What is it to be Brave?
What is it to be brave? One definition of brave I like is being brave is to “face danger, fear, or difficulty”. New riders will have ample opportunity to demonstrate their bravery. There are many things about motorcycling that can cause fear or present danger or difficulty, especially when you are brand new to it. To start this off, let me just say that if you’ve already taken the step of taking your first motorcycle course, you really need to congratulate yourself and celebrate the bravery you have shown. To the masses, motorcycles appear inherently dangerous and many people just can’t get past that.
You’re going to notice throughout this article that I have a strong bias towards training and practice. That’s because training provides you with the techniques and skills you need to succeed on the road and practice builds the confidence you need in order to attain mastery and true enjoyment of motorcycling. I believe motorcycling isn’t about hopping on and going for a ride, it’s a lifelong pursuit of new experiences, new ideas and new challenges.
I’d also like to say that it’s not my intention with this article to teach anyone how to ride. What I want to do is illustrate a process whereby you can recognize the things that reduce your enjoyment of motorcycling and overcome them in order to go on to a long, happy motorcycling career.
To become brave, we have to overcome fear. So let’s talk about how fear impacts us while we’re riding.
How Does Fear Impact Us?
Fear can cause us to make sudden adjustments to the bike which negatively affect stability. For example, we are in a corner and it is tighter than we expect. Fear causes us to impulsively grab the front brake, causing the bike to drift farther to the outside of the corner, making the situation worse. This is one of the most common mistakes new riders make in corners. With training and practice, when we start to feel uncomfortable, we rely on our training and practice and instinctively add counter-steer or lean in order to negotiate the curve.
Fear can cause us to avoid an activity. Maybe you blew a corner and scared yourself. Your confidence is shot and on that next sunny day, everyone is going out riding on the local twisties, but you’re not feeling it.
How Can We Be Brave?
The first step in being brave is identifying what you are actually afraid of. Obviously at a higher level, most of us have some degree of fear with respect to injury and death. But we also have more specific fears as they relate to motorcycling. Tight corners, passing, riding in heavy traffic, the weather, highway riding and wet roads are just a few.
Once we’ve identified what we’re afraid of, we can work towards overcoming it. To do so, we need to come up with a plan. It needs to include an evaluation of the risks involved, the steps we can take to mitigate those risks and a plan to gradually expose ourselves to the thing we fear.
For example, let’s say you feel afraid in tight curves. You’re afraid to really lean the bike over and so you always go very slow around corners. This is extremely common among new riders. So let’s come up with a plan to fix that.
Step 1 – Evaluate the risks of tight curves:
- Going wide and going off the road or fixating on the barrier and hitting it.
- Crossing the center line into oncoming traffic.
- Hitting the brakes or chopping the throttle too hard and causing the bike to lose stability.
Step 2 – Research the solutions:
- Get online and watch some videos on cornering. Here’s a good one from MC Rider on going wide or if you prefer, Motojitsu.
- Find local training courses. Many locales offer novice rider courses, experienced rider courses and more advanced cornering courses run on racetracks. All of these courses will teach you the techniques you need to be successful on the road.
- Find out where your local twisty roads are. The roads all the local riders hit up when they want a blast of adrenalin. This is where you’ll practice. Practice is key to developing confidence.
Step 3 – Make a Plan:
- Book that next-level training course that will challenge you to become better!
- Plan out a day to go out to the local twisties and start to get to know the roads.
How Can We Build Confidence?
Now we’ve made a plan, go out there and implement it! Take the course and/or get out onto those twisties. The idea is to gradually expose yourself to the danger and slowly build confidence by practicing the techniques you learned on your course or in your online research. Take it slow, a perfect corner is more important than a fast one. Work on your techniques first, the speed will come. Spend a season riding your local twisties once a week like this and I guarantee you you’ll be super-confident in the curves.
You will not build confidence if you don’t get out and ride. And when you do, you need to do it strategically. Plan out where you will ride and what you want to work on. I plan out my season. I will take a training course at the start of the season, I will plan out a trip every month or two and plan to go on group rides at least once per week. Every single time I ride I evaluate my takeoffs, my shifting, my acceleration, my braking, my cornering, my stopping and my parking and I consciously attempt to apply learned techniques to all of them as I ride.
