What I did during Summer Break 4 weeks off

Management rant: Since I've become a manager, I've found a secret hack. It is the same amount of work to take a week-ish off as it is to take 4 weeks off. There's a process to make this happen. The first is that you book your calendar out like, 3 months out. And then you go tell your boss "Hey, I'm taking 4 weeks off in (month)", and you start figuring out who should cover your stuff in the process. And you build a plan, and you tell everyone that it's an important business continuity exercise, because any single person being a single point of failure is a recipe for burnout and pain, and it's an important growth opportunity for people to have the chance, in a reasonably constrained way, to make decisions in a larger scope, and learn new things about what their management does.

And the thing is, you can't reasonably catch up on email backlog. You can burn through it and sacrifice a whole day(s) or more of reading digital dead trees, which is the productivity equivalent trying to push a water wheel upstream, or you can just put in an OOO that says "if you want me to see this after I get back, put "we must imagine Sisyphus happy" in your email text and I'll search for that string and read your email". (Or forward to a special email alias that only has you in it, or use a gmail + address, or whatever. But give people a means to flag things to you).

And then when you get back, you search for that string, maybe search for a few people who are important to you for whatever reason, and archive all the email that existed while you were out. If it was important, they'll resend it. Go on vacation. If your company falls over cause you went out of office, that's actually the company's problem, not yours. I like to ask people what would happen if someone called in rich one day. They liked their job or whatever, they just had enough money to be financially secure and stable, and were about to take 1-3 quarters to rip through their bucket list, are you gonna fire them? And if you fire them, don't you already have the problem you were trying to avoid in the first place? Capitalism is silly as hell cause it frames these problems of ongoing organization resiliency as some kind of unsolvable mystery, but the answer is pretty simple, just go on vacation for 4 weeks. It's good for everyone.

Anyways.

I intentionally planned this vacation to do "nothing, except a couple of events (one trackday, one moto camping trip, one 12 hour endurance race, one videogame)".

I got 3 out of 4, which is as solid C, and the fact that productivity culture would lead me to even grade my vacation is a sign of how badly I needed to go on vacation.

My vacation started as they always seem to do, which is a madcap sprint to get my some motorcycle prepped. Last year, I'd built my own version of the KTM RC8C. The KTM RC8C is a wonderful, track only motorcycle, that is purpose built to go as fast as possible around the track. It looks like this:

Image: https://mcn-images.bauersecure.com/wp-images/60235/820x0/web_rc_8c_left.jpg

Unfortunately, this bike is quite expensive - it runs about 40k. If you can buy one, cause they only made 100 of them in the first production year.

However, KTM does make the Duke 890, which shares a motor and general design with the RC8C:

2020 KTM Duke 890 R Lynnwood Motoplex

So I did the only reasonably thing, I bought a Duke 890 R and ran it through my shop of mechanical horrors and ended up with this:

Yes, yes, they're the same picture, I know. I built this bike with a very focused goal - when I was racing back in 2007 on my SV650 racebike, the fastest I'd ever gone around Thunderhill East was 2:00.2. I've owned a lot of other motorcycles since then, but that was always the fastest I'd navigated a track. Obligatory picture:

This very simple, straightforward motorcycle was the one that took me to the fastest I've ever gone. ~75hp, no electronics, stripped down to as light as possible, no windshield (because I felt like a $120 916 windshield, that would match the plastics I fitted to the bike, was highway robbery).

I've had a lot of fun over the years on different bikes, but I'd never really been able to ever recapture that magic lap in the 2:00 range. I could got on almost any motorcycle and turn out a 2:04 at Thunderhill, but I couldn't actually go any faster that. After years of riding fast bikes slow, I decided it was time to try to try going faster than I had before. The thing is, because I'm not a purist, I'm also fine with entirely stacking the deck. My SV650 was ~375 pounds, 75hp, DOT race tires, and all the very finest technology of 1995 (carberators). My Wish.com RC8C has is 342 pounds with a full 1.6 gallons of gas in the custom fuel cell, custom fairing mounts, a custom subframe, a very minimalist exhaust, and basically everything not absolutely required for going, stopping, and turning removed from the bike. It puts out a healthy ~100hp, has traction control, selectable ABS, a dual direction quickshifter, and basically every other toy that you could want.

However, I also moved to Washington between now and then, so I was going to have to make my times at Ridge Motorsports track, the Pacific Northwest's premier track destination (probably). It's hard to compare lap times from track to track, but the lap records are roughly the same at both tracks, in the 1:44 range, so I figure that my target of sub 2 minutes was still reasonably applicable. I got the bike all prepped, rolled into my friend's trailer, and we went out into the rain to the track. The night before, as is my tradition with new tracks, I walked the track to get a sense for how it goes.

Walking the track is nice, mostly because you can inspect the camber of the track, find small variations in pavement quality, figure out your braking, turning, and acceleration reference points, and otherwise figure out where your body will land when you accidentally don't slow down enough for a corner.

The day dawned wet but sunny:

I, being poor of sense, went out on my race tires while it was still pretty slick just to get a sense of the track and lemme tell you, race tires designed for dry and hot weather do not do well in the wet. Even with the traction control turned up to maximum, the bike would still spin up the rear alarmingly at the slightest provocation. But after a few sessions of rolling and a dry line forming, we eventually ended up with the day looking like this:

I don't have many pictures from the rest of the day, but I managed to get my laptime down to a 2:08, which is solid middle of the road time, and one I was quite happy with for my first time out at this track. Ridge is also a beautiful track, where you spend a lot of time leaned over, which rewards bikes that focus on corner speed, light weight, and good drive out of the corners, which happens to be the sweet spot for this bike.

We rolled the bikes back in the trailer, headed for home, and I (unsurprisingly) started prepping another motorcycle.

