Mastering the Motorcycle Safety Training Course — Hitting the Books

While I can think of lots of other places to be on a Friday night, I find myself at 5 p.m. after a busy week at work climbing the stairs of a local motorcycle dealership to find a meeting room for the evening. I hear the voice of the instructor welcoming everyone, and I quietly slip into the back of the room where 13 other would-be motorcycle riders have already found seats. We have all signed up for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s Beginning Rider Course, and our goal was to cram as much knowledge about the fundamentals of safe riding into our heads as possible before the night was through. Tonight is our required 5-1/2 hour classroom work while Saturday would be an all-day, hands-on driving experience on “the range” (a closed driving course at a local manufacturer’s parking lot).

Heartland Honda has allowed us to meet at their beautiful store in Springdale, where dozens of beautiful bikes are on display. I am sure it is no accident we have to walk through the showroom to get to our meeting room. Jim Meyers, one of the training organizers, greets us with an overview of the class and what our learning goals were for the evening. We take turns introducing ourselves, which was helpful to learn why people were there – what brought each person to the class, had they already been riding, did they own a bike and just wanted to fine tune some skills? Or were they like me and had ridden on the back of the bike but never had the handlebars put in my hands?

My fellow classmates include a pastor, a married couple, an older gentleman who had ridden many years ago but not since, one man who identified himself as a “middle age schizo” who wants to learn to ride, several men ranging in age from probably early 30s to at least 65 or so who say they have always wanted to ride and had begged their wives for years to do so. Their attendance in the class was part of the deal that had been struck at home before they could begin the motorcycle phase of their life they had been dreaming of.

There are four other ladies in the class in addition to myself and the wife, and as I was soon to find out, they all had bikes and in fact several were experienced riders. One was a newspaper reporter, two others were process servers and one was a former postal carrier now working in the healthcare field.

Clearly motorcycle riding attracts people from all walks of life, and the variety of attendees reminded me you cannot stereotype riders. While we are all very different from one another, we share an intense interest in both the machine and the sport as well as a longing to be able to comfortably and confidently riding a bike wherever we wanted to go.

Jim turns the class over to the evening’s leader, Mike Turner, an experienced rider who has spent a lifetime on bikes with the stories to prove it. An upbeat instructor, Mike is a great teacher who keeps the evening moving along through the learner’s workbook by mixing in numerous “you-won’t-believe-this-but” stories detailing harrowing escapes from certain disaster.

A few examples:

• The time he narrowly avoided crashing head on into the front of a Greyhound bus going around the curves of Lake Tahoe. The bus was cheating a corner by riding over in Mike’s lane instead of his own. To avoid “becoming a grease spot” on the front of the bus, Mike had to turn his bike quickly onto the gravel shoulder where he didn’t come to a rest until 200 feet later.
• The time he was riding through Death Valley at night and came across a group of burros standing in the middle of the unlit highway. Fortunately, Mike’s swerving skills were more instinctual than anything else, and he successfully threaded the herd without incident.
• The time he rode through thick, freezing fog from Bakersfield to Sacramento, never so cold in his life and barely able to see the road in front of him.
• The time he learned to control high speed wobble (read violent shaking of the handlebars) on a bike by standing up and leaning forward over the top of the handlebars to put more weight on the front wheel (that is, if your shaking legs would even hold you up at this point in such a horrifying experience.).

A Vietnam vet who is also the president of a motorcycle ministry, Mike has seen quite a bit of life and met many interesting people along the way. His work as a paramedic for many years has also put him on the front lines of the aftermath of many motorcycle accidents and deaths. These experiences plus his own years on a bike clearly have made an impression on him and he is passionate – insistent – about the importance of riding safely. Such wisdom makes for great teaching. I am certain everyone one of us will walk out of the class that night with a greater awareness for the risks of riding as well as a deeper understanding of how to plan for and avoid those risks.

Whether we would put that knowledge into practice would be up to us. Saturday’s work on the range would be our first test of that.

Mike mixes his stories and his teaching material throughout the evening with a number of short professionally done instructional videos that illustrate different driving environments and situations. These really give you a sense of what you will see from the rider’s point of view and how to avoid a lot of dangers. The class is treated to pizza and a short break before moving on to finish the lessons.

Before we leave, we take a multiple choice test over the workbook materials and the videos. I miss only one question — about what to do when coming into a curve. We are dismissed with instructions of what to wear and where to show up tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. to start the driving portion of the class.

Better get some sleep tonight.