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Riding Away
Jun. 22nd, 2013 07:15 pmToday was the first session of my two-day Beginner Motorcycle Training class, where they promise in two days to take us from 'never been on a bike before' to 'licensed drivers safe to release into the wild.' I have been looking forward to this class with a mixture of excitement and terror for most of a month, now.
The classroom part I have no serious worries about - I can memorize and recite things no problem. It's the actual riding that scares me. When I say I'm green, I'm utterly green. I've been a passenger on a bike before, but I don't know anything about how they work or how to drive one, and I've never driven a manual transmission vehicle of any sort before. And I am cautious, and I like to practice things until I'm PERFECT before I stop.
This has served me well in dance (I will just go into a room by myself and drill one move or one routine for hours until I can do it forwards, backwards, right-handed, left-handed, and in my sleep), and in surgery (I spent most of a year doing all of my hand-sewing using surgical instruments to get my technique right), and in just about every handcraft and physical skill I've ever tried. It doesn't work so well in a class with eight other riders, where you have about 15-20 minutes to practice a particular riding drill at full speed before you move on to the next thing.
I am overcautious, over-timid, and over-slow. It doesn't help that, when I'm the one driving, suddenly 15 mph feels like OH MY GOD TOO FAST and how the hell am I going to brake in that short a distance and swerve and freak and which hand is the clutch and which hand is the brake and oh yeah, foot brake too and TOO FAST SLOW DOWN NOW! When in fact I'm holding up the rest of the line.
But the teachers are patient and supportive, and continue to reassure me that I can do this; I just need to relax, loosen my arms, speed up, and have faith. And my classmates... well, most of them just don't pay much attention to each other at all, and the ones who do are pretty nice too. And by the end of the day I at least felt like I had the hang of starting and stopping and shifting gears, and had accepted that speeding up would not kill me, and would actually make some things easier.
I have one more 8-hour day, at the end of which I'll have to pass a test to show I've gotten all of this down pat, or at least down passable.
I can do this. I've brought living things into this world and taken them out of it; I've danced on stage in my underwear; I've walked 60 miles in the heart of July; I've taken a living creature, drugged it unconscious, cut open its abdomen and pulled out its organs and sewed it back together and had it walk away that afternoon in better shape than before I started. I've jumped out of a plane. I survived having a Saint Bernard eat part of my face, and went back to work three days later. I can ride a goddamn bike.
I just... you know. Wish I had a week or so to practice in private, at my own pace, before being tested on it....
The classroom part I have no serious worries about - I can memorize and recite things no problem. It's the actual riding that scares me. When I say I'm green, I'm utterly green. I've been a passenger on a bike before, but I don't know anything about how they work or how to drive one, and I've never driven a manual transmission vehicle of any sort before. And I am cautious, and I like to practice things until I'm PERFECT before I stop.
This has served me well in dance (I will just go into a room by myself and drill one move or one routine for hours until I can do it forwards, backwards, right-handed, left-handed, and in my sleep), and in surgery (I spent most of a year doing all of my hand-sewing using surgical instruments to get my technique right), and in just about every handcraft and physical skill I've ever tried. It doesn't work so well in a class with eight other riders, where you have about 15-20 minutes to practice a particular riding drill at full speed before you move on to the next thing.
I am overcautious, over-timid, and over-slow. It doesn't help that, when I'm the one driving, suddenly 15 mph feels like OH MY GOD TOO FAST and how the hell am I going to brake in that short a distance and swerve and freak and which hand is the clutch and which hand is the brake and oh yeah, foot brake too and TOO FAST SLOW DOWN NOW! When in fact I'm holding up the rest of the line.
But the teachers are patient and supportive, and continue to reassure me that I can do this; I just need to relax, loosen my arms, speed up, and have faith. And my classmates... well, most of them just don't pay much attention to each other at all, and the ones who do are pretty nice too. And by the end of the day I at least felt like I had the hang of starting and stopping and shifting gears, and had accepted that speeding up would not kill me, and would actually make some things easier.
I have one more 8-hour day, at the end of which I'll have to pass a test to show I've gotten all of this down pat, or at least down passable.
I can do this. I've brought living things into this world and taken them out of it; I've danced on stage in my underwear; I've walked 60 miles in the heart of July; I've taken a living creature, drugged it unconscious, cut open its abdomen and pulled out its organs and sewed it back together and had it walk away that afternoon in better shape than before I started. I've jumped out of a plane. I survived having a Saint Bernard eat part of my face, and went back to work three days later. I can ride a goddamn bike.
I just... you know. Wish I had a week or so to practice in private, at my own pace, before being tested on it....
