Seven Months Ago On This Date

...I thought Belle had had the biggest year of her life. At the time of writing that, she had already:

- Become a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

- Become a Homeowner

- Become a Wife to the most Awesome Husband (effectively)

"Good things come in threes." A trifecta, a "hat-trick," and without even being greedy, who in their conventional mind would think that somehow, she could manage to fit another milestone in an already momentuous year?

I swear, I don't think Belle herself knew there was any rabbit left in the hat.

Until we tried and got another rabbit after all...


Enough said, because the last time I said anything at all about how big of a year Belle is having, fate seems to have us defy even our expectations.

There's still two and a half weeks left to this year.

I'm not sure Belle or I can handle any more awesomeness at this point. :)



P.S. I've been maintaining this weblog with mostly my adventures going into five years now, and yet somehow, they all pale in comparison to Belle's 2011. Women, I tell ya!

Shedding Leaves

That's a big tree, and so it makes me damn glad that Belle DID NOT buy a house that's too big, but just big enough for us. Cause that means we don't have a huge lawn to maintain front and back, which consequentially means we don't have a huge lawn FOR ME to maintain front and back.

I wish I could buy a leaf blower, but I refuse to stockpile our single-car garage with tools or toys that would only see annual use. (And believe me, there are A LOT of tools and toys I'd want to have, not the very least of which is a chainsaw!)

So a plastic rake it is. At the very least, it's good exercise for me.

We're coming up on the closeout for 2011, but I'm not ready to summarize it yet, because I have yet to put the cherry up top for this year. I won't be until Christmas Eve, but until then, I just have to look at this magnificent tree shedding its bountiful leaves of this past season, full of color, getting ready to do it all over again for next year.

If this damn tree's still up for it in all its good years, there's no reason I shouldn't be when I'm just heading into my thirties.

Bring it on, Tree. Bring it on.

---

Around this time last year, I was elated to have been crash-free (at the track) for 2010.

Since taking up motorcycle track riding back in 2007 (I think), I had not been without a track crash at least once per season in my attempt to be better and inherently go faster on my motorcycle, up until last year that is. Admittedly, being crash-free at the track was a goal I was striving for when I decided to do less and less trackdays every season; this was my way of decreasing the odds of me having an incident, mitigating danger from an already dangerous hobby. I also wanted to preserve my passion for the sport, and as is with a lot of things I take interest in, I always firmly believed that I end up disliking anything I liked if I did them often enough (with the exclusion of Belle and Rusty, of course!). It was just the nature of my beast.

However, in continuing last year's streak, I am crash-free for 2011! I can say this now since I've figuratively parked my bike from any more trackdays this year, and I may have only done four trackdays this year (the lowest that number's ever been!), but it's not for a lack of trying to crash per se; I've gone faster at Thunderhill Raceway this year than I've ever had in all seasons I've been at this favorite track of mine (see previous entry).

Unlike last year though, and unlike my current clean streak at the racetrack, I did have an incident on the streets this year.

It could've been a lot worse, and I'm not just saying that. But what was more important about that incident was that it reaffirmed to me just how good the good people I have already met truly are.

I had planned on making a winter project out of repainting the blemished panels of the bike with the help of my good friend Jeff, who had recently taken up DIY-painting after having done a set of track fairings for himself. He had agreed to help me in the process seeing as he had more quantifiable experience than me, and the tools to do the deed. We just needed the right color code for the red and white used on the paint, so I dropped by Bob Hope's paint shop again, firstly to catch up with him on the fantastic season I had had with the bike, thanks in no small part to his generous and fantastic work on the paint job. After hearing my account of the street incident resulting in the rashed panels, and after having looked at the damage, he offered to repaint it himself rather than just providing us with the color code of the paints he used. I wasn't expecting this, and even though he once gave me a generous price when he painted the whole bike, I did not expect him to repeat this generosity when he told me how much he'd repaint the damage fairings this time around.

Bob didn't need to do anything more than he already has to convince me that his was a giant heart amongst mediocre men. Yet he continues to be like that big tree in our front yard, standing tall and ready to give all he can at every blow of fortune's wind, even at the misfortune of others.

Admittedly, I had once thought to also preserve the bodywork on my bike by implanting them on a rolling chassis (a non-running motorcycle) of my bike, and just park it in my living room.

But it still stands that the very people responsible for helping me make a picture that was in my head a rolling reality, continues to make me proud to run their colors every time that I can, just as much as my personal underlying sentiment in this whole thing does.

I walk with gentle giants amongst these men. :)

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...

Can't live with them.



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. :)

Am I Too Unlucky, or Too Lucky?

Remember this? And this?

Is it still a "coincidence" at the third occurence, or does it become factual?

