that it’s just like riding a stationary “spin” bike found at your local gym. Ever take a spinning class? Then you’ve ridden a sort of fixed gear bike except spin bikes don’t go anywhere when you pedal them, unlike track bikes. If you can get on top of your 80 inch gear and your cadence is high enough, you’ll easily be going 25mph. You’d better be certain you know the how to control the bike in these instances!

Why on earth would someone want to ride a bicycle that doesn’t allow you to coast and doesn’t have any brakes in NYC traffic? I’m sure the reasons are as different as the people that ride them. But the reason I rode was to learn how to be the master of the bike and not let the bike master me, which it can easily do to any rider foolish enough to think that they they can ride it on the street without going through a sharp learning curve. To give you a tiny idea of what it might be like, check out the video below.

The girl (KT) that gets creamed by a cab at the end didn’t get hurt, although her bike did. That particular footage was shot during was on the city’s many alleycat races.

Anyway, riding and mastering a trackbike in the city helped to hone a sort of 6th sixth sense about pedestrian and traffic patterns which has helped me to this very day. I know it sounds cliche, I know it’s corny, but if you’ve managed to develop a 6th sense of your own, then you know what I’m talking about. Call it hyper awareness, call it “being the the zone, call it whatever you’d like. It just a shame that the joy of riding these bikes has been tarnished by their ever growing popularity. I remember when you had to scour each and every shop in hopes of finding a usable track specific part, now you can order a color coordinated bike that looks like a track from clothing stores like Urban Outfitters, everyone can look cool now!

BMX bikes, road bikes, track bikes, mountain bikes both cross country and downhill, I’ve ridden and raced them all.

For the next post in this little series I’ll talk about how spending hours and hours on a road bike helped me in my Ironbutt attempts.