to considerable trouble to get everything to Talladega, where they could hone the rough edges of their riding techniques as safely as possible, knowing that it would improve their odds on the street. That doesn’t sound like being irresponsible to me.
But the bigger issue involved here is that they are taking full responsibility for their own desires instead of ignoring them, pursuing life amidst its myriad risks, and foregoing the illusory security of those who will preach abstinence upon hearing that a person has “one of them motorbikes.” They had very different experiences at Talladega, but Bill and Dave both lived that day to its fullest. I guess that’s one of the reasons I love this sport so much; it attracts people who really want to live while they’re alive. And if that means having some wrecks along the way—motorcycling or otherwise—so be it.
The “Trust Me” Line
September 2000
This part of learning a racetrack is among the most harrowing and the most satisfying. As in so many pursuits, taking up greater challenge opens up the possibility of attaining greater reward—another life lesson potentially embedded in the imagery.
Turn Six at Road America is a 90-degree left at the crest of a steep rise. The entrance passes under a walkway bridge, and visibility is extremely limited. It’s possible to carry considerable speed through there, and then Turn Seven is a 90-degree right-hander waiting for you down the short chute between those two corners. In order to connect them well, you have to set your trajectory blindly while rapidly approaching the immovable earthen embankments that the bridge spans. Scary business.
During a CLASS (California’s Leading Advanced Safety School) track day at Road America, instructor and racing legend Reg Pridmore explained that Turn Six requires the use of a “trust me” line: a path that offers no apparent reassurance of its ability to carry you safely around the corner. You have to carve a predetermined arc based on what you’ve learned on previous laps rather than on what information is available to you in the moment. This requires a certain geometric memory, along with a faith that your chosen line will transport you safely, even though you can’t see where you or it is going. Without that faith, you’ll be tentative, second-guessing your decision, and either you’ll wobble through slowly and sloppily or you’ll make enough recalculations and line adjustments to put yourself squarely in the gravel trap on the outside of Seven.
With practice comes knowledge—real knowledge, based on trial-and-error experience (as opposed to, say, a plan based on the paper map you studied before arriving at the track). This sort of knowledge truly is power. Power instills confidence and hope, which in turn allow for commitment. As your ability to commit to your “trust me” line increases, it’s possible to get through there more and more smoothly, building speed and