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In legend, King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table
set out on the Quest of the Holy Grail.
Unfortunately, only the best knights could find it. In fact, only three achieved the quest and only Galahad was considered the most chaste and perfect knight of all. Of all Arthur's other knights who
bagan the quest, many gave up the search and of those that persevered not a few suffered grisly fates.
And just like those knights, we find ourselves confronted by the same issues. Most advanced riding training in the UK encourages to try to achieve the "Holy Grail" of the perfect, fault free
ride and present the concepts of police riding practice explored in Motorcycle Roadcraft as the only way to achieve this.
The realities are that the Holy Grail 'Perfect Ride' is out of reach of most of us in the first place, and that advanced riding technique is not the exclusive province of the UK police.
Qualified police riders only get that ticket at the end of a long and intense course, and not all that start the course are able to complete it either. Let's face it, we're not going to reach that
standard at the end of a few days training or being observed, but that's nothing to be ashamed about.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of police training is about high speed riding technique and in reality as civvie riders we are unlikely to need to ride to that level - as a police instructor who
gave me an informal assessment some years back put it;
"extremely competent at low speed but had nothing left when I pushed him"
As we'd long since left the rest of the group behind and were travelling at speeds that would have had me in serious trouble had he been on duty by that time, I was pleased enough with that assessment.
In fact, it fully confirmed my thoughts - that for normal riding we don't need to get hung up on police-style progress. As long as you're not a mobile chicane, you're riding fast enough; there's
absolutely no reason advanced skills shouldn't be available to the rider who wants to circulate at rather more sedate speeds and Survival Skills courses reflect this viewpoint.
The other danger is that we'll think ourselves 'fully trained' after a short course or passing a riding test and come to believe that learning advanced skills means we won't get ourselves into difficult
situations. Unfortunately, the combination of "doing it by the book" after a short course and seeking the Holy Grail myth of "the Perfect Ride" can leave us singularly ill-equipped for riding in the real
world; for those of us who are less than perfect, it will be a case of WHEN rather IF things go wrong!
Too many times I've heard riders say something to the effect; "I did it all by the book but it still went wrong". In effect, if we believe that having advanced skills removes the risk of accidents
we are simply saying to ourselves "it'll never happen to me". I'm quite happy to admit I'm not a perfect rider, far from it. But when I've made a mistake - and I've made a few in my time on a
bike, some of which have hurt - I've made sure that I've learned from the mistake as I plan on not making the same one again! And I've learned by looking at others' mistakes too.
Unfortunately advanced riders have accidents just like anyone else, and just like anyone else they have accidents that were avoidable if only they'd considered:
a) the possibility of the accident situation developing
b) how they might get out of trouble if the situation did develop
But how many riders spend time working on ensuring that they have options when things do go pear shaped? How many even practice emergency stops? If you're an advanced rider, can you honestly say you do?
I'll give you a couple of examples of rider error that come up over and over at all levels from newly qualified to advanced rider:
"I was using my headlights and wearing hi-vis but the driver at the junction still pulled out in front of me."
"I set my speed into the bend by the vanishing point and got back on the throttle but it tightened up out of sight."
"I wasn't going too fast into the roundabout but it was covered in diesel."
My research has indicated that training in the United States and Australia is much more about disaster management than in the UK, and my own riding experience is one of the reasons my courses are designed
the way they are; as I ride, I look for the Worst Case Scenario in any hazard. I look at what might go wrong, and how much it will hurt me if it does?
We're all encouraged to wear hi-vis clothing and to ride with the lights on, at every level from CBT to IAM. But if you look at accident statistics over the last 40 years, riders are still having the same
accidents at the same junctions in exactly the same situation where you'd expect conspicuity aids to help. So what's going wrong? On my courses I'll explain some of the issues about junction accidents,
so that rather than hope or worse still expect the driver to see me coming, we'll arrive at the junction in a mindset that gives us the best chance of avoiding the vehicle if it does pull out.
Going into a corner too quick is a common cause of serious bike accidents, and accidnet analyses from all over the world including the UK reach the same conclusion; the bike could nearly always have made
it round the bend, it was the rider input that failed. We have to ask ourselves why this is and the conclusion has to be that the rider is taken by surprise by some feature of that bend that was out of
sight. So I'll explain why approaching the bend I'll use ALL the clues including road signs, and why if we can't see all the way through it, we should anticipate that it tightens up out of sight and go
in a bit slower, a bit more cautiously.
Roundabouts are often seen as a place to make progress; many advanced riders are taught to straighten them out or take what is sometimes called the kerb-kerb-kerb line. However, roundabouts are also
notorious for fuel spills. We'll look at exactly where on the roundabout we can expect a slick and what clues we can use to sniff out diesel (I've given one clue away there!), and then how we canl plan a
speed and line that gives us the best chance of dealing with a spill should we happen across one.
And this is where the distinction between 'Survival Skills' and 'The Perfect Ride' should be obvious. Rather than try to encourage a fault-free ride, I take a much more pragmatic approach to rider
training and try to explain why and how things still go wrong, despite the rider taking the "by the book" approach to riding. In fact one of my US instructor friends puts it like this:
Riding a motorcycle is a continuing exercise in disaster management
This may seem an over-cautious approach, and even a very paranoid way of approaching riding, but in fact it's anything but; by expecting the worst, I'm usually pleasantly surprised when it doesn't
actually happen - and if it does, I'll deal with it.
By contrast we've all met the rider who comes back from a spin by the skin of his teeth, fuming about the blind driver who nearly had him off at the crossroads, the dodgy bend where he ran wide and nearly
off the road, and the skid he had on the roundabout blaming the lorry driver who must have overfilled his tank!
Ask yourself - who had the more enjoyable and least stressful ride?
I'd say it was me, expecting the worst!
The learning process goes on for ever and the broader the experience you can give yourself in terms of the riding techniques you research and the knowledge you gain, the better a rider you will be. So my
training is intended to be realistic and pragmatic, to encourage riders to recognise the kind of mistakes we make, to learn how we can try to avoid them, but most importantly to have a way out of trouble
when we foul up.
In short, we want to avoid a similar grisly fate to that awaited those less-than-perfect knights.
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