In doing this, many of us can fall into the trap of focusing on the negative. All we take away from the ride is what we didn’t do well. I challenge you to focus more on what you did do well or the one corner where you really rocked it! Always take away the things you can improve and make a plan for the next ride to work on those. But, focus on what really went well, or where you really showed improvement. Keep it positive!
The Inherent Dangers of Motorcycling:
I’d like to talk about some more specific dangers we face, but I think we should start with motorcycling in general. Motorcycling can be dangerous. Motorcyclists are disproportionately exposed to serious injury and death. What I mean is that if you get in an accident, you are more likely to be injured or die than someone in a car who gets into an accident. I won’t quote statistics, if you want to deep-dive into that rabbit hole, google is your friend. However, people who do their research will find that there are ways to mitigate both those risks.
So how do we mitigate the risks of crashing, getting injured or even dying? Turns out, that’s pretty straightforward. If you consider motorcycling to be a 4-legged stool, one leg would be a properly functioning, safe motorcycle, one would be training, one would be wearing good safety gear and the last would be a focus on safety each and every time you ride. Without any one of these legs, the stool will fall over, meaning you’re setting yourself up for failure without 4 properly installed legs.
Having a properly functioning motorcycle that is safe to ride is important. A good pre-trip inspection will prevent you from running into problems out on the road. Here’s a good video from Ryan at Fortnine. You would be amazed how many people are riding around with tires that are worn out or low on air. A couple summers ago, I was doing a local ride around a route we call “The Loop”. It can be 45 minutes or so between civilization and when we finally arrived back at a gas station there was a Harley there with a hole in his tire. I helped him plug it with my plug kit but I was blown away that this guy was from off the island on a road trip with a completely bald rear tire. The guy was nowhere near anywhere that would sell a replacement tire for his bike. He was in a rough situation that was completely avoidable. He was lucky it didn’t blow out or lose air out in the boonies because he would have been really stuck.
Training is key for all riders. The best riders in the world all embrace training. Learning proper technique and developing skills that have been developed by experts over generations of motorcycling provides you with the foundation for building confidence and maximizing your enjoyment. If you live in a place where there are riding “seasons” it can be really helpful to take a refresher course at the start of every season. This gives you confidence in your technique and skills right at the start of the season, allowing you to get the most out of it. If you live in a place where there are no courses, seriously consider planning a trip to a location that offers some good training courses.
All The Gear All The Time (ATGATT): Everyone’s perception of risk is different, I make no judgement about anyone’s gear. My attitude towards gear is predicated on my understanding that IF I get into an accident, ATGATT has a very good chance of preventing serious injury or death.
A focus on safety each and every time you ride is a critical leg of our stool. What do I mean by that exactly? Think about the last time you drove home from work. Do you even remember doing it? Unlikely, most of us don’t. That’s because we can drive our cars with our brains mostly on auto-pilot. It’s bad, but we do it. We’ve done that route so many times, our brain does it with a small amount of attention. You cannot do that on a motorcycle. You can’t drift, you can’t watch the scenery go by, your whole focus needs to be on the 360 degrees around you on that bike. If you don’t do that, if you’re not always watching for someone to pull a crazy maneuver or looking around that corner for the deer about to jump out, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Expect the unexpected.
If you are properly prepared, most of the danger will come from everything else around you. You’re wearing your gear, you’ve taken training this year, your bike is in good shape and you are focused on safety. You are as good to go as can be. The road, animals, other drivers and the weather are all examples of things that pose a potential danger to you.
Common Difficulties:
Most difficulties can be overcome through a combination of training, practice and experience in that order. If you take all the training available to you, practice as much as you can and gain experience in different situations every year, you can overcome most if not all difficulties we face. Let’s look at a few common ones:
- I can’t flat-foot my bike: Personally, I think that this falls into the realm of a real difficulty. If you have short legs, you may find it more difficult to ride, especially in traffic and when parking. That said, this difficulty can be overcome. There’s a plethora of good advice out there on YouTube for people of smaller stature. Practice and experience will get you sorted out. It will be difficult to begin but once you get a rythm for shifting your body to the left to put one foot down it will become muscle memory and you’ll be good to go.
- My bike is too heavy, it’s difficult to stand up: If the bike feels super heavy to stand up, especially if you have short legs, here’s a tip: Crank the handlebars over in the direction you are standing up the bike. So turn the front wheel all the way to the right and then stand the bike up. You will find it much, much easier.
