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At the Track

First, I’ve never ventured onto a motocross or other type of off-road racetrack, so these are observations and experiences from road-racing circuits. Second, I’m not talking about watching a race, but rather a particular type of racetrack activity unknown to most people, probably even most motorcyclists. Some sport-riding clubs rent tracks for special events called “track days.” Members ride the course, honing their skills but not actually competing (at least not in any official way). Similarly, rider- and/or racer-training operations, often featuring famous ex-racers, hold riding schools at racetracks with varying levels of supervision, classroom instruction, and individual attention. Any of these events may last from one to several days. Facilities require whoever puts on an event to provide on-site medical services (e.g., one or more ambulances) and to staff the course with flag-bearing observers at key locations to signal riders on the track about emerging hazards; it’s not a matter of just letting a bunch of riders go crazy.

Ironically, racetracks may be the safest places I’ve ridden fast, and they can be quite beautiful. They’re certainly the places where I’ve learned the most in the least amount of time, though sometimes I would have learned even more if I hadn’t been so intent on racing my ego.

Wrecks

December 1996

What’s even better than spending time on a racetrack? Introducing your friends to the experience. Not only do you get to enjoy their exhilaration vicariously, but you also may be inspired by their fortitude, and you can celebrate their triumphs over trepidation and mishap.

My friend Bill went down. He ran wide exiting Turn Two, the wheels of his Honda Hawk GT slipping suddenly out from under him as gravel replaced tarmac beneath those precious tiny contact patches. It wasn’t a very dramatic crash; Bill was up and walking it off before the trotting corner workers reached the scene, and the bike sustained only mild cosmetic damage. The medical crew recommended a trip to the local hospital for x-rays, just to be safe, and Bill’s day of track practice was over after just thirty minutes of seat time. He returned later in the afternoon with the official news: he had a broken collarbone, but not so much as a bruise anywhere else. The worst of it was the goofy harness he would have to wear for the coming six weeks; it looked like backpack straps without the backpack. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief—me, most of all, because it had been my idea to get him out on the track.

After months of coaxing and cajoling, my two main riding partners finally agreed to join me for the Southeastern Sportbike Association’s track practice at Talladega Grand Prix Raceway (the road course, not the NASCAR oval). I had started making such pilgrimages the year before, visiting four different tracks in the process, and I came away from each experience a more enthusiastic and better rider. Bill, having just started riding a few years ago, resisted my urging to try out “the track” until this past spring, but after he got his first taste at the wonderfully winding circuit at Mid-Ohio, talking him into Talladega was actually pretty easy. Dave, on the other hand, was ambivalent up to the last moment. He’d only recently returned to riding after a lengthy hiatus, still had fresh memories of two street get-offs, and was trying very tentatively to get acquainted with a newly acquired pristine Ducati 750SS. Dave eventually surrendered to relentless persuasive efforts, his fate being decided by something like democratic process within our little riding trio.

About a dozen of my local riding buddies descended upon Talladega the night before practice, and we retold all of the usual riding stories over dinner. I might not have noticed, but Dave pointed out afterward that the vast majority of the tales told had to do with crashing. This conversational bias was not lost on a track virgin who was already apprehensive about losing his cherry-red Ducati (or more) in some riotous orgy of uninhibited speed. As I tried to come up with a verbal antidote for the queasiness Dave had contracted at dinner, it occurred to me he wasn’t the only one nervous about the next day’s potential for trauma. All of those stories he had just heard were actually attempts at inoculation.

Each rider had taken one of several approaches. The most popular tactic was to catalog all of one’s own errors, reviewing the lessons learned and reaffirming one’s own invincibility in the process. Another strategy was to tease fellow riders about all of their respective mishaps, with the implicit conviction that such disasters occur only in the lives of others. A third group paid their respects at the altar of famous racer crashes, thereby invoking some celestial blessing on their endeavors. It could have been the evening before a perilous expedition or the locker room before the big game. The details vary from one setting to the next, but, generally, human beings trying to manage collective anxiety tend to do so in these ways.