Look upon my stack of tires, ye mighty, and despair:

The Vancouver Island Grand Loop

There's a wonderful set of GPS tracks that snake around Vancouver Island. My friend had wanted to do this run for awhile, as a sort of pre-run for either doing with a larger group or our spouses, depending. As I hadn't successfully completed a tour like this in the past, I immediately began taking apart my motorcycle:

Once that was sorted out, I headed out to do some shakedown riding with another friend up through the Sultan Basin area:

We did a quick trip down to the basin, and then a cut into the woods, as you do:

As the bike worked just fine, I loaded up to drive up to Bellingham where we'd cross the border and head into Canada:

Highly recommend being a motorcyclist on a ferry, you get to skip the lines and they usually put you on the boat first and let you off first:

We got the Good Weather.

The riding is mostly fun to do and less fun to describe, so this is mostly about how when you go moto-touring, you get to spend all your time finding the neatest camping spots, as long as you're willing to ride in and out of them.

On these trips I inevitably find myself doing the hipster bicyclist thing, where I sprint from beautiful campsite to campsite:

I liked these leaves:

Also, it turns out that when I set up the bike I initially over-adjusted the brakes slightly, so they ended up dragging, overheating, and locking on. Not my favorite experience, but a relatively easy fix with a couple of tools:

There are worse places to break down, after all.

The other thing that you really start to appreciate after being on the road for a bit is walking in to a resturaunt in a town and ordering whatever the local thing is:

Find a beautiful place, take a picture of it:

Find a beautiful place, do a wheelie:

See some elk in the woods:

Make a steak in the woods on a firebox:

Enjoy a beautiful campsite under a cloudy sky:

One of my favorite things is riding across bridges, this was a pretty good one:

Unfortunately, shortly after this photo, my friend discovered one of the known weak points on our bikes. I was out front, and the roads often had small bridges over creeks and rivers. Most of them were only somewhat sketchy, but there was one where for some reason the dirt had built up on it to a reasonably sized jump with a pretty aggressive kicker on it. I saw it, slowed down, and hit it at a reasonable speed, but my friend unfortunately got blinded by the sun reflecting off the dust from my bike, and didn't see it until it was extremely late, and aired the bike about 30 feet, landing flat, and snapped the upper mount that holds the headlight and gauge assembly. So we ended up cutting short at the halfway point. This also led to the first time he caused a ride to be cut short, rather than me. Disappointing, but hey, I know how it goes!

The remaining pictures from the trip are mostly on asphalt as we were cutting back to the ferry:

Quick coffee stop:

Found this wallpaper in the bathroom very amusing:

Pictures just didn't do this sky justice, but I tried:

Arrived back at the ferry, dirtier and somewhat worse for the wear, but on our way home:

These motorcycle trips are like landings: Anyone you ride away from is a good one, and we both rode away, so really just a wonderful time across the board. Also, should you find yourself in the woods, always good to pack a trashbag and carry out some trash. Never a bad time to help clean things up a bit.

We can close this chapter with a shot of Vancouver Island. It rained on the ride home. The border patrol were surly and unkind, what else is new, welcome back to America!

Let's go endurance racing!

Say it with me now: Time to prep a bike.

Ahh, no, not that bike. In fact, that's enough of that for a bit. Let's just sit in the yard:

Oh, a frog.

Okay, I don't really feel like working on the endurance bike. Let's do something else, and put a graphics kit on my 890.

Much better!

Anyways, what were we doing? Oh, right, endurance racing.

First, some text. Endurance racing in this case is minimoto endurance racing, which is small displacement bikes around a gokart track. The reasonable approach to this is: fold yourself on to a child's motorcycle, and ride it in circles for 12 hours. The unreasonable approach to this is you buy a purpose built motorcycle that has no reason for existing but for adults to beat other adults riding childrens bikes.

My riding crew's approach, of course, is take an angle grinder to the front of a motorcycle's frame, install a Chinese 190cc air cooled 4 valve single cylinder motor, and then make custom forged carbon frame spars using 3d printed molds.

Here's the bike, partially completed:

I handled exhaust fabrication:

A glamor shot of the custom made carbon and exhaust parts:

Also, in the middle of this I picked up a long term dream bike of my wife's (a Husqvarna FS450 Supermoto), and one of the new KTM 350 4 strokes to compliment my woods bike, and give me something to offer to friends when they come to visit:

The two dirtbikes together:

Okay, enough fun, back to prepping the endurance bike - oil cooler mount:

A short break to ride the new 350:

Go to the woods, look to the mountains:

See a beautiful place, do a wheelie:

NO MORE FUN, BACK TO ENDURANCE BIKE PREP.

Validating oil cooler capacity:

After more work, electrical mounting, making sure everything was reasonably well secured for 12 hours of abuse on the racetrack:

The reason we had to cut the front of the frame off, and the custom frame spars to fit around the head:

Ahh, this clearance is a bit tight:

This was supposed to be me and my friend working on the bike together, but unfortunately he got sick the week before the race so it fell to me to finish putting everything together with some additional help from the rest of the riding crew. But we managed to hustle it all together, and get out to the track, and get the bike on track for the first time:

So, of course, our custom made frame and everything worked perfectly, right?

lol. lmao.

The epoxy that we'd used to bond in to the frame didn't actually hold up, and the mounts pulled out from the frame, which we noticed after practice.

I'd been worried about this and had proposed pinning the mounts into the frame, but we hadn't had time to do it. So I ended up doing it anyways, but at midnight the night before the 12 hour race in the pits with a borrowed drill and bits.

In the sun the next day, I could see my work:

Nothing to do but change the oil, keep an eye on the torque on the motor mounts, and run it:

We set up our rider strategy - 30 minute sessions, filling every 1.5 hours, and trying to avoid crashing:

I had the joy of starting, because I had the most experience push starting the bike - did I mention that when you do this kind of swap, the kickstand fouls on the footpeg so you can't kick start it? Anyways, push start only! Oh, and it's a LeMans style start, so you sprint across the track in full gear, and you go!