- Going fast scares me: Well, yes it’s going to until you’ve got a few more kilometers under your belt. Nothing to be done about that. It’s important to realize that if I can do it, so can you. It just takes a while to get comfortable. You can also take more advanced courses after your novice course. My local provider has a course called the Experienced Rider Course. There’s no real definition of what “Experienced” means but I’ll tell you a bit about the course. It takes you through different aspects of your bike and stretches your knowledge and ability a bit. You do a portion on a drag strip where you accelerate until you hit the rev-limiter so you know what that feels like. There’s a ton of emergency braking, both in a straight line and around obstacles. There’s taking corners and obstacles at higher speeds and then a full section on low speed maneuvering which refreshes and improves upon the skills you would have gotten in novice. All these things happen over an intensive two day period and I highly recommend taking a course like this to build your confidence early in the riding season.
- My bike has too much power: This isn’t one you’ll hear too often but it’s real. I have a friend who left his bike in rain mode for the first month he had it because it dumbed the horsepower down by 60hp. His fear was more that he would let ‘er rip more than he should and that’s a very real concern for some riders. Having said that, you are in charge of the throttle. Don’t hammer it, ease up to speed, gently roll off and it doesn’t matter how much power your bike has, you’ll be fine. Always, always, always ride within your capabilities with a good amount of margin for the unforeseeable stuff that life throws at you.
- Parking: This is a real difficulty. It takes practice. You get low speed training at novice training, you get it again at advanced or experienced training and you still need to practice it in order to remain comfortable pulling off parking. Additionally, shorter people struggle with backing the bike up. If it’s just too much of a pain and you’re that short, just get off the bike and walk it back into the spot. Better that than dropping it. My Experienced Rider Course instructor is an amazing rider, a former motorcycle police officer. He says, “You can tell everything you need to know about a rider in their first and last 25 feet.”
- Start and stop traffic: Start and stop traffic can be tiring. Tiring for your clutch hand and tiring if you’re short and have to basically get on and off the bike non-stop. Avoid it like the plague. If you have lane filtering or splitting in your area, always proceed with caution. Idling your motorcycle along at a crawl in traffic takes some skill that you will learn through low-speed drills in your novice and experienced/advanced courses. Again though, practice is also important.
Common Fears We All Have:
- Crashing: We’ve all thought about this at one time or another. Assemble your stool correctly and you’re as safe out there as anyone else is.
- Dropping the bike: There’s no easy way to say this; you will likely drop your bike. Just prepare yourself to feel a bit embarrassed and maybe put out a few bucks to repair some cosmetic damage. You don’t need to feel embarrassed – we’ve all done it – but you likely will anyway. I’ve dropped all my bikes, some more times than others.
- Riding in the rain or on wet streets: There’s some great videos out there on how to ride in the rain. Check out MC Rider or Fortnine. Riding in the rain is not fun. It’s not something I do unless I have to, but occasionally I have to, i.e. on a road trip. And when I do, I’d prefer not to be grinding my teeth and all freaked out the entire time. There’s more risk when riding in the rain. Visibility is degraded, especially for other drivers. There can be oil or other slippery materials on the surface of the road. Painted lines are a hazard. The point though is that as long as you are aware of the risks and take the appropriate precautions, you’re no more likely to have a problem than on a perfectly sunny day. Remember that most tires are engineered to deal with wet streets.
- Will I or did I buy the wrong bike? Maybe? There’s a lot of advice out there on buying your first bike. There’s tons of good videos out there and I’ve even written an article about it, here: Buying a New Bike The upshot though is that a lot of new riders buy a bike they have to replace in the first several years. It’s to be expected really, don’t sweat it.
- Riding in a group: Riding in a group can be a really good time. However, your first rides with a new group will likely not be so amazing. It’s a bit of a process to get to a point where you really enjoy group riding. Have a read of my article here: Group Riding
- Riding on the highway: This is a common one. At higher speeds, traffic can be intimidating. At higher speeds, doing anything can be intimidating. Do it more. The more you do it, the easier it will get.