Dave went on to face the dreadful beast and conquer it; by midmorning, he was all grins after each practice session, despite his concern about Bill’s spill. By the end of the day, he was asking about how soon we could return. Bill, too, was undaunted by his fall. He said his greatest pain was the disappointment of having to end the day so early after riding quite well, at least up until his unplanned sampling of Alabama soil. He wanted to get back out and master that Turn Two exit! He had analyzed his mistake and couldn’t wait to try a different approach (no doubt we’ll hear more about this at the next pre-practice dinner). But, alas, we all must return to our workaday lives between motorcycling events. And it is there that we encounter another set of crash stories . . .

“How’d ya hurt your shoulder? Oh, you wrecked on a motorcycle? Friend of mine had one of them things. Ran underneath a train at 350 mph with his wife and kids on the back. All of ‘em burst into flames and died instantly. Killed some people who weren’t even there when it happened. They’re still finding pieces of that motor scooter all the way across the state line. You’d never catch me on one of them things. Death traps, I tell you! Where’d you crash? On a racetrack? Are you crazy? Foolish thing to do, a man your age out racing around on a suicide machine like an irresponsible teenager! Did I tell you a friend of mine had one of them things? Got run over by a Greyhound bus in his own driveway. Broke every bone in his body. Terrible thing! Nurse friend of mine says the same thing happens to somebody in town every eleven minutes. What? You wanna go back again? What are you, some kind of daredevil or just plain stupid? Didn’t you learn your lesson? Did I mention a friend of mine had one of them things . . . ?”

We’ve all heard the stories. It seems that everyone—and I mean just about everyone—who hears that you ride a motorcycle always knows someone somewhere who had some hair-raising, awful crash that either prevented the person from ever riding again or convinced the rider and all of his or her friends, neighbors, and relatives that motorcycling is the most surefire way to incur extensive physical injury known to man. And they feel compelled to tell you about it. Again and again. Punishment for youthful exuberance comes swiftly, surely, and severely—if you believe these stories. Which I don’t.

Sure, motorcycling is a dangerous activity, and accidents really do happen, sometimes with very serious consequences. But that’s only part of the story. Non-riders tend to leave out (maybe because they never heard) other important factors, such as the seventeen beers ingested immediately prior to the ride of death, the absence of appropriate riding gear, or the lack of good training and experience (or common sense and maturity) on the part of the rider. Nor is there any accounting for the millions of people who do not instantly detonate upon contact with the doomsday device supposedly lurking within each and every motorcycle.

For most who offer their unsolicited horror stories about a friend of a friend, the facts about motorcycle safety won’t mean a thing. Try as he may, my friend Bill will be wasting his breath explaining that he really wasn’t hurt that badly and that he gained a very valuable learning experience on the way to increased mastery. It won’t matter that he hasn’t had a wreck on the street in nearly four years of riding, or that the racetrack is by far the very safest place to practice and improve one’s skills (no oncoming traffic, medical crew at the ready, mandatory full leathers and track-worthy machinery, same corners over and over, and so on). And he had better not even mention anything about the exhilarating freedom, grand camaraderie, and thrilling adventure that make the expenses, risks, and injuries all worthwhile. They’ll have none of that, thank you. Which is too bad.

Just as the litany of crash descriptions repeated by the riders prior to practice managed their anxieties, the stories told by non-riders manage theirs. But the typical anti-motorcyclist’s anxieties aren’t about risk, damage, and injury; they’re about missing out on life. You see, they need to reassure themselves that taking chances always ends in disaster; this is the justification for all of the “safe” conventions they’ve adopted. Never mind all the lost opportunities for enriching experiences, the important discoveries about one’s own abilities and limits, or the bonds that form between people who face challenges together—what they want is certainty, safety, and security. As if these really exist.

