Are You a Good Rider?

What is a good rider?

Ask 20 people what makes a good motorcycle rider and you’ll probably get 20 different answers, most of them centered on the generally accepted principle that the fastest riders are the best riders. “He has to be a good rider because he can ride faster than me” seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Ask anyone knowledgeable who the best rider in the world is and they will probably say Valentino Rossi – a multi time Moto GP champion.

If you think about motorcycles as Freud would, you quickly realize that there’s a whole lot of machismo at play. Most riders, without giving it much thought at all, equate riding well with going fast. After all, nobody wants to be the slowest rider in the group, unless you are BDB.

A while back I had a conversation with a fellow rider and he fell right into the macho trap of equating riding fast with riding “good”. When I called him out on this he realized what he had done and changed what he said to something more like “He’s a really good, fast rider”

Myself, I won’t ride if I don’t feel right. That means that I have to be 100% aware and 100% ready to react to the threats that are going to be presented to me. Riding is a good activity for me because if I’m on the road and I’m spending the night out with the boys, I won’t drink too much because I know that I won’t ride the next morning with a hangover.

I had my first and only road accident on a motorcycle when I was 17. It was about 2 weeks after I bought my first road bike, a 2 stroke 1974 Kawasaki 750 triple. I was showing off and whacked a fire hydrant. Luckily I didn’t get hurt. It DID scare the crap out of me and I believe it also gave me a very healthy respect for motorcycles.

When I ride on the road, I do it with the attitude that every bike, car, truck, cow, buffalo, dog, chicken, etc. is out to kill me and my job is to prevent them from doing that. I am constantly scanning the road, checking the mirrors, looking for dogs that don’t see me so I can give them a toot on my horn, looking for scooters that are getting ready to dart across the road so they can make a u-turn on the divided highway, looking for sand, gravel or oil in the corners.

When I ride in the dirt, I ride for fun. I have fallen in the dirt too many times to count. In Thailand, dirt riding can be somewhat similar to road riding because the trails you ride on often link remote villages to the real world. You may come around a corner to find a step through in your lane coming right at you. You might be climbing a hill and find a pickup truck sliding down the hill towards you.

I used to think that the best riders were those that didn’t get hurt, didn’t endanger themselves or anyone else (an oxymoron because motorcycle riding is an inherently dangerous thing to do), those that didn’t ride when they’ve been drinking or those that didn’t ride at night.

Now that I’m older, I have finally learned what being a good rider is all about. Being a good rider means that you never stop learning to be a better rider.