The glory of these races is that you have an immense diversity of riders, bikes, and skill levels out there:

We were thrilled that everyone had gotten a spin on the bike the day before in practice, everything seemed to be working, we did our first 4 rider swaps without major issues, putting in good, consistent times, and found ourselves second in class and 3rd overall. The bike was working well, although I found I needed to often retorque the carbon motor mounts, because we hadn't had time to install the mounts with proper bushings to let us torque the bolts on to a metal surface instead of carbon. But all in all, minor issues, until...we realized our rear tire wasn't going to last race distance. We needed to do a tire change in the middle of the race - we didn't have a spare wheelset, so we were going to bring the bike in, do a tire change as fast as humanly possible, and then send the rider back out and hope we don't lose too many laps.

I mentally walked through the process for the tire change, prepared all my tools, and we called the rider in. They came in, we put them on the stand, and as we're pulling the rear tire off the bike, they red flag the race. This is a gift beyond basically anything we'd expected, as all other teams are stopped and we're losing zero time, as long as I complete the tire change within the window of the redflag. I manage to change the tire in 4 minutes, it takes another 4 minutes to seat the bead, and we have the bike back together in under 10 minutes. Red flag flips to green, and we're still in the running! 3rd place in our class is making up time on us, but we're 6 hours in and still holding steady at 2nd in class and 3rd overall.

The sun is going down and we're still holding steady...

And then disaster again - the rear tire goes flat. We pull the bike back in, and I prep to do a tube change. And...another red flag. A second lucky break! I get the tire changed, we lose a few laps, but are still running very competitive times, although we drop back to 4th overall, and 3rd in class. 4th in class is gaining on us, though, and our rider had mentioned there was a struggle with the transmission. I can hear the bike down the front straight slipping out of gear, and I decide that we need to do an oil change - we signal on the board, pull the rider in for the oil change, and I discover oil is leaking massively from the oil cooler. Thankfully, we had the foresight to bring the bypass assembly for the oil cooler. After 23 minutes of struggling, I have the oil cooler out of the circuit, the oil changed, the bike safety wired again, and ready to go out. Our rider goes out, and via some pitside semaphore, we discover that the oil temps, while high, are within safe margin, and we are good to keep going.

My session is up, I take it out on track, and I immediately notice the motor mounts are not doing well - the bike is making a large amount of noise, and I can tell from the vibration of the motor that it has banged itself pretty loose.

At this point, frustration has been growing for me - we've been competitive, we've done great, but the cracks of 9 hours of racing are starting to wear on us all. I'm frustrated at the things that could have been prevented, our decision to follow the manual instead of doing what we knew was right and running high quality, modern synthetic oil, and the general frustration of parts failure. I pull in to the pits, retorque the motor mounts, and things feel solid. With the fresh oil, the bike has stopped dropping out of gear and shifts okay.

And then one of the other riders in my class puts a hard pass on me, and that frustration just pours out on to the track. The other riders in the open class have been consistently faster most of the day, but I'm flatly done with thinking about strategy, I've been responsible about how I approach the race, but we're 9 hours in, everyone has had a chance to ride the bike, I trust the bike will hold together, and I'm done getting passed by people I know I can pace with. I have 30 minutes in my last stint on the bike, and I am going to make them count. The track configuration is fast and flowing, and while we're slower on the power than our competitors due to a stock motor, our bike has the advantage in suspension, tires, and overall grip.

And I make that work. They're faster driving out of the corners, but I've got better brakes into the corner, more speed midcorner, and I've got enough hours on the bike now to trust it. And so I push: aggressive lean, as hard on the gas as I can be, late and light on the brakes, trailing deep into the corners, trusting that despite the cooling temperatures that the front end will stick and the bike will hold up. And it does. This is racing, we're in the open class, hard passing is on the table, and all I have is block passing, because I'm not making my passes on the power.

In these situations, racing is a waiting game. I know I have the pace, but where we carry speed is different, so I have to wait for the opening, and seize it when it comes - for the first rider, they get poor drive on to the back straight, and I block pass them into the last hairpin. I expect them to come back by me down the front straight, and they draw even with me, but I haven't given them enough space to take the ideal line to the outside, I make sure I don't touch the brakes until after they do, and force them behind me into turn one, leading into the part of the track where the strengths of my bike mean I can start to draw out a gap.

Now I'm wedged between two fast riders, and the goal becomes to not let the rider behind me get by, while also waiting for my chance to take the spot back from the other open rider in front of me. I notice they run a wide line into the infield section, and after confirming they do that consistently, I take advantage of the extra space on the inside, turn the bike sharper and harder, and block their line with my bike on the exit. I know I'm faster in the back section, and I maximize my speed through the corners, pulling a sufficient gap that they can't motor me on the straights. And after that I'm free of having to think about the other riders and all that I can think about is stringing together the lap I know I can do without traffic in front of me. My times drop, and I put in the fastest lap we've done on the bike so far, a 53.029. I debate if I should keep pushing harder, but the bike slides both wheels in the middle of turn one, I save it on my knee, and I decide that we've done what we can. I dial it back a few clicks, and pull in at the end of my session, exhausted, but once again happy.

I've gone out and challenged myself, ridden harder and faster, the bike is still in one piece. There's an hour and a half left of riding that our last two riders will handle. We're not going to take a podium, all we have to do is keep the bike upright for another hour and a half and we'll complete the 2nd longest asphalt race in America on a bike we built ourselves. I've done my part.

And that last hour and a half counts down, and my friend who built the bike and had the whole crazy idea of taking an angle grinder to the front of the frame rides it across the finish line. He managed a 53.052 on his last session, and we ended up completing 602 laps total.

Racers talk about "podiums that feel like a win", because you overcame some specific bike or setup problems, or you just had a bad race but you made the best of it, and this was a 7th place that felt like a win. We had problems, but we worked through them, and everyone successfully did their part.