I swear, I really can't have anything too nice and/or red, cause sooner or later, I just end up throwing it down the road (so to speak).

I'm about to hit 40k miles on the R1, which should be by the end of this week, which is something I'm pretty stoked about. I bought the bike to replace my beloved Aprilia Mille about three years ago when it had 14k miles, so to date, with all the bikes I've ever owned, the R1 is the bike that I've racked the most miles on in the six years I've been riding. Actually, it's the only bike to date I've owned the longest out of all. So much for a "rebound" bike.

About a year ago is also when it became the TAAF bike. So how do I celebrate its annual anniversary and subsequently being at the cusp of 40k miles?

I get it all scratched up!


(sigh)
Let's rewind back to 48 hours ago, when I decided to finally cross off Skaggs on my list of roads to ride with a few friends of mine. Skaggs has always been one of the roads in the State that gets a lot of praise for being a great riding road, but in all the years I've been riding, I've never made it up there, even though it's only about 90 miles north of me. I've ridden to roads further than that from me.

Before heading up there, I looked at Google Maps to get an idea of how to get to Skaggs. Pretty simple; head up to Healdsburg, CA and exit off of Dry Creek Road. Head northwest on Dry Creek Road, and it turns into Skaggs Springs Road.

Not quite.

While on Google Maps it looks like the two roads eventually turn into one another, in reality, it doesn't. Heading west from Dry Creek Road, you'd have to make a left turn to get to Skaggs; Dry Creek Road continues past Skaggs and becomes another road instead. If I had actually ZOOMED into the satellite view in Google Maps, I would've notice this, but I didn't.

So three other friends and I, with myself in the front, found our way to Dry Creek Road, and stayed on there waiting for Skaggs to appear, either a sign, or the road to simply start winding up. Well the road did, and it was FUN. I'm riding the road thinking, "This has to be Skaggs. It is too fun, clear, and virtually isolated from traffic that this MUST be Skaggs."

The road just kept winding; "Skaggs" kept on going and it was just stupid fun the whole way through.

Until of course, we turned into an otherwise harmless bend on the road, as pictured below:


Have a closer look at that photo, and see that where the arrow is pointing, is the part where the fantastic two-way pavement ABRUPTLY turned into a one-lane dirt road.

That's right. In the middle of that turn, the pavement literally disappeared. There were no transitions, and if there was ample warning prior to us bearing down on that bend, I missed it (and per account of the rest following me, they saw no sign either). Even worse, it's not as if the road straightened out after it turned into a dirt road, giving us much needed room to slow ourselves down with our rear brakes; the road bent left, and to make matters worse, the left side (bottom half of the photo above) was a sheer cliff. And if that's not bad enough, there was a heavy-duty steel gate across the dirt road blocking my trajectory.

Clearly I didn't fall of the cliff, or hit the steel gate, else I wouldn't be writing this now, nor would the damage to the bike be as minimal as pictured above. I managed to scrub off as much speed as I could through the dirt with the rear brake, though admittedly not enough that I did end up riding up the hillside slope a bit instead of hitting the steel gate. This worked to my benefit a bit as it more or less scrubbed off the remaining momentum the bike and I had, but being nearly 45 degrees up in the front meant I lost my footing, and therefore the bike and I fell on the right side on a bed of rocks.

The bed of rocks were bitter-sweet; on one hand they saved the bike from even more damage, cause if the bike and I hit the ground instead, hard parts would've been broken and the fairings would've been cracked or punched or anything other than scratched. On the other hand, they weren't without their punishment, cause they did gouge my fairings. Take the good with the bad though, right?

Two of the three friends following me also got sucked into the dirt, though they had more warning than I did after seeing me in a cloud of dust, so while they still had their own dirt excursions, they managed to scrub off more speed while they still had pavement, and therefore kept it upright through the dirt. Once we got my bike upright again, I just turned to my friends Lili and Jeanette and asked, "What happened to the road?"

Lili and Jeanette had done Skaggs before, especially Jeanette. However, they were both equally sucked into the-road-that-was-not-Skaggs and how fun it was, that I'm sure they just wanted to see where it would go until stopped. You couldn't blame them if you were riding the same road.

Nobody can be faulted for this at all in my opinion, just chalk it up one of those strange things about riding. Given the circumstances and options at the time of the incident, I can't be mad as well, cause as far as damage limitation is concerned, I think I definitely pulled off the lesser of the would-be evils; the only way I could've done it better is if I was able to keep the bike upright at 45 degrees up that hillside slope. Maybe I should practice that some more...

Oh, and you want to know what the actual name of the-road-that-was-not-Skaggs is?

Rockpile Road.

See. When even fate has a sense of humor about things, you just can't be mad. :)