Visualization (Look There, Go There)

"Six months prior to the 2000 Summer Olympics, Wilkinson suffered a serious foot injury that kept her out of action for a couple of months. During this time, she used mental images to visualize her dives. Her foot was not fully recovered by the time she started diving again, but she was able to qualify for the Olympics. At the 2000 Summer Olympics, Wilkinson, who was still in pain from her foot injury, was in eighth place after the first of five dives in the platform diving finals. However, she earned her the first gold medal for a female American platform diver since 1964."

- Wikipedia entry for Olympic Diver Laura Wilkinson

The true story above is one that I will never forget, if not just for the mere fact that I always fall back on it during applicable situations.

You look where you want to go.

Also another adage in my book of self-motivations and learning tools. A bit of a racing nugget describing the phenomenon that regardless of the mechanics, your body will lead you to what you are looking at. Riders are taught this for a couple of reasons; to make a corner even in doubt, and more importantly, to not hit a wall (or anything!) if you don't want to (unless they want to!).

At the height of my track riding addiction, when I could average a bit more than doing a trackday once a month or so, I had all the opportunities to practice the sport-riding around a track for the sake of honing it. There is no substitute for actual on-track experience when you are trying to learn the dynamics of piloting a motorcycle, especially with regards to body position, which is a significant tool in a rider's repertoire to be able to control a motorcycle at speed. You could put your motorcycle on stands to stabilize it, then move, pivot, and pitch yourself all over the motorcycle in trying to burn to muscle memory what your proper body position ought to be, but the properties of a static motorcycle changes at speed, therefore so would your interaction with it.

Then came my self-imposed regulation, when I decided, for the sake of not getting sick of what I love doing, to do less trackdays. I think I've been successful in implementing this regulation every year for the past couple of years or so now. This year alone, I've only done four trackdays to date. This is fantastic in the sense that I still love the sport, I spend less, and the chances of having on-track incidents have decreased as well. Unfortunately, the other casualty was sacrificing a bit of my never-ending quest to get better and better through practice. I've always used every street-riding that I do as something to hold me over in between my trackdays, but as I wrote earlier, the dynamics of motorcycle riding changes at speed; you don't ride the street like you would the track, and vice versa. The basics are the same, which at the very least is what I retain and burn to muscle memory, but the physical and mental sensations differ between the two, and greatly determine one's inputs on the bike.

So what else did I do to keep me relatively sharp and progressing, even when not doing?

Visualization.

There are a lot of professional motorcycle racers I admire, each and every one of them having something distinct in their ability to make a motorcycle go around a racetrack fast, from a MotoGP god like Casey Stoner, to local AFM hero Dave Stanton. Even if reality dictates I could never amount to a tenth of what they are now, they still make the best examples for me to try and emulate as far as riding abilities go. Now out of the number of them I could've used, I chose Valentino Rossi. His riding style seemed the most natural and relaxed, looking as if it's not hard work to make the machine go fast, exuding comfort and thus total control over his machine. The way Rossi rode a motorcycle, it looked like how a person ought to ride a motorcycle if a rider had nothing else but natural instinct to go by; no unnecessary contortions, no wasted physical effort. Just sheer efficiency.

So I found one photo of Rossi taking a corner, which is the photo depicted below. Numerous times I would look at the photo, pulling it onto my monitor at random times of the day just to stare at it, to imagine what he must have thought of (if he even thought about it) to make his body move the way it did to look the way it would; how he bent his arms, upper body, legs, etc. I tried to imagine how he anchored himself, what muscle(s) were taking the load, and which were featherweight in comparison. I tried to visualize his point of view, of how the road ahead of him would look or how much the horizon would tilt in correlation with how much he tilted his head from his shoulders.

More or less I would imagine, "what would it feel to do that?"

It didn't happen overnight, and it probably happened over tens if not hundreds of times I clicked that image file to open and view it. Admittedly, I eventually stopped (or maybe forgot) looking at the photo for awhile now, but I guess it really stands that if you keep looking at something, even previously, something eventually burns itself to (muscle) memory.


Valentino Rossi up top, just some random poser trying
to look like him on the bottom.

You see*?

I can still pick out a number of things that I do differently from my model image, but maybe if I go back to glazing over Rossi's photo again, I may just completely plagiarize the man himself.