The race strategy that brought us home:

After a quick awards ceremony and some much deserved sleep, we took a look at the bike in the light, and noticed that our motor mounts had failed but had failed much more progressively than I'd expected:

We went home and immediately put the bike in a corner and didn't look at it for 3 weeks. But I did take something as a memento with me to add to my shop wall:

Okay, endurance race is in the bag, time to prep a bike.

Back to Ridge!

I have very few pictures of this day, but it was hot and beautiful. I had a target of scrubbing another 3 seconds of laptime and getting to an equivalent lap to my fast laps at Thunderhill. Anything in the 2:04 range would make me happy. And I rolled out and almost immediately put in a faster time than my previous best, and ended up closing out the day with a 2:03.1 in the books. The only noteworthy thing I discovered is that the bike can indeed get louder - this screen did do something before it decided it was tired of being part of the exhaust:

And there's no more pleasant place than sitting in a hammock on the track and watching the world go by on a beautiful day:

I took a quick detour to a friends place on my way home, helped him fix his lawnmower, and then took the ferry home at the end of another beautiful day:

Let's go into the forest!

Well, it turns out, if you have a new bike, you don't really have to prep it, so we went for a ride in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. The trails were still kinda snowed in:

But you can find some nice overlooks here or there:

Motorcycles are pretty good:

And this is the firewatch at the top of the lookout we rode up to:

And with that, I burned 4 weeks. I also read 8 of the Kate Daniels books (hooray, urban fantasy romps), but I never played FFVII Remake, so I guess that means I need to take another vacation sometime. And because I'm writing this a week later than I intended, I'll share a last happy moment from Memorial Day weekend, which was my wife and I getting to go out to the track together for the first time in years.

She got to break the supermoto in on the track:

And I managed to break through the 2:00 barrier for the first time in my riding career, putting down a 1:58.1, while still seeing a lot of places where I could make more time. A friend caught me moving through some traffic (sound warning).

So, can I recommend that you schedule yourself some vacation today?

Judgement and Resistance at the Lafayette Whole Foods

As some young men are want to do on a fine Sunday, we took a motorcycle ride - over the hills, through the lovely valleys and vistas of the Bay Area. We ended up in Lafayette, as one of our intrepid group was on an electric motorcycle, and the Whole Foods there has multiple charging stations available for those of such an evolved persuasion. The second ChargePoint station was available, and after a brief negotiation with the ChargePoint app, his bike was charging with mine tucked up behind it, and we headed into the store to pick up a few small items. On return to our motorcycles, I walked through the now completely empty row of charging spaces to busy myself with re-arranging the contents of my topbox to fit our groceries as a BMW i3 haltingly backed into the charging space next to us, where the high voltage charging spaces are.

After coming to a premature stop 2/3rds of the way into the space, an older woman steps out, and with lips pursed and disapproving expression, snaps open her i3's charging door, and takes two firm steps towards the ChargePoint station in front of Jeff's bike before she notices that the charging handle is missing from the station. She regroups for a moment, traces the wire from the station and discovers that it is plugged into Jeff's Brammo Empulse. I watch her expression cycle from haughty disapproval to a sort of incomprehensible confusion, as if he's here only to vex and trick, before she notices that it's whirring away, covered in blinking lights, and is clearly interacting in some meaningful way with the charging station.

There's a beautiful, awkward three second pause as she realizes that not only do the young miscreants have some pseudo-reputable business with this charging station, but also that in her haste to prove what assholes the youth are, she had traveled past an open ChargePoint station to block one that's incompatible with her car. I watch her cycle through a range of emotions before she turns back, closes the charging door on her car with a hollow plonk that robs her of any remaining moral high ground, and slowly rolls towards the open ChargePoint spot. However, due to the lot traffic she ends up sitting across 2 handicapped spaces, with no ability to back into the open ChargePoint spot, and after a few abortive attempts to bend time and space to get her i3 into charging range, she ends up backed into the open ChargePoint spot sideways. A beautiful five seconds are shared between us, too short for me, an eternity for her, before she slowly rolls away, taking the ruins of pride with her as she abandons the electric watering hole to those disreputable youth and flees to the plebe parking lot, far from insouciant motorcyclists.

Lafayette Whole Foods, never change. You're beautiful just the way you are.

The Mindset of a Long Term Commuter

The commuting mindset is the most conservative, risk averse, and safe of the mindsets I use to approach riding. There's a couple of other ones (spirited street, track, offroad, and supermoto all come to mind), but this one is the broadest and the most useful and accessible to other riders, so I'm starting here.

But before we get into the details, I think it's important to discuss some of the foundational components of safe riding. The baseline for looking at hazards in MSF that stuck with me was "Search, Evaluate, Execute" (SEE) as the approach to how you look at common situations to identify and react to hazards. There's also the concept of maintaining a "space cushion" that showed up in the CA drivers handbook. These things are both good foundational skills - look for upcoming hazards, decide on a plan of action, and then perform that plan of action, and make sure you have space for emergency maneuvers. These techniques are designed to give you time to identify an incoming situation, and rely on your vision and evaluation skills of the current state of things to decide on a plan of action. This covers the foundational mental component of safe riding - identify hazards as they are presented to you, and avoid them. Most riders will start to evolve on this organically, where they look at things that have the potential to be hazards and react to them preemptively. If you haven't started doing this yet, it's a great starting point for safe riding (or driving, or bicycling). It's also worth noting that any emotional reaction from someone else doing something is likely an outcome of not adequately predicting and internalizing that thing. I don't get angry when people merge into me anymore because I've already accepted that possibility and done my best to counter it actually impacting me in any way. In general, if you find yourself having strong emotional reactions to other drivers on the road, it's a good time to reflect on why you're actually reacting to that thing - is it because you failed to adequately predict the behavior?

