The chassis is bouncing. Surging from one extreme to the other as the bike navigates the gouged asphalt. The engine screaming at the top of its lungs - as if it were crying out for help - calling to the motor-oil deities above, and asking for just a fraction more time to find its way. To find its rhythm. And yet the chatter continues.

The bike bucking from end to end. Wildly. The dark side of its split personality roaring to a head. Kicking up its tail and shaking the very core of confidence, until it finally seems to submit. As if it were bracing for impact. At the zenith of the next oscillations, a small window opens which allows the mind to wander into a world where a perilous future seems forged with inevitability.

Yet as ragged as the ride seems, a nanosecond of a thought crosses my mind, and it occurs to me that my destiny is not to die in a singular-vehicle accident where the occupant has launched them self off of a cliff that extends hundreds of feet above sea level.

At least that’s not my destiny today…

An hour later I’m coming in a touch to hot to another sweeping canyon corner filled with grandeur when it occurs to me that the one-on-one battle I’ve fought all day isn’t rust from taking so much time off from riding but rather something entirely different. I’m not flirting with disaster because my timing if off, but rather I’ve been waging war with how I ride. I’ve been battling myself and my riding style.

I can’t say that I specifically set out to change how I ride, however after spending months viewing and editing the the riding segments for our Twist The Throttle project, it seems I’ve at least subconsciously begun to alter how I interact with a motorcycle. I suppose on some level this should have been expected - viewing yourself doing any given activity often leads to some level of introspection about ‘how’ you perform at the task. Folks do it all the time when it comes to their golf swings or their batting stances.

One of the first things that I noticed while editing is that there are very few, if any, shots where I don’t cover the front brake. That wasn’t true when I first started to ride, so many years ago, but somewhere along the line it became habit - a good habit, but a habit nonetheless. And these days I simply can’t feel comfortable on a motorcycle if I don’t have a constant tactile interaction with the brakes.

Another comfort factor that has turned into a trait is my personal need to alter the center of mass when cornering. Most of the time when entering a corner I’ll slide off of the saddle to the inside of the corner, which is something that I more or less already knew about my riding style, yet until I looked at the tapes I hadn’t realized that often times I do this irregardless of whether or not the corner in question justifies it or not. And over the past several days one of the things I’ve realized is that there are a host of corners where for whatever reason I’m no longer ‘getting off’ but rather simply lightly leaning while counter-steering.

Finally - and perhaps most glaringly - somewhere during editing I realized that I have an awful tendency to ’sit up’ far more then I should while riding. That is to say I don’t use my legs nearly enough to keep myself ‘tucked’ over the tank. Over the past few days as I’ve at first subconsciously and then quite consciously tried staying more centralized to the tank - both with my knees and my stomach - it’s been rather amazing to see and feel the difference.

At first my initial reaction once I realized what was going on was to fight the change - a fairly typical human trait for sure - but as I’ve pondered this process of change what I’ve come to realized is that this sort of continual analysis of how one rides and how one gets better or more proficient at riding is a never ending process. If we don’t actively seek out improvement then we’re effectively dead and if that’s the case it’d be far better to just fly off the cliff and catch a sunset…