As apparent, you look at something enough times, and you will find yourself there. :)






* Pun most definitely intended!

Four Seconds

Is the difference you'll get at Thunderhill Raceway by taking a six-month break from it.
Or maybe from the April Spring to October Fall weather.
Or maybe from the Ohlins FG43 forks, PVM billet monobloc calipers, and 45mm throttle reel rate.
Or maybe from getting married...

Thunderhill in April on the left (camera on bike)
Thunderhill in October on the right (camera on rider)

Actually, I have no freaking clue where I got the speed to shave off four seconds 'round Thunderhill. I just hope lightning will strike twice the next time out at Thunderhill again.

Maybe six months from now again. :)

Sponsors...

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Can't live without them. :)

Monkeying Around

Well that was a bitter-sweet.


Was back at Thunderhill over the weekend (October 8th) with a gang of my good friends, including my ever-present buddy Trung, who's coming back from his last outing at Thunderhill that resulted in yet another tumble.

Man, that last crash really did a mental number on Trung; he's otherwise healthy and his bike supposedly runs just as well as it did before he binned it, but for some reason, Trung just could not get back in the groove. Pre-crash, he was probably one of the faster Intermediate riders around a track, but post-crash, he says he couldn't even pass one person on track, let alone our friend Jeff, who's only back in Thunderhill for the third time, first time out in the Intermediate group. He says he's, "going backwards."

The poor guy. I say if he really is going backwards, then let's start from the bottom; put the street fairings back on his bike and let's start riding the streets again. Less stress, less time away from his now burgeoning family, and ultimately cheaper.

That was bitter.

For myself, I haven't been back to Thunderhill for as long as Trung, and the last time I did any kind of track riding was late in May, during Yamaha's appreciation days in Laguna Seca. All in keeping with my self-imposed tradition of doing less and less track days in the last couple of years or so. After this past weekend, I've only racked up four track days in total this year, which is a far cry from the height of my addiction, I think having done up to fourteen track days in one season.

Yet somehow, I'm still getting quicker.

I've never ran a lap timer. The one time I ever owned one came with the purchase of one of my track bikes, and I promptly turned around and sold it. The closest thing to a lap timer I use is my ContourHD; a lot of people use their videos to gauge their lap times, marking the time marker when they crossed the checkered line, and again the next time out - the difference between two marks make up your lap time. I never made a habit of doing this though. Recording sessions were done solely for the purposes of compiling fun little videos as a side hobby of mine. Nevertheless, I had an idea of how fast I could go, because I needed to know whether I could move up to a particular group; from Novice to Intermediate, to Intermediate to Advanced. Track day providers post their guidelines of cut-off times to meet to be able to safely run with each group, particularly the Intermediate and Advanced.

In the example of Keigwins@TheTrack, their guideline cut-off lap time for Thunderhill Raceway is 2:15 for the Advanced Group, so back when I decided to move to the Advanced Group, this was the time that I knew I had to meet. I can't remember how I figured I could meet this time, but I did, as I've been an Advanced rider since, but still I did not keep a lap timer. Since becoming an Advanced Rider, I figured I must be doing 2:12's at best around Thunderhill.

This past weekend, my footages marked me at having done 2:08's consecutively. I had no idea I was even doing sub-2:10's, or for how long now. My warm-up lap alone out of the hot pits was at 2:15!

Color me genuinely surprised. How could I be going faster when I've been hardly going to the track?

That was sweet.

I paid the price though, because the day after my body was sore all over. Thunderhill is a physical track in that it is high-speed, so you are hanging on for dear life against wind-blasts and high-speed braking, fighting to turn the front wheel at triple digit speeds. I guess going that much faster raised these same challenges as well. That, or maybe it's cause I hardly do this kind of riding anymore, so my body's just not up to par than before. Even 48-hours after that track day, I was still residually sore.

That was bitter.

It was all worth it though, despite my buddy Trung now starting from square one, and me being DOA coming home from that day. It's nice to know that I somehow have the aptitude to retain particular skills or abilities, and improve upon them, even when the frequency of practice is seldom. A good number of friends I've come to know over the years were also there, so the company was just as awesome as the weather itself was. To cap it off, despite the high number of people that showed up and the people that I know that also rode, not one of us had any incident. Everybody went home the same way they arrived at the track.

That was very sweet. :)