The only guarantee in life is death. Risk is everywhere, all the time; it is simply a part of life. To spend one’s life eradicating risk is to hurry death, not avoid it. People can be dead long before they die. If something can be said about motorcyclists as a group, it’s that we understand that security is an illusion. This doesn’t mean all things are equally dangerous or that we should arbitrarily disregard potential consequences. And it doesn’t mean that we face risks without fear (as an analysis of the aforementioned dinner conversation easily reveals). But it does mean that a respect for danger can allow the pursuit of wondrous and exotic pleasures with a minimum of cost. American society is presently swarming with people who feel entitled to a no-risk deal in life, fleeing any and all responsibility for their actions and decisions, holding someone else to blame for what really amounts to chance, and expecting life to provide unlimited enjoyment for free. Lamentably, some of these people are motorcyclists: witness the absurd litigation directed against helmet manufacturers because riders sustained head injuries in accidents. While we should certainly expect well-developed protective gear, it’s thoroughly unrealistic to think it will keep us completely safe in every eventuality, and no helmet is sold with any such assurance.

The bottom line is this: everyone is responsible for his or her own choices, and all choices involve risk. The real issue is not avoiding risk but managing it. Once people accept risk, they can take responsibility for dealing with it. Acknowledging risk leads to a more careful approach and a better chance at achieving the desired goal. Denying risk leads to carelessness in the pursuit of the goal and decreases the chance of success. Avoiding risk means abandoning desires and goals and settling for something less from life—without desire, how can you achieve satisfaction? The question isn’t whether or not you’ll wreck, the question is whether or not you’ll try, taking the risks seriously, addressing them as best you can, and treating the inevitable mistakes made along the way as opportunities for learning. Obviously, this doesn’t apply only to motorcycling; it applies to every area of living.

My friends Bill and Dave chose to embrace risk, not because they had some secret death wish or because they’re irresponsible. Quite the contrary. They have a very strong life wish. They want to live so much that they’ve spent a lot of money on good safety equipment. And they went to considerable trouble to get everything to Talladega, where they could hone the rough edges of their riding techniques as safely as possible, knowing that it would improve their odds on the street. That doesn’t sound like being irresponsible to me.

But the bigger issue involved here is that they are taking full responsibility for their own desires instead of ignoring them, pursuing life amidst its myriad risks, and foregoing the illusory security of those who will preach abstinence upon hearing that a person has “one of them motorbikes.” They had very different experiences at Talladega, but Bill and Dave both lived that day to its fullest. I guess that’s one of the reasons I love this sport so much; it attracts people who really want to live while they’re alive. And if that means having some wrecks along the way—motorcycling or otherwise—so be it.

The “Trust Me” Line

September 2000

This part of learning a racetrack is among the most harrowing and the most satisfying. As in so many pursuits, taking up greater challenge opens up the possibility of attaining greater reward—another life lesson potentially embedded in the imagery.

Turn Six at Road America is a 90-degree left at the crest of a steep rise. The entrance passes under a walkway bridge, and visibility is extremely limited. It’s possible to carry considerable speed through there, and then Turn Seven is a 90-degree right-hander waiting for you down the short chute between those two corners. In order to connect them well, you have to set your trajectory blindly while rapidly approaching the immovable earthen embankments that the bridge spans. Scary business.

During a CLASS (California’s Leading Advanced Safety School) track day at Road America, instructor and racing legend Reg Pridmore explained that Turn Six requires the use of a “trust me” line: a path that offers no apparent reassurance of its ability to carry you safely around the corner. You have to carve a predetermined arc based on what you’ve learned on previous laps rather than on what information is available to you in the moment. This requires a certain geometric memory, along with a faith that your chosen line will transport you safely, even though you can’t see where you or it is going. Without that faith, you’ll be tentative, second-guessing your decision, and either you’ll wobble through slowly and sloppily or you’ll make enough recalculations and line adjustments to put yourself squarely in the gravel trap on the outside of Seven.

With practice comes knowledge—real knowledge, based on trial-and-error experience (as opposed to, say, a plan based on the paper map you studied before arriving at the track). This sort of knowledge truly is power. Power instills confidence and hope, which in turn allow for commitment. As your ability to commit to your “trust me” line increases, it’s possible to get through there more and more smoothly, building speed and fine tuning the connection between Six and Seven.