There's also the component of using the controls to avoid road hazards or misbehaving cars. Many people spend a lot of time (as they should!) honing their skillsets for those reaction moments, be it hard application of the brakes, judicious use of the throttle, or a quick swerve to get around an obstacle. People also seek out things like dirt riding, trials, supermoto, etc, to build skillsets when the bike starts to move past the limits of traction so they can handle those situations more confidently. All of these things are very good ideas, and I have spent significant amounts of working on those skills. However, for my daily commute, I consider needing any of these skills to be a failure in approaching the commuting environment appropriately. As an analogy, I wear full gear nearly always on my commute, but I haven't needed it in the last few years to protect me from a crash, and I consider having to use my riding skills during my commute similar to having to use my gear in a crash - any significant usage of the performance of my motorcycle is exposing me to risk of screwing it up, losing traction, and crashing. As the old saw goes: Superior riders use superior judgment to avoid situations that require superior skill.

When I first started thinking like this, I considered any time I had to use my "track skills" on the street to be a situation I needed to reflect on and evaluate. Now, I consider any time that someone else forces me to use the brake, throttle, or change the trajectory of my bike a failure. There are a few unavoidable situations that pop up every couple of months, generally around no look lane changes during lane sharing, but now they generally happen at low enough speeds that even having to execute the swerve after a long, tiring day at work is not a big deal. With all of that foundation laid out, the commute mindset breaks down to a very simple thing:
How do I get to work each day using as little of my riding skill as possible?

The mental side of the game is wide open - use and stretch those mental muscles! But the needed riding skills to get to work should be no more than gentle countersteering, throttle, and brake application, and the associated shifting. The staples I use to prevent having to do more than that are as follows:
Lane position
Making sure that the bike is pointed in a direction of clear road as much as possible (either towards the split, towards the shoulder, or towards a blank spot in traffic)
Trying to consistently break free of groups of cars and exist in the space between groups of cars on the freeway
In the split, moving slow enough that I don't have to perform massive swerves to stop avoid unexpected lane changes

I'll lay out a few situations here to hopefully illustrate:
If I'm riding in traffic, I will attempt to position myself so that lane changes, sudden applications of the brakes or gas by the cars around me won't cause an accident, even if I do nothing.

If I'm getting ready to change lanes, and there is a car two lanes over, I will accelerate or brake slightly so that if that car changes lanes at the same time, we won't end up colliding.

If I'm in traffic, and traffic is slowing, I will gently point the bike towards the split as soon as I'm reasonably sure I will be sharing. That way if the car in front of me slams on the brakes, I'm still likely to make it into the split without an aggressive swerve needed to avoid hitting them. If they start to change lanes when I enter the split, I'm already in position to move with them into the next lane over and split the 2/3 lanes instead of the 1/2 lanes.

If I'm in the carpool lane and traffic is moving at 50mph, and the next lane over is completely stopped, my reaction is to ride on the fog line, very nearly on the shoulder. This way, if a car pulls out from the stopped traffic into the car pool lane, it requires no movement and no skill from me to avoid the accident in the vast majority of cases. If they are pulling on to the shoulder, I have additional space and time to consider my options and swerve gently on to the shoulder with them or swerve behind their vehicle, depending on the situation. Swerving gently on to the shoulder with the car requires minimal skill to perform as it's only a movement of a few feet to the side, whereas swerving behind them will likely require significant skill to execute and put me on a bad path into stopped traffic.

Generally, looking at every situation as "how can I position myself so I need the the minimum amount of effort and skill to navigate this situation" is going to pretty clearly give you the lowest risk option, and you should train yourself to always go for that option as far in advance of the situation actually developing as possible. Don't let your speedy commute ambitions outweigh your talent!

The caveat: It's possible to switch mindsets multiple times in a single ride. Maintaining the commute mindset for the majority of my ride helps me establish a reasonably safe baseline, but I definitely will swap to the spirited riding mindset when I get a good run at a clear interchange!

The Rise of ADV Sport: A S1000XR Review

If you've been following my bike history (why wouldn't you?), you'd know I bought in to our electronic future about a year and a half ago, with a 1290 SuperDuke. As of 2014, there was nothing that could compete with that bike in the arena of top shelf suspension, brakes, electronics, horsepower and an upright seating position. But while the SuperDuke is exceptional at a short haul through tight traffic, or ripping up a twisty road, it's not in its strongest suit when you start riding the undulating slab of the 580. As I'm nothing if not a purist for the type I like, the SuperDuke still fits my ideal motorcycle nearly perfectly. But it was time for a change: rather than being focused on street hooliganism and track performance, it was time to revamp for for dominating a commute, interchanges, merges, and carrying me to work with speed and efficiency. The range to do at least 160 miles before hitting reserve was a requirement as well, which the Superduke does neatly by virtue of getting 45+mpg on a casual commute. But getting a SuperDuke to push towards 50mpg is the ultimate pyhrric victory, like beating diabetes by replacing your blood with HFCS, and gives no satisfaction.

This surprise ruined by the title.

Although the world doesn't need another case study on the Faustian bargains you can make with highly paid marketing consultants to build a Brand Experience, I'm still going to drag you through the sordid details. After all, you can't talk about an S1000XR without talking about the rise of the ADV scene. The ADV scene contains wonderful mainstays of Long Way Around R1200GS cosplay, and riders who lovingly order stickers from around the world to affix to their dentist's thrones, while talking about how one day they're just gonna take off and ride, man. But the best marketing always contains a drop of truth, and that truth homeopathicically distributed through this bucket of marketing indiscretions is that in dirt riding you find clean, solid design principles. Horsepower is available in spades because you're only riding dirt to roost your buddies, refined long travel travel suspension to handle your poor life and line choices, an upright seating position that helps you target fixate off the shortest cliff, and light weight so that you spend less time begging your buddies to help you drag your bike back to the trail. And indeed, all of these things hold similar virtues on the street. Horsepower brings danger closer, faster. Light weight increases confidence and maneuverability, while refined suspension carries you through corners you never should have made, and an upright seating position lets you rise above the human concerns of traffic and dream of freedom. There's also the continuing drive towards electronic aids on the street, which overpriced ADV bikes wallow in as essential bullets in their marketing fluff, and is another entire debate I'll sidestep entirely by pointing out that those that disparage modern rider aids are moronic neo-luddites and those that welcome and spend money on them are the golden heralds of the new age. After all, there's something to be said for an electronic package that allows a terrible rider to maximize the speed at which they fling themselves off the shortest cliff their ADV inspired bike allows them to find, regardless of its impact on the secondary market.