What to do When You're Feeling Anxious:
At this point, it’s really important to understand that we can control our bodies through one very important vector, our breathing. If we consciously focus on slowing our breathing, this has as direct effect on our heart rate. Slow, deep breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system which in turn slows our heart rate and widens up our blood vessels, reducing blood pressure. Science, just science. Do 5 slow, deep breaths on a 5 second count for each in and out breath. Do a body scan. Shoulders up around your ears? Relax them and drop them down. Death grip on the handlebar? Relax your hands. Toes curled up in your boots? Relax them. Clenching your muscles causes your blood pressure to rise. You want to be relaxed on the bike.
Getting Over a Crash:
I was in a crash when I first started riding where a person turned left in front of me and I nailed the hood of the car pretty much head on and flew a couple hundred feet down the road. It can happen. But, I was wearing all my proper gear; boots, pants, jacket, gloves, helmet. No scrapes or breaks, just a contused lung and that was from landing on my cell phone in my chest pocket. (Cell phones were no joke in those days lol) It was a pretty bad accident, I was doing 50-60km/h when I hit the car. See the bike below. The moral of the story is that I got in an accident that was more or less unavoidable and as a result of having proper gear, got away from it with no serious injuries.
There’s a particular intersection on a highway near me called the Malahat. It’s a left turn lane into traffic moving in the opposite direction at 80-100 kilometers per hour. Every single time I come down the hill on my way home towards that left turn lane I start to imagine a car turning left in front of me and smashing into it. It could be because I find left turns across highways dangerous and a really bad idea or it could be because of my crash. Regardless, it happens to me. When I mindfully paid attention to what was happening to me, I noticed that in addition to imagining bad things happening, I was tensing up, my hands were clenching the handlebar, my toes were curled up on the pegs inside my boots and I was breathing faster. It was very stressful every time I came through that section.
Relaxing and breathing helps *in the moment* to get my body back under control and this in turn reduces my overall level of fear. But, what to do about the disaster movie playing on repeat in my head?? Let’s go to high performance athletes for this one. High performing athletes have been practicing visualization for success for years. Again, science. I started by imagining that intersection when I was sitting around at home with some free time. I would imagine riding through the intersection, seeing all the traffic, feeling the weather and the wind rushing past me, and I would be watching the oncoming traffic like a hawk. And I would ride through the intersection and all would be well. I practiced this quite a few times over the off-season. When I was back on the bike the next season, as I got somewhat close to that intersection, instead of letting my brain go on auto-pilot and playing whatever movie it wanted, I consciously played my version of the movie, where nothing happened. I controlled my breathing, I relaxed my hands, feet and shoulders and guess what?? Nothing happened. I rode through the intersection and all was well of course. A couple years later and I don’t even realize I’m doing it anymore, but I still go through that exercise as I get close to that intersection. It’s the new auto-pilot program.
Conclusion:
We’re all capable of bravery. We’re all capable of acting strategically to minimize our risk by taking training, practicing and exposing ourselves gradually to more challenging situations in order to improve. Hopefully you’ll realize from this article that you’re not on your own dealing with anxiety and fear. We all deal with it to some extent or another. Ride safe!
Interesting Links:
- MC Rider: Motorcycle Training – Professional level training videos
- Motojitsu: Motorcycle Training – Professional level training videos
- Doodle on a Motorcycle: Motorcycle Adventures – Interesting rider. If you watch a selection of videos from when she created the channel until now, you’ll see this amazing progression as a rider. From new rider riding a naked sports bike to riding Harley baggers like a pro.
2 thoughts on “Becoming Brave and Building Confidence on Your Motorcycle”
Thank you very much for this very informative and great written piece. I took up riding in Spring of 2021, can totally identify with everything you highlighted- and yes, agree with all, especially the Malahat turn – too find it scary, but doing it often helps.
I dropped my bike on Mill Bay road- trying to make a u-turn on gravel (downslope) – felt so embarrassed because it was such a rookie mistake. Could not stand bike up – even applying technique we were shown at riding school, as bike kept sliding. Lucky for me a motorist stopped and helped me. Driving home, I was so mad at myself for poor decision and execution, yet learned from it.
The other area that I am still and will continue to work on is cornering, confidence now vs a year ago, much improved. I am considering doing the Cornering Training in Duncan in April, as I too believe continue training and honing skills- like so many other aspects of live- is key to continue to grow and excel.
Keep these coming – thank you!
Thanks for the feedback Hendrik! I hope you take the TractionWerks course! A friend of mine took it last year in her first year of riding and it did amazing things for her confidence!