Today, I unlocked a brand-new transportation method for getting around as I trek across the globe. While exploring the world by air, land, and sea, I can now add “motorcycle” to my list of options.
There are a lot of ways I’ve explored new territory over the years: car, truck, canoe, kayak, hang glider, hot air balloon, small diving boat, enormous cruise ship, giant airplane, small bush plane, train, electric scooter… in addition to the obvious ones like bicycles, roller skates, skateboards, and snowboards.
But I’ve never really cared about motorcycles at all until very recently. I was never enamored with them in the past, mainly because it seemed like riding them was so much work, and they seemed so incredibly dangerous.
So, that’s why I signed up to take a safety course when I decided to give motorcycles a try, even though that’s not required in my state (Arizona). I wanted to start out on this new journey with as much safety and training as possible.
What’s funny, though, is how, when I signed up for the course and took the test, my wife was completely mystified and almost angry.
“You signed up for WHAT? A motorcycle class? I’ve known you for two decades, and you have never—even once—mentioned wanting to ride a motorcycle… ever!”
I actually find this line of thinking to be quite funny. I have all kinds of interests that I don’t talk about with anyone… but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.
I’ve never understood people who tell others what their plans are or those who make all their thoughts and interests known to everybody. I’m a thinker, a researcher, a “finder-outer” who just slowly, carefully feels his way through life, quietly wondering about possibilities and asking: “What if?”
I almost never announce anything to anyone about anything I do until it’s done.
If I’m going to do something, I’ll keep it to myself unless and until I decide it’s the right thing to do, and then I’ll go do it. Only then will it be time to tell others about it—after the fact.
This way of going through life has saved me from a lot of embarrassment over the years.
I’ve known so many people who make these big, grand announcements to everyone they know about all the things they’re going to do… but they end up not doing them, either because they had no business making such a claim in the first place, or because circumstances outside their control made it impossible.
So why create embarrassment for yourself by telling everybody something you don’t know is going to happen for sure? I guess I’m naturally like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, where he says: “Never let anyone know what you’re thinking.”
There’s really only one exception here, and that’s with my immediate family: my wife and kids. If something big and important affects them, I’ll tell them.
In this case, I did feel it could affect them if I started riding a motorcycle, so I told my wife… after I signed up for the course.
She was so completely astonished; she couldn’t even believe it. I think she thought I was kidding. But no. I don’t kid.
If I were to take my wife’s question seriously (and while I am being lighthearted here, I did take her seriously and I did give her a solid answer), I still don’t know exactly why I want to start riding motorcycles.
I think it comes down to two specific reasons:
First, it’s mostly because I am, unapologetically, having a mid-life crisis. I yearn for new and interesting things to do and new ways to experience life while it’s not too late.
Second, it’s also because buying a convertible Mustang last year really opened my eyes to being out on the open road. I mean, really, out on the open road.
There’s a world of difference between sitting in the air-conditioned cab of a family sedan with soundproofing and nice, gentle music playing in the background as you politely leave one location and arrive at your destination.
But my attitude these days is mostly: FORGET THAT!
Gimme the top down, man! I want the wind blowing through my hair (or what’s left of it) and sunburn on my skin. I want to feel the rumble of my rickety suspension on the potholes, hear the loud road noise, and smell the dirt on the hills as I pass by them.
I like driving my Mustang with the top down (I prefer “topless,” as I like to say to my wife), where I can hear my own engine purring. It’s a totally different experience that way when you’re connected to the world around you rather than isolated in a nice, sterile chamber on wheels.
Driving with the open sky above me, I can smell the scent of wet pavement when it rains and the diesel fuel of trucks as they drive past me. I can also feel the fluctuation in the air temperature when I hit thermals and cool spots, and the hairs on my forearm respond as I sail down the road with my arm out the window.
I want more of that.
I want an unobstructed view of the world I’m exploring. Once I actually got a taste of what was going on above, under, and around my four-wheeled pony, it only gave me an appetite for taking in more of it.
Do you know what your car sounds like? I know the metallic rattle my engine makes when I hit exactly 50 MPH on that one specific bend in the road when I’m in fourth gear as I drive home. I also know that when I rev it up a bit, that annoying rattle goes away once I hit exactly 54 MPH.