The “trust me” line can be a metaphor for choice points in life, combining the values of two seemingly contradictory bits of wisdom: “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost.” These appear to be competing notions about how to deal with challenging situations until you realize they work sequentially. Life never allows a full view of the future, yet success requires commitment. This makes it absolutely necessary (if you want to make progress) to absorb information all the time because you’ll have to go with what you know from past experience as you navigate the present on your way into the future. So, we must look carefully before each leap, accumulating knowledge that will help us hesitate less on subsequent efforts. These aspects of life can be captured and packaged neatly in the concept of the “trust me” line. Metaphors serve as efficient symbols to abbreviate lessons learned in one realm and allow us to apply those lessons more generally in other realms.

Here’s another example from the same riding school at the same track. A lengthy, nearly constant radius turn on the back half of Road America is called, aptly enough, the Carousel. When I was there some years ago, before recent improvements, this section was rather bumpy and provoked lots of jarring bike movement while heeled over, which was unsettling for both rider and machine. The common reaction to this is to reflexively tighten up everything from your hands’ grip on the bars to your butt’s grip on your underwear, none of which is helpful. What does work is to stay relaxed, allowing the bike to hunt its own way through the mess, trusting (there’s that word again) that your machinery was designed well enough (and, in the case of modern bikes, it was) to get you through unscathed, as long as you don’t panic and do something abrupt with the throttle or brakes.

Here, the life lesson is about the counterproductive nature of excessive control. Anxiety can propel us into the pursuit of a death grip on our circumstances or the people around us, which in turn usually drains or scares away our resources and does little, if anything, to change the situation for the better. Clenching up, micromanaging, or overreacting in life’s Carousels is a recipe for self-defeat. What we need is a calm, attentive approach that allows as many things as possible to work themselves out on their own, reserving interventions for those relatively few tactical points where they’ll be effective.

The author tipping it in at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course—or was that Road America? Though rarely captured in photos, every racetrack has its own unique personality, joys, and challenges.

Metaphors aren’t just tricks for deliberately tucking away life lessons. They’re at the very foundation of our thinking about everything. In just the previous two sentences, check out the storage and building images. The concept of a container is one we use all the time, even though we’re often not referring to actual physical receptacles. The components and process of building a physical structure find their way into all sorts of ideas about other concrete items, organizations of people, and even how ideas “build on” other ideas. It’s pretty difficult to think or talk about most anything without employing a metaphor. Linguistics and cognitive psychology overlap in this area (catch the spatial metaphor?) and seek to understand the way virtually all thoughts are rooted (!) in our experiences in the physical world.

Now, obviously, motorcycling is not the only source for rich, meaningful, and valuable metaphors. But if motorcycling is something you’re interested in, it’s more likely to serve as just such a resource. Riding utilizes so many different faculties, provides so many different sensations, and requires so many different coordinated and complex operations that it may be nearly inexhaustible as a wellspring of metaphors (and their less poetic cousins, analogies). The only problem with riding metaphors is that only other motorcyclists who have engaged in the same activities and who’ve had similar experiences will be able to digest our wisdom in those terms. We might educate someone else about the “trust me” line as a conceptual analogy, and it could have some meaning to him or her. But it’s the experiential reference points that really make metaphors come alive and shed compelling new light on things.

Metaphors allow us to articulate and mentally manipulate what would otherwise be impossible to grasp. The more metaphors at your disposal, the more options—tools, if you will—you have for working with a novel situation. You apply metaphors, one by one, until you can choose which will fit best and provide clues and cues about what to do next. For instance, if the Carousel metaphor applies, I can try to relax and look for strategic moments to take action. But what if a different metaphor is more appropriate? What if, for example, it’s a situation more akin to emergency braking, wherein it’s of vital importance to act now with decisive force? Then a different constellation of variables and response patterns comes into play all at once, with the focus on quick, but still measured, application of intense effort.

How can I gain maximum “traction” in an argument? Where in my routine is the mixture of solitude and socializing too “rich” or too “lean”? What portion of my work needs a better “saddle” to support greater endurance? Which neighbors offer an “open road” for dialogue and which ones are more like “speed traps”? OK, these examples are getting silly. The point is that we almost always understand one thing in terms of another. The more “others” we have to get terms from, the better we’ll be able to understand the thing under examination, and the better we’ll be able to communicate that understanding to others. Trust me.

