Crashing | Overcoming Fear | Learning from Failure | Finding Resilience
My first day as biker didn’t quite go to plan. In the morning I was riding a shiny brand-new motorbike, in the afternoon I’d crashed it and left hospital with eight stitches, a bloody chin and the worst headache ever.
Yep. It wasn’t the most illustrious start.
The crash was innocuous: I had braked at a junction for a red light but I wasn’t slowing. I pulled on the brake a second time and it felt soft in my glove. By the time it dawned on me, it was too late.
BRAKE FAILURE. SH******T.
It’s the worst feeling in the world, nut even worse as it plays out at a speed of 0.5x. I jumped the red and came off the handlebars. My chin and head (in a helmet, otherwise I would not be here writing this) hit the wall and 130 kg of motorbike fell on my left leg. I was dazed, covered in brick dust, and my jeans were a mottled wash of petrol and blood. I called Sarah unable to form complete sentences which freaked her out. Soon I was in an ambulance talking gibberish to the ambulance-women all the way to St. Thomas’s.
I healed well physically: my headache went away, my stitches came out and the graze on my chin disappeared.
But the problem was this: mentally I hadn’t healed and the crash had brought me a deep-seated fear of ever riding again.
Midlife crisis or fulfilling a childhood dream?
Men of a certain age suddenly take up new hobbies to recreate their youth. Some cycle, some get tattoos, piercings or a sports car.
You could call my starting to ride motorbike in to my 40s a midlife crisis I suppose; I prefer to call it the fulfilment of a childhood dream. I was 12 when I saw ‘The Great Escape’ with Steve McQueen (it was on TV not at the cinema) trying to make that jump on his iconic Triumph, and it was then I knew I wanted at some point in my life to ride a Triumph.
But now with that crash, my dream had gone up in a cloud of brick-dust.
If at first you don’t succeed try try again. Then give up. No point being a silly fool about it.
But weighing it all up, I decided to throw in the towel because I couldn’t get my head straight, I couldn’t quite exorcise the fear. I’d replayed the incident in my head too many times and so I returned the bike to the manufacturer and hung up my boots. It was better to be an ex-biker than a late biker.
Howver, giving up isn’t always the easiest thing to do because old dreams die hard, especially those fashioned in childhood. We bikers are an odd bunch. We dote over our bikes as if they were our best friends, we name them, polish and clean them with pleasure. We dote over them. The problem was, I still hoped for the thrill of the ride, the pure joy, the meditative sound of the engine.
Overcoming the fear of crashing
For bikers, a ride brings a high-octane dopamine-fuelled feeling of freedom and pure unadulterated joy.
-Old biking saying (by me)
Motorcycling is a drug in two ways: it’s addictive and when you’re down, it gives you a high. There’s a reason you never see a motorcycle parked outside a therapist.
Six months later my childhood dreams came back to me all singing and dancing and they managed to win over my fears. Old dreams don’t just died hard. They can exorcise your demons.
I decided to try again. I bought another learner bike, a 125 cc, she was clunky, a ‘screamer’, her brakes were reliable but even so, I always made sure to double-check them before setting off (something I do even till today). Once bitten, as they say.
I rode the ‘screamer’ for a year and totted up over 5,000 miles. My skill level increased, my confidence came back and one day I rode past the wall I had crashed on and saw the deep scratches and damaged brickwork, but it didn’t affect me anymore. I realised I was riding without fear.
The motorbike test: failing again and again
I was feeling confident on taking my full licence motorcycle test, given the road experience I had had. Getting a full ‘A’ Motorbike Licence entails passing a theory test of multiple choice questions and spotting hazards on a video. Then there are two practical tests: Module 1 tests the rider’s control of the bike with maneuvers such as figures of 8, slalom, emergency stops, hazard avoidance, u-turns etc. and Module 2 tests the rider’s road skills.
