The Flint and the Iron

Five to six years of riding video I've accumulated, between the street and track, whittled down to just over ten minutes of a musical trip down memory lane.

Honestly, I don't know which I'm more passionate about; riding, or editing videos. :)

Bun. In the Oven.

Understandably, around this time of every new year I already have something brewing. So not surprisingly, here's another adventure brewing for 2012 (and onwards!).

See it brewing live:


Hey, at least this time out, it REALLY is an adventure for myself, Belle, and Rusty! :)

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. :)

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