And this is the point where someone chimes in and says something about how the sport touring community has been doing this for years and the VFR750 was the pinnacle of the gentleman's sport touring ride and - well, they'd continue, but they need to take a break to check that they took today's medication, and by the time they get back from doing that, had a quick detour to the bathroom, they've forgotten what they were saying, the name of the person they were talking to, and are primarily preoccupied with if their suspenders are going to hold their pants up for the remainder of the trip home. And indeed, that's actually a pretty good reason to ignore the sport touring market entirely. The bikes are over weight, under suspended, slow to react, and most of the motorcycle manufacturers have realized that the entire marketplace is rapidly expiring, and have discontinued the bikes with no plans to continue onward. As the stock and trade of a modern Renaissance motorcyclist is subtlety and wit, I have left only the barest implications that there might be a relationship between sport touring bikes and their riders - consider this a puzzle for the reader to explore. And while there is a value in the knowledge that occasionally bubbles to the surface in the sport touring scene, this is often akin to the dilemma that those of us who are friends with KLR riders face. While Kawasaki may have built a perfectly functional motorcycle out of pot metal, polyurethane, and the design principles of the Roman empire, these are probably not the staidly functional choices we should build a lifestyle around. After all, this sort of reasonable, responsible thought isn't going to Make America Great Again, and we can't allow the usefulness of a cheap sport tourer or a KLR to detract from the dream of propping up a failing American ideology via a last ditch set of poor decisions on financing, balloon payments, and wealth transfers to those that replaced their sense of decency, worth, and social responsibility with a bank account balance.

Ahem, where was I? Oh, yes, the S1000XR. Let's have a picture:

A BMW in it's natural habitat: The garage.

Well, I mean, you can read a thousand reviews that say things about the motorcycle. It goes fast! It has suspension bits that bounce both up and down at both ends! More buttons than a hipster's wardrobe! But I think that a refined reader of my words deserves better than that. So in the time honored tradition of terrible management across the board, I'm gonna shit sandwich this bike and we're gonna see what it's like to actually live with.

The bike itself is a wonderfully aural experience - firing it up, it emits a raspy, lumpy idle, and if you put it in most powerful modes, it emits a burble coming off the throttle that reminds you of an F1 car blowing a gout of fire from its tailpipe. Slam up the gears without touching the clutch, and be rewarded by the flat static burst of the quickshifter, slam it down the gears without the clutch and appreciate rev-matched downshifts and the burble and pop of race bred DNA. At low RPM, the engine pulls smoothly and without drama, gathering itself to spring, and at 5k it begins to wail with a distinctly un-gentlemanly howl before fucking straight off into the territory of an ex-AMA racebike. If any government agencies besides the NSA are reading this, I'm happy to be the brave anonymous tipster on the clear violation of sound emissions in exchange for buyback rights to all motorcycles found in violation. Just send me an email, I'm sure you already have my information. And much like the effortless shifts of government direction in the interests of its controllers, the engine jumps to respond to any input change with the frictionless synchronization of a backroom deal. It's quite clear that there has been minimal change during the theft of the dark heart of the S1000RR to jam it into this new chassis. The dual direction quickshifter is also equally interesting, it works in a wide variety of configurations from seamless changes that are too good to be believed to the occasional misstep as you fail to shift strongly and positively enough and instead simply bounce your foot off the shift lever ineffectively. But it works well enough, often enough, that it will handle the majority of your downshifts, with only occasional reaches for the clutch when it's actually needed.

And despite the size and wheelbase of the motorcycle, it steers into a corner with wild abandon, tempered only slightly by a clinical team of engineers debating the exact speed at which the human brain can handle a change in direction with some form of accuracy. With the amount of leverage courtesy of the wide bar, I found it somewhat over-sensitive. I fixed this by applying a bandsaw to the last few inches of the bars, reducing leverage to a more useful ratio, while also slimming the bike for lane splitting. In the ergonomic space, as I am a man who also once dabbled in the black tar heroin that is supermoto riding, I also appreciate that a high seat is offered, expanding the seating position out to more dirt bike inspired dimensions. There's a low seat, too, for the inseam challenged. The suspension is useful, but clearly a compromise point for BMW, as they are trying to reconcile the yin and yang of sport riding against the history they have build on cushioning the backsides of rich urban bikers to and from the local artisan coffee joint. As such, while road mode is nicely damped and supple, it lacks the appropriate rebound damping, meaning each bump is a novel exploration of the rebound waveform collapsing. Dynamic mode, on the other hand, fails to handle potholes with grace, but is beautiful up a twisty road, with excellent sport riding settings. The single rider mode lacks enough preload in the back, but cheating it with the rider and luggage mode fixes the problem. Ironically, the right settings are all available, they're just mushed up in the wrong places. Rider plus luggage road mode on the front with rider only dynamic mode on the rear shock would probably be a great commuting setting, and rider plus luggage front and rear in dynamic mode with the compression settings from road mode would be a nearly perfect sane street pace ride. As it is, rider plus luggage in dynamic mode comes into it's own up a relatively smooth twisty road, and the 2 up preload setting makes you think your pillion has disappeared entirely.