I passed the theory test without any problems but Module 1 was a real setback. Until I took my Module 1, I had never failed any kind of test or exam in my life.
Failure is a great teacher, it pulls the rug from under your feet and humbles you. Humble pie is like warm lager. It puts you in your place and it tastes sh*t.
None of the the test manoeuvres were problematic for me except the U turn which sounded deceptively simple on paper: ride the bike along a white line, check over your right shoulder and then perform a U turn avoiding going beyond another white line and without putting a foot on the ground.
Simple hey? But it wasn’t for me.
I failed it seven times.
The first time I failed it, I put a foot on the ground. The second time, I went over the white line. I even failed it once for doing my shoulder check too early.
I was in turmoil. I could breeze through all the other manoeuvres, but the U turn was my choke, my one stumbling block and each time I failed I had to wait 2 weeks for a retest and fork out some more money. It was frustrating and I started to feel, as Jose Mourinho once called Arsene Wenger, a specialist in failure.
I started to swot up and research all the advice I could find, in manuals, Youtube videos and from instructors. I amassed a lot of detailed hints for passing the u turn and practised on the screamer at weekends.
Overthinking it is typical me.
My head became cluttered with a lot of advice …
“Keep the clutch at the bite point and maintain that.”
“Ride as close to the first line as you can.”
“Sit on the left side of the seat to counter-balance when you turn right.”
“Keep your left elbow soft and high.”
“Lean in.”
“Get up to a speed of 10mph.”
“Use the rear brake.”
“Lock in the steering.”
Choking on the day, is a strange thing. You can practice all you want but test day is unforgiving.
Where was I going wrong? Analysis paralysis and fear of failure
The problem was I was I was overthinking. I was trying to absorb all the information and on test day a tsunami of thoughts came cascading over me. It was a classic case of paralysis by analysis.
Secondly, I was being too cautious, my crash had turned me in to a defensive rider and this very same cautiousness was actually causing me to fail. I need to let go.
I decided to reset. To perform a Control Alt Delete on the hard drive of my brain. I boiled down the advice to simple actions that I could focus on on the day and I visualised making that turn perfectly.
So what did I do? I kept it simple;.do the main things well and the others will look after themselves. I had decluttered my head and boiled it down to three rules.
Keeping it simple with the 3 point plan
- Commit commit commit. Go in full-hearted.Donit 100%. Damn. Get momentum and speed. Lean in to the turn. Be in the moment. Don’t think just do. (In retrospect I had been riding too slow and committing enabled me to ride up to 10 mph, the ideal speed for me that enabled me to lean in to the turn and shorten the turning circle.
- Keep your eye on the end point. At the apex of the turn I learned to turn my head to look at a point at the end of the manoeuvre. It’s a curious fact in motorcycling, that your front tyre will nearly always end up at the point on the ground you’re looking at.
- Marginal gains. In life, making a small change can reap disproportionate rewards, or as economists call it, marginal gains theory. Swapping out the chicken wings starter for a salad, having a small glass of red instead of a medium, reading a paragraph a day, that sort of thing. I told my instructor to swap out my test bike, the Honda CBR 650 for a Kawasaki Z650. My instructor said, “why would you want to do that?. The Honda has 4 cylinders to the Kawasaki’s 2, and is a smoother, less juddery ride, especially at low speeds.” My reasoning was simple: the Kawasaki Z650 is a couple of inches shorter than the Honda CBR 650. And how much was I failing by? A couple of inches.
And that was it. I completed the U turn with gusto, inches to spare and I passed Module 2 with no points . Just looking back at the above list, it’s good advice for life in general.
It’s been 8 years since I became a biker and fulfilled a childhood dream (or my mid-life crisis if you want).
A few years ago I bought my first big bike, my dream bike, of the same lineage as Steve McQueen’s. She’s a joyride each day every day, and also a reminder of how I learned to ride, and how that journey turned in to one of self-discovery and in itself another type of triumph.
Hey Loons 