You Just Can’t Get There from Here

February 2002

In my work as a psychotherapist, I often witness people’s surprise as they grasp more fully something they already knew. Knowledge of the very same fact can come in layers and have a deeper impact each time. Usually it’s the social context that facilitates an openness to additional meaning, especially if it reduces our self-consciousness.

You probably know the old joke. A man stops to ask directions (which is funny already!), and, after several false starts, the person trying to explain the directions gives up, befuddled by the complexity of the numerous turns required, and utters the above proclamation.

Sometimes, however, a straight line isn’t the shortest distance between two points. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there are situations wherein the direct pursuit of a goal precludes the achievement of one’s stated objective. It’s that way with speed.

I had just returned from a day at the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School at Road Atlanta. Although I’d heard it many times before—and believed it, and preached it—the exhortations of chief instructor Lance Holst sunk in a little deeper for me than they ever had before: “Don’t worry about going fast. Speed will come as a by-product of concentration and confidence.”

Maybe it was because former MCN editor Lee Parks had kept me awake well into the wee hours of the morning, catching me up on recent events in his life. (He’d stuck around, having won the WERA National Lightweight Endurance Championship there a couple days prior.) So I was really too tired the next day to push myself into the red zone of excitement/terror out on the track.

Maybe it was because I was a little older than I was when I last rode around a racetrack. I’m now less able to maintain the illusion of invincibility and less worried about being labeled “the slow guy”—not because I’ve advanced beyond that position, but rather because I’ve grown to accept the possibility of occupying that position without so much shameful self-consciousness. I was there to have fun and see what I could see, not impress the staff or my classmates.

Maybe it was because I’d been at and on the track at Road Atlanta enough times in the past

that I always knew what was around the next corner. And I’d spent plenty of time on Suzuki SV650s, so the SV650S they provided for me was instantly familiar and a wonderfully user-friendly bike, anyway.

Maybe it was because—more than at any other track day I’ve attended (I’ve done eight, several with schools)—the staff seemed genuinely interested in helping students regardless of their ability level. So all that politically correct talk about enjoying yourself, going at your own pace, not making track sessions into sprint races, and the like all felt really real, and that attitude set the tone among the attendees, too. I detected no pressure, no condescension; there were no pissing contests for me to lose.Whatever the reason, I was the most relaxed I’ve ever been on a racetrack.

In the past, I’ve often found myself unable to resist the temptation to go as fast as possible down the straights, not so much for the sake of speed itself but to save what little face might be possible. It’s a racetrack, after all! But now I treated each one as merely a period of downtime that allowed me to review my plan for entering the next corner. This approach kept me from having the all-too-familiar experience of getting into corner after corner too hot (too hot for my abilities, certainly not too hot for the bike or track) and then having to struggle to remember—and execute—the proper sequence of turn-in procedures while frantically fighting off the distractions of panic and trying to slow down to a speed I could manage, only to then flee the disappointment of my botched corner by blasting out of it with the most violent acceleration possible, as far down the following straight as possible, and starting the whole process over again.

Regardless of what I knew, regardless of what I made up my mind to do differently the next time out, the racetrack atmosphere simply overwhelmed me again and again with my own adrenaline and testosterone, which prevented me from making the best use of all of the learning opportunities that the racetrack provides. Luckily for me, the racetrack is such a perfect learning environment that, almost in spite of myself, I always came away with a wealth of new knowledge. My gains, though limited and inefficiently made, were always more than I could hope for from a year’s worth of street riding. I can’t recommend the track enough as an educational institution.

So what happened when I stopped trying to go fast and concentrated instead on proper cornering technique? The most unremarkable thing possible: I went faster. No surprise, right? Obviously. And yet it was the first time I’d ever consistently done the thing I’d been told to do, believed was best, and preached to others. What’s up with that?