So all of those things are standouts about the bike - but there are a number of things that are marginal as well. The dark side of the frictionless, quick reving engine is essentially zero rotating mass, which means pulling away from a stop requires a significant fistful of revs, or the RPMs drop alarmingly as you let the clutch out. Expect to burn the clutch a bit. Also, the gear ratios are nearly unchanged if changed at all from the S1000RR, so you've got a frankly moronic 6 speed that's so tight ratio, the difference between the gears is marginal. It would be great to have a first gear that topped out at lower speed, and an overdrive 6th that dropped you into the nice spread of torque available at 4k. Of course, this is how BMW has been winning all the top gear roll-on competitions, so fair play to them for trouncing the competition there, just a pity it comes at the cost of real world usability. Essentially, I find myself operating the motorcycle like a 4 speed: First, 2nd, 4th, and 6th. The difference between 5th and 6th is about 400RPM at 60mph, which makes the top gear feel pointless. It would have been wonderful if they had shortened first gear significantly, spread 2nd through 5th lightly, and then made 6th a very tall, true overdrive gear. And while we're talking about the clutch, you spend $19,250 on a bike, and BMW gifts you with a non-adjustable clutch lever. That, paired with the axial mount master cylinder, makes me wonder if they started developing the bike from the ground up, made it to the top, and just phoned it in for the levers, brake MC, and windshield, all of which are marginal at best. The windshield does a wonderful job of taking an otherwise smooth, reasonably quiet riding experience and throwing dirty air straight into your helmet, increasing buffeting and noise dramatically. If you stand up on the pegs and get into clean air the noise level drops approximately 60%, which is just staggering. As such, I'm removing the windscreen and the windscreen mounts, which I anticipate will completely fix the problem. As I'm 5'11 with the legs of someone who's 5'5 and the torso of someone who's 6'5, I think my physical construction here is as much to blame as the bike's, but hey, I bought the damn thing, you have to listen to my gripes about it. That's just how the deal works.

There is also the little point of the bike actually having linked brakes, which is a feature most reviewers don't even bother to mention. I first noticed it when the rear brake lever felt very inconsistent - well, as it turns out, that's because it uses the ABS pump to engage the rear brake when you apply the front brake. I think this actually contributes a large degree to the stability of the bike on the brakes in the corners and while upright, as a computer based engagement means when you apply the front brake, the bike can actually apply the rear brake very effectively based on speed, lean angle, front brake application, etc, to establish and exploit available rear traction to help control dive and smooth brake application. The system is so transparent that you wouldn't notice it unless you're riding the rear brake as you apply the front brake, where you'll notice the rear lever becomes oddly firm. It's nothing like the linked brake systems of the past, and I believe it contributes in a huge way to confidence applying brakes in a corner, especially when paired with the cornering ABS. Interestingly, despite this excellent functionality, the power of the brakes is somewhat disappointing, as I feel like it takes a significant amount of force to get the bike to really engage the front brakes. The braking power is there, it just requires more force than I would like. I'll probably fit a Brembo master cylinder to address this particular issue - I'd imagine this is a place where they skimped a little, because it's acceptable to reduce front braking power when you're building an "ADV" bike.

There's also the obvious other caveats, that this bike simply doesn't work in real offroad riding. You can absolutely fire-trail it, double track, it'll handle dirt roads just fine, but it's not going to handle true singletrack. But no one's buying it for that, either. It'll go to Alaska and back no problem, but you're an idiot or a glutton for punishment if you want to ride this thing anywhere serious offroad. I purchased the OEM engine crash bars for it, which amusingly, require taking a dremel to at least one fairing to fit. You can get away without dremeling the left fairing, but the right one it is a necessity - I'm assuming this is some sort of "you're going to drop it, you asshole" indoctrination.

But it's time for the last slice of bread: This bike is legitimately amazing. The complaints that I raise are almost entirely nitpicks, and easily fixed by throwing a few hundred extra dollars at the bike. Some might balk at spending another thousand bucks or so to fix these sort of problems, but everyone's gonna have a different opinion on most of the things here, with the exception of the non-adjustable clutch lever, which is a very odd oversight in a premium bike like this. As it is, I'll probably just make something that fits and uses a Brembo lever to match the master cylinder I'll end up buying. The bike as a whole package is exactly what I wanted: A ballistically quick, well suspended, upright steed with top shelf electronics, that is equally at home lane splitting home at 8PM, tearing up a twisty mountain road solo or 2 up, or strapping a pile of luggage on to go out camping for the weekend. It nets 40mpg under casual use, pushing range to an easy 160 miles, the TC lets you slide enough to have a good time, and you can click it off the fly to perform wheelies for the kids or impressionable middle aged men. Throw a topbox on it, enjoy the invisible luxury of aping the responsibility of the sport touring crowd while riding a bike that will do 0-100 in the time it takes the officer to figure out you're not over the hill. It's the perfect bike to rack up thousands of guilt free, fast, safe miles on. It'll also probably make fools of arrogant sportbike riders when I take it to the track. It's a very worthy companion to the SuperDuke for those who, like me, are willing to support the American way of life on a financing plan. As they say, if you can pretend to have the means, I highly recommend it.

PS: Someone's gonna say something about vibrations or some shit, and to that I have to say: There's your proof that BMW riders are all dentists, and also, they mostly seem to go away after you break the bike in. Between break in, fitting the engine bars, and shortening the handlebars, the vibration profile changed enough that I don't notice them. Also, cruise control means you can take your hands off the bars on demand.

PPS: Also, thanks to SF BMW for being awesome and getting me a bike really quickly once I decided I wanted one. Buy all your bikes and stuff from them. I'm off to ride my bike around, ciao!

Motorcycle Risk Mitigations

I've been meaning to make this post for some time, and finally have the time to sit down and do it. It's going to get into much more of the theory around safe riding as opposed to the hands on practical skills. That said, I think there's stuff of value here for riders of all skill levels. This model is a simplification of reality in pursuit of a way to better help folks avoid getting in accidents, and to hopefully help the conversation along when it comes to discussing what makes more experienced riders safer vs. newer riders.