How could I ever know this in a Honda Civic with my little piano music playing on my iPod and the air conditioner chugging away, trying to keep me cool?
I can’t. It just doesn’t work that way. I like being attuned to those little environmental factors that are always there whether we realize them or not.
And for whatever reason, the closer I get to turning 40, the more I crave those raw, visceral sounds and feelings of life. I don’t mind my face turning red because I forgot to put on sunscreen while driving up and down the s-curves of Mount Lemmon.
Who cares?
I got to feel the air change and become drastically cooler as I climbed from 2,000 to 7,000 feet in elevation while hearing the birds sing, smelling the oil spills on the road, and feeling the tingle of those UV rays pounding down on my neck as I raced away from the sun while it set!
That makes me feel alive… and I am really in the mood to feel alive right now.
I think that’s why I want to ride the simplest, purest mode of mechanized transportation out there. I want to take it all in. Bring on the two-wheeled cruisers!
So, as of today, I’m all done with my safety course, and my license is good until I’m 65.
The overall experience of learning to ride a motorcycle was very interesting… and I have to say, it was harder than I expected.
I don’t mean that in the way most people mean it when they say, “It was harder than I expected.” I’m constantly surprised when people say that because it tells me they’re really bad at understanding or predicting how hard things are.
A few of my kids are like this: God love ‘em, but they’re regularly shocked when they try new things and it turns out to be difficult. One of my sons was nearly histrionic due to his inability to ride a bicycle.
Apparently, he thought he’d just hop on it for the very first time and ride off into the sunset. I was sad for him, but I also thought it was kind of hilarious: why would he think that balancing on two wheels while moving forward—something he’d never done before in his life—would be so simple?
In the case of learning to ride a motorcycle, I was a bit surprised by what, exactly, turned out to be so challenging.
Riding a motorcycle on a road filled with cars presents you with tremendous threats that are constantly changing, for example. You are always in danger, if not due to your own mistakes in speed and maneuvering, then due to the actions of others on the road.
I won’t even bore you here with listing the unbelievable number of things you need to be observing, anticipating, thinking about, and preparing for while riding down the road on a bike… but I will share a few things I learned in this course that were very interesting.
It was way harder than I expected.
Okay, that’s not actually true. Like I said, I expected it to be hard. But the riding part was more challenging than I was prepared for in a few ways.
I was totally prepared to do a very bad job and forget lots of things or do them the wrong way, over and over until I eventually got them right. And that is exactly what happened, but some of the things I thought would be hard weren’t.
Some of the things that turned out to be hard were things I didn’t even know about at all before I started.
Shifting was really tricky.
In general, I’m not afraid of shifting. I’ve driven a car with a manual transmission for most of my life: I have always preferred a manual gearbox, in fact.
In a car, though, you have a stick shift in your center console with numbers on it, and you can literally just look down at it and immediately know what gear you’re in. But as I learned today, shifting on a manual motorcycle is totally different.
At least on the bike I used (a Suzuki TU250X), I had to stomp down on a peg on the left side of the bike to shift down and pull the peg up with my toe to shift up.
How do you know which gear you’re in? You don’t! It doesn’t tell you.
You simply have to remember the whole time what gear you’re in, and if you forget, you have to start over by putting it in neutral and trying to match the speed with the gear you want. That’s not necessarily a disaster waiting to happen, but it is a heck of a lot harder than a simple car shifter.
The bike was really finicky.
Putting my bike into neutral was nearly impossible: you have to just barely pull up slightly with your left toe until a green light comes on.
But if you go too far, it upshifts. That was maddening. Many, many times, I tried to put it into neutral and accidentally put it into second or third gear.
If I had more time to learn this bike, I might get used to it eventually, but during my rider course, I never did.
I stalled a few times, which was embarrassing.
Trying to figure out just how much play there was in the “friction zone” of the clutch (which was, confusingly, a handlebar lever controlled by the left hand) was quite difficult. And when the bike stalls, you have to put down the kickstand (or what they call the “side stand”), then pull it back up again.
That’s kind of weird: it’s like having to restart your computer or going to the breaker box panel outside your house and flipping the switch from on to off to on again.
That’s not such a bad thing in those circumstances, but it’s really strange when you’re on a bike and trying to ride!
You have to ride by feel and intuition.
Our instructor told us not to look down at our hands, our feet, the ground, or even the instrument panel: we had to look up and forward basically the entire time.
So, even though you have a speedometer and a few other indicator lights in the steering column, we weren’t supposed to look at them. That was weird!
During one exercise, my instructor kept saying, “I need you to go about 12-15 miles per hour between these cones,” but then, also told me, “Don’t look at the speedometer. You just have to feel it intuitively.”
What? This was my first time on a motorcycle! How on earth could I “feel” 12 to 15 miles per hour intuitively?
Obviously, if I owned my own bike and got to know it over a period of weeks, months, or years, this wouldn’t be so much of an issue. I would get to know it like I know my own guitars: I know the way they look, feel, sound… I can tell any one of my guitars from anyone else’s guitar with my eyes closed.
I just know them that well. I know where the scratches are, which string tuners are wonky, and which custom modifications I’ve put on a few of them.
But when borrowing a bike for a course like this, it felt like I spent 90% of the time getting used to the bike itself and only 10% of the time actually learning to ride a bike.
Plus, here’s the other thing: every bike is different!
Everyone in the class used a different bike, and there are myriad brands, sizes, configurations, colors, engine displacements, trims and packages, and a lot of other things that make each individual rider safe and more confident over time. But that’s going to take quite a while for me since I’m just starting out.
Riding a motorcycle is a full-body experience.
Like most other things I experienced during the course, I expected this, obviously. But again, I just didn’t—I couldn’t—understand the full extent of it all.
For example, you can look at someone riding on a motorcycle and notice that they’re wearing a helmet. That’s obvious. But until you put a helmet on, for example, you have no idea what that actually involves.
Helmets are tight, disorienting, and claustrophobic… and they sound weird.
In addition to the helmet, we had to wear gloves. But, as I learned, you have to put the helmet on first. Otherwise, the gloves make it too hard to put your helmet on.
There were lots of little things like this that involved doing things in a specific order, and many things had a lot of sensory overload.
Immediately after I put my helmet on, for example, I noticed how weird everything sounded. A helmet attenuates noise in a certain way that muffles the sound, but you can still hear… sort of. It’s hard to explain. Things just sound different.
Also, I couldn’t wear my sunglasses, and it was really bright outside, so driving into the sun without shades on definitely took some getting used to.
The instructor shouting at me sounded weird, and when I shouted back (over the sound of our motors running), I could hear myself really loudly, but I couldn’t tell how much of the sound of my own voice actually escaped the helmet so she could hear what I was saying.
Instead, we mostly just used hand gestures, but there’s a whole vocabulary for that, too, which I had to learn, and that was confusing, as well.
Helmets also prevent you from touching your face.
I lost access to my face after putting a helmet on, and I guess I just didn’t realize how much—and how often—I touch my face on a regular basis until I couldn’t touch it anymore.
I have a beard and a mustache, and normally, I like to comb my facial hair out of my face and away from my mouth, but wearing a face shield completely prevented me from doing this. The facial padding on the inside of the helmet smashed all my facial hair into a weird space right in front of my mouth, which I wasn’t expecting.
My lips became chapped, but I couldn’t put on chapstick, either, so the whole time I was on the bike during our riding test, I was licking my lips and blowing my mustache out of my mouth. That was uncomfortable and added to my stress level in a big way.
Another weird quirk is that it was super hot (over 103ºF here in the Sonoran Desert) as we were riding, and while I brought a water bottle, I couldn’t use it. I couldn’t fit the darn thing anywhere near my mouth while wearing my helmet: I had to take it off completely.
And, of course, the action of taking off my helmet required me to be at a complete stop or entirely dismounted from the motorcycle altogether.
Your clothing choices are REALLY important.
If you own a car, and you just want to pop down to the Circle K to get a soda during a random afternoon, you can be wearing a tee shirt and basketball shorts, then hop in your car and sail down the road without thinking much about it.
All you really need in a car is something to cover your feet with (shoes, sandals, or even flip-flops) and your wallet. On a motorcycle, you can’t do that. Or, you reeeeeallllly shouldn’t, even if you could, since being uncovered is dangerous.
For our class, we needed a long-sleeve shirt, thick, full-length pants, and durable boots that covered all our feet and went up past the ankle. That’s in addition to needing a helmet and gloves.
That is SUCH a tremendous difference, and moving forward, it’s going to really make me think before deciding where and when to ride a motorcycle to get places.
Do I just want to head out to run a quick errand? Or do I really want to go to all the effort of putting on all the proper gear to ride a motorcycle, even for a few blocks?
That will highly depend on the day, the weather, my mood, my desired destination, and many other factors.
Wearing all this safety gear makes you look, feel, (and smell) funny.
Riding on a bike out in the open air, when it’s over a hundred degrees, and you’re wearing long pants, long sleeves, and a helmet makes you get pretty darn sweaty.
There’s no air conditioner on a motorcycle (well, not on these small cruisers, at least), so you just rely on the breeze to keep you cool. But after dismounting and simply standing around for a few minutes, my goodness, you sure work up quite a sweat.
After we were all done, and I got off my bike and removed my helmet, my hair looked ridiculous, my head was covered in sweat, my shirt was sweaty in the armpits, and I was also sweaty …elsewhere… in the “pant region” (I’m trying to be polite here) which made me walk funny.
If had, say, tried to ride a motorcycle to church on Sunday morning, I would be cowering in embarrassment at the state of my hygiene and presentability.
But there’s not much you can do here: I was wearing a minimal layer of clothing, and it still made me sweaty and uncomfortable. I guess it just is what it is.
Maybe if I want to ride somewhere and be presentable, I’ll need to bring a hairbrush (for my hair), a beard brush (for my beard), and a change of clothes… or at least a change of underwear (at a minimum).
The actual riding experience is more fun and less scary than I imagined.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to ride a motorcycle if I thought it wasn’t fun or was purely scary. That would be silly. But I did expect it to be scary to start out. I mean, I was thinking it would actually be terrifying to get on the darn thing and start moving forward.
But, really… it wasn’t! It was fun!
Apparently, I was constantly going too slow.
The weirdest thing my instructor kept complaining about was not at all what I expected. She kept telling me the same thing over and over, getting more and more frustrated each time.
“I need you to try it again, with more speed this time. You have got to go faster.”
Faster?! What? This was shocking. Half the time, I kept expecting her to tell me to slow down. But no, she was constantly telling me to speed up! This was very surprising.
At one point, during our swerve test, I suggested that I might be going too fast, and she totally blew off my concern, waving her hand dismissively and laughing.
“Honey, you don’t need to worry about that: you aren’t going fast enough to crash.”
Hmmm… this was very comforting and yet surprising.
I felt like a young military recruit in boot camp, shooting big guns like bazooka rocket launchers during target practice but feeling bad about how much ammo I was using up, and then being told: “Keep shooting! Use more ammo!”
Weird.
Going faster is easier than going slower
I’m a very careful, conservative person. This applies to almost every aspect of my life and almost everything I do. I am slow, methodical, systematic, and careful. But once I finally got the hang of the command to “go faster” — it was fun, and it was easier!
That was so weird: you’d think (or I would, at least), think that going slower would be safer and easier. But it is not: it’s actually much harder. You can stall out, the bike can fall over, and you can’t do things like lean and turn, which make it much smoother when you’re going fast.
The possibilities are endless now.
So, now that I basically have an unrestricted license (and a spotless driving record, I might add), I can get my own bike and hit the road both on four wheels and/or two wheels. That’s an exciting possibility.
I don’t know what I’ll do with that now… maybe go on a super long road trip across the country? Maybe just get a bike and ride back and forth to my office and get a bunch of city miles under my belt for a few months?
I don’t know. But today was exciting, and I’m looking forward to what comes next. At some point, I’ll go bike shopping and pick something and see where that takes me.
…and if anyone's listening to this, who has a motorcycle and is—or will be—in Southern Arizona at some point, look me up! Let’s go riding together.
Show me your bike. Teach me some tips and tricks. Let’s go out together! I’d love to meet you and learn about this cool new world and community of bikers.
I Just Got My Motorcycle License. Now What?