creative maverick

Life is supposed to slow down when your life is in threat. And yet it didn’t when I found myself on a motorbike in a Tennessee forest, pulling a wheelie, heading for a tree. One moment I was riding along a forest path, the next I was on the floor with a bike by my side.

I blame Chris, my friend who had suggested we go on a motorcycling holiday despite the fact that I’d never ridden a motorbike in my life. His email had sold it to me; “We will travel to the unspoilt natural beauty of the Tennessee mountains and spend a week tearing through it on high powered off-road motorbikes.”

This seemed a daring holiday choice given that my only previous experience on two wheels was riding a bicycle. But Chris assured me we would get two full days of training before going truly off-road.

It was our first day at the Motorcycle Vacation Resort. The training had started well. We spent the morning learning the most important skill of off-road motorcycling: looking ahead.

What I didn’t realise is that a motorbike is not steered by turning the handlebars but by shifting your weight. It’s a lot subtler than you would imagine. If you turn your head to look to the side, the bike will follow where you are looking. Our trainer Laura told us something that was to become our mantra for the week; “Where you look is where you go”.

We spent a lot of time on the first day establishing the deceptively challenging habit of “looking ahead”. The toughest test of this was to ride in a tight circle. In order to turn in a clockwise circle, we had to ride while looking ninety degrees to the right. The moment we forgot and looked straight ahead, the bike straightened up and we rode out of the circle.

Once we got the hang of this in an open field, Laura told us how to ride off-road where we might encounter rocks, logs, and holes in the path. The key, she told us, was quickly to pick a line of travel through the obstacles, then look ahead to where we were going. The most important thing was not to look at whatever obstacle was right in front of us. Since ‘where you look is where you go’, if you look at a big rock in front of you, you’ll hit it.

After some fun practising riding over small logs, we set off to go back to the house. We took the scenic route through the woods and this is where I momentarily forgot all my training.

As we entered the woods, I saw two large rocks in front of me blocking the path. I couldn’t see how I could negotiate around them. My cyclist brain told me that if I hit anything higher than a few inches, I would be thrown off. I panicked and my cyclist brain then did something even worse. In an emergency on a bicycle, you yank the brakes against the handlebars with both hands and pull to a stop.

On a motorbike this tends to result in pulling the throttle as hard as possible.

And the result of doing that on a 350CC motorbike is to pull the front wheel off the ground and launch you at great speed in a random direction.

Here’s the first of my very important learnings that I think will be helpful to share:

Learning #1: Sometimes hitting the first tree you come to is the very best thing that can happen to you – because you don’t want to gather any more speed before impact. (This is what entrepreneurs refer to as “Failing faster”)

A split second later I hit the tree in the chest and there was a loud crack from my back.

Finding myself on the floor I feared my worst nightmare – a broken back. “I can’t move, oh my god I’m paralysed” I shouted until I got up and realised I wasn’t. There was however a large gash across my chest where I had made contact with the tree. I turned to my friend Chris for support as his job is to rehabilitate people with severe injuries. But it was all he could do to choke back his laughter and say “that was a very impressive wheelie you just pulled”.

With no apparent structural damage I went on to complete the training course and was riding up and down mountain dirt tracks by the last day.

By that point, I had come to realise that off-road motorbikes are built with over 12 inches of shock absorber so you can hit a log or rock and ride right over it.

Learning #2: If you find yourself in a new environment, applying the principles of your old, different, environment can have very grave consequences. Update yourself. You might be amazed what’s possible - but only if you believe it’s possible.

And, most important of all:

Learning #3: The only reason I crashed was fear of crashing itself. I guess you could say this is “the law of attraction” in action.

Here’s a good question to remind ourselves of often:
If “where you look is where you go” (not just on a motorbike), where am I looking?