Risk
In this post, I'm using the word risk to refer to our chances of ending up on the ground. Easiest to conceptualize as "If I were put into a bad situation 100 times, how many times would I make it out upright?". It's worth noting that risk can never be taken to zero except by not riding a motorcycle. It's also worth noting that someone can ride in a very risky fashion and be lucky for an extended period, and not crash. However, regardless of your skill level, you ride in a high risk fashion for long enough and it will eventually catch up to you.

I generally categorize risks into two categories: Environmental and individual. Environmental risks are the broader risks that are present in the world out there, everything from pavement quality, the weather, the density of traffic, the chances of road debris, etc. These are the things that determine my "baseline pace". If I'm on a back road in the middle of nowhere with no cross streets, on a sunny day, with good pavement, and I haven't seen a car in 20 minutes, my pace will likely be higher as the environmental risk is relatively low. If it's raining, I'm in SF with city traffic, pedestrians, etc, my pace is going to be much slower. The amount of environmental risk determines my baseline pace. If you're riding at a pace where nothing that you come across surprises you, chances are you have established an appropriate baseline pace. If you're riding at a pace where a completely unexpected hazard comes up, you should re-evaluate if that hazard was completely unexpected or if your pace was too fast to allow you to identify that risk.

Individual risks are individual, tangible things that are increasing risk right now. That can be a pothole, gravel, bonzai pedestrians, an erratic car, and other things that directly increase my risk by potentially knocking me off my bike. Individual risks are also things that contribute to higher risk by robbing me of situational awareness and visibility or otherwise reducing my chances of identifying a hazard. Individual risk is a thing that determines if I'm going to be going faster or slower than my baseline pace on a per situation basis. If I've got good sight lines, excellent situational awareness and visibility, I might go significantly faster than my baseline pace through a corner, despite high environmental risk. If I can see a couple of potholes on approach to a blind corner, I'm going to be going significantly slower than my baseline pace.

There is also a dedicated skill of identification of risks in the environment. I'm going to just leave that out for the moment, as that's a complete conversation unto itself, and I want to focus this post more on risks and mitigations than I do identification.

Risk Mitigations
So now we've got a baseline for our mental risk model - environmental risk as a broad, large scale thing, and individual risk as situations that expose us to additional risk. With that baseline, we can move on to the important thing: Risk mitigation.

The first form of risk mitigation is "reactive mitigation". Reactive mitigations are when you have to do something or you will have an accident. It's the additional lean angle to avoid running off the road, it's panic braking to avoid colliding with a car, or swerving into the gap to avoid a car doing a sudden lane change while you're splitting. This is the last ditch effort that relies on reaction time and individual skill and motorcycle performance to prevent an accident.

The next way you avoid risk is by what I will call "predictive mitigation". Predictive mitigation is when you have identified the situation in advance, and you have taken the appropriate action to reduce the chances of that situation requiring a reactive mitigation or causing an accident. These sort of reactions are things like pre-emptively hugging the white line on a blind right hander in case a car comes around the corner, slowing when you see gravel signs, slowing when the vanishing point is closing down, and other actions you take in anticipation of risks, as opposed in reaction to them.

The final forms form of avoiding risk is to not ride at all. This is strong risk avoidance - choosing not to ride because you are sick, tired, or under the influence. It's an important tool when you don't feel like you are capable or your bike isn't in a functional, safe state. For some people, this is the only acceptable way to deal with the risk of motorcycling, and as a result they do not ride at all. For me, it's a decision I make when I'm not confident I can effectively avoid risks by predictive mitigation.

Putting It All Together
The reason that I categorize risks this way is because it simplifies safe, quick, and fun riding. Thinking through the environmental risk before I even swing a leg over the bike helps me get my baseline pace right. Once I'm riding, that baseline pace gets modified based on the encounters with individual risks I have. If I'm on a long ride and encountering minimal individual risks, chances are good I can turn up the pace a little bit and be just fine. If I'm on a ride and encountering many individual risks, I can back the pace down to reduce the chances of any of those individual risks knocking me off the bike.

Furthermore, as a new rider progresses in experience, their risk mitigations should be moving from more reactive mitigations to more predictive mitigations. Reactive mitigations are easy to mess up, rely on the performance and skill of the rider to be performed successfully, and if you fail to perform a reactive mitigation, you are highly likely to crash. Predictive mitigations are low risk, low skill maneuvers that are taken in advance of a hazard becoming highly risky. Obviously, this relies on predictive thinking and anticipation of situations in advance, such as predicting the conditions that are going to show up around a corner, or the actions of a car in front of you, and using techniques that allow you to maximize your space cushion and awareness.

The goal is to put you and your motorcycle in such a position on the road that you have pre-emptively taken any needed actions to avoid an accident. Performing predictive mitigations is a continual process that will be constantly changing as you move through traffic or up a road, as you take into account new information, discard old information, and identify new hazards. It's a very good idea to think through your history of reactive risk mitigations, and consider how those could have been pre-emptive mitigations instead.

The other thing that I would strongly encourage riders to consider is to look at each encounter they have not on an individual basis, but as an average for the number of miles they ride, and the number of years they expect to ride. I expect to be riding for at least another 40 years, so that means that if I have a single high skill required reactive event while commuting every 2 months, I will have to successfully navigate 240 high skill events over the next 40 years to avoid crashing while commuting alone. That isn't a particularly acceptable risk level for me, so I have adjusted my riding, speed, and approach to lane splitting and traffic to keep the number of reactive events down. As it is, I've managed to successfully move the vast majority of my risk mitigations from reactive to predictive, and as a result, have a much lower chance of being involved in an accident.

I hope my perspective helps other riders have a new tool for approaching the risks of riding a motorcycle safely - as always, remember, all models are wrong but some models are useful, and I've found this one very useful over the years. I hope others find it useful as well.

Conan’s Blog

Look upon my writings, ye mighty, and despair.