Did I not actually understand or believe in this principle before? Was I just too caught up in the fabrication of a certain self-image to heed such wisdom, even if I knew it was true? Had my personal physiology made me too excitable a lad for the task at hand? No doubt all these factors contributed to my behavior to different degrees at different times. But the thing I was most consciously aware of, what stood out to me as different from other track days, was my decision at the beginning of the day to simply have fun. I made a deliberate choice to abandon any pretense, slough off any pressure, and eliminate any habit that might interfere with my enjoyment of the day. And I made good on that decision many times over while out on the track.

I’ll close with an analogy from what I’m sure the majority who’ve been there consider the most memorable part of Road Atlanta. Turn Eleven is the most intimidating corner I’ve had the “pleasure” of experiencing at any track. The approach is a fairly steep incline; you pass under a bridge at the crest and then descend down what feels like an elevator shaft on the hill’s other side. Waiting for you waaaaaay down there at the bottom is Twelve, a flat, high-speed sweeper that spits you out next to a wall that hugs most of the front straight. Turn Eleven isn’t sharp, but it is completely blind. And when you finally can see through it, the image before you is extremely alarming—not to mention the visceral sensation of suddenly losing a hell of a lot of altitude!

A brush with greatness. Coverage of the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School in 2001 yielded not only excellent instruction on the wondrous Road Atlanta racetrack but also a handshake from The Man himself at graduation.

Anyway, even more than with most corners, the key to getting through Eleven well is to have a series of reference points to aim at long before you can see anything like the big picture of where you’re going. You start with a point on the track at the base of the incline, point yourself toward the second “U” in SUZUKI painted on the bridge, hunt for the curving dashed line that appears in the middle of the track just beyond the bridge and clip its arc, and then hurl yourself down the hill toward a spot on the outside of Twelve, where there happened to be an orange cone on the day I was there. Those more familiar with Road Atlanta may actually experience Eleven as a turn, some sort of organic whole, but for me it was always this set of reference points, none of which were the turn itself. I could do OK through the corner if I kept my sights set on these other goals, but I’d be instantly lost whenever I watched the contours of the track. The only way to navigate that corner was to aim for those other points.

In the past, I might have felt that aiming for fun was tantamount to lowering my standards, wimping out on learning how to go fast. Now I see it as the reference point that makes all those other things possible.

Making Music

August 2010

As a hobbyist bass player, I was recently bewildered by a song I was trying to learn by ear. Although I can read music, I’m usually able to pick out bass lines without written assistance. On this particular song, though, I was confounded again and again by a rhythm pattern, or what seemed to be the lack thereof. A sequence was established during one section of the song, and I expected to repeat it. But as the sequence cycled again, it was as though the notes had been shifted to different beats. This threw me off every time.

I finally determined that the bass line was cycling through its sequence at a different pace than the drums were cycling through their sequence. I’m used to keeping time with the drums, and I expect my own notes to “stay in place” on top of the drum pattern. My expectation was perpetually confounded on this song. It was as though the bass and drum lines had been written in different time signatures. Indeed, they were: I’d encountered polyrhythms.

Here’s a brief explanation for those without a musical background: a time signature dictates how many beats there are in a basic song unit, called a measure. Rock songs, for instance, typically have four beats per measure. When you tap your foot to such a song (assuming you’ve “got rhythm”), you’ll find that patterns in the song repeat themselves over some fixed number of four-beat measures.

In one example of a polyrhythm, one element of the song repeats after so many three-beat measures while another element repeats after so many four-beat measures. This is different from something like the “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” round wherein two elements cycle on different schedules, but do so over the same number of beats. Imagine singing “row, row, row your boat” while someone else sings “row, row your boat” (with one of the “rows” missing); that’s a polyrhythm. You can see how easy it would be to get confused. Polyrhythms are for advanced musicians!

What does all this have to do with motorcycling?

As I was struggling to learn that song, I kept thinking of my very first track day, which was, in one way, my very best. It took place at Talladega Grand Prix Raceway (TGPR). TGPR is a compact, 1.4-mile track with about ten corners, depending on how you count the bends. The lightly modified little Honda Hawk GT I’d borrowed for the event was a perfect fit for the combination of a tight, relatively slow track and a rider of meager ability. Years later, when I returned on a bigger, faster bike, I had less fun, partly because the machine was too brawny for the course (and my still-meager abilities) and partly because I felt I had more to prove after bringing the extra power. That ended up being a step backward for me.

Back at my first track day, I could manage both the bike and the track (eventually). This allowed me to achieve something unique in my experience. By the middle of the afternoon, I’d truly settled into a rhythm. I had my braking, turning, and throttle-opening markers memorized such that I didn’t have to think them out at each corner. Instead, I found myself “playing” the bike’s controls very much like a musical instrument. That didn’t mean I was setting any lap records, but I was having a blast.

When playing familiar music, I don’t count the beats, look at my fingers to see if they’re in the right places, think about the names of the notes, and so forth. Instead, I just make sounds that match the ones “in my head.” Everything is orderly and predictable, and I’m on autopilot. There may be periods of improvisation when I deliberately deviate from the established pattern, but then I settle back into the routine and resume cruising. And even when I improvise, I stay true to certain structures, like the key of the song and its time signature.

The author at his very first track day. Talladega Grand Prix Raceway, with its compact, flat, and readily memorized layout, is perfect for beginners. It thrilled on subsequent visits, too.

Late in the day at TGPR, it was exactly that way. I’d have to improvise here or there because of traffic, but mostly I could flow around the track without having to think about what to do next. The different control actions became repetitive rhythmic sequences, as though the track were a musical pattern and my braking, turning, and accelerating were taking place on specific beats within the larger framework of the racetrack’s “song.” Not surprisingly, my lap times grew much more consistent.

With all the basics occurring as effortlessly and reflexively as tapping a foot to a well-known tune, my perspective evolved. Instead of attacking each corner as a discrete unit, like measures in the racetrack’s song, I could string them together in longer sequences, like verses and refrains. I began appreciating the music instead of just the notes. It was exhilarating!

So, it wasn’t a graphic image of the track that was forming in my thoughts. Instead, it was a rhythmic pattern. Although you can translate an auditory rhythm into visual form with written notes, the experience and memory of a rhythm isn’t visual at all. In fact, I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t simply “in my mind’s ear,” like a melody is. The sense of rhythm is somewhere (everywhere?) in my body. I just feel it, though the vagueness of that description doesn’t do justice to how precisely organized it can be.

And that’s what I experienced at TGPR, except it all applied to the Hawk instead of to a musical instrument. No, it wasn’t the Hawk as a separate entity; it was the Hawk/TGPR combination, just as you don’t play a guitar without also playing a tune, even if it’s an improvisation.

Racetracks are fantastic places to learn because of their repetitive nature. There’s nothing like practicing the same pattern over and over again to build confidence, allow for systematic experimentation, and develop/coordinate skill sets. But what about transferring all that to the street? Obviously, I couldn’t just continue to play the Hawk/TGPR song when I rode a different bike on a mountain pass!

Real-world riding is like learning a never-ending new song with a constantly changing time signature. It’s not rock or R&B or classical music; it’s more like improvisational jazz. We’re continually trying to get in sync with the immediate timing demands of the road ahead of us. Timing may not be everything, but it’s the single biggest factor involved.

This may be the most important aspect of track-day learning: developing a precise/reflexive sense of control input timing for different corners allows for interpolation in novel situations elsewhere. A complex, multidimensional “map” (think fuel-injection software) forms within us, with timing as a fundamental organizing principle. Surely this draws on the same bodily sense as musical rhythm. And it’s a similar matter of learning basic patterns (chord progressions or throttle/clutch/brake inputs) and then applying them in ways that are new but still obey rules about sequence and timing.

Even bizarre musical forms have rules. They may not be readily apparent to a naïve listener, they may change over the course of the song, and they may even be different for different instruments playing simultaneously. But the musicians all obey those rules as they move through the piece together. As we ride, we’re engaged in delicate and complicated timing operations, sequencing control inputs on separate—yet intertwining—rule-bound schedules; hence my odd association with TGPR during the encounter with polyrhythms.

When we ride well, our actions are well orchestrated. That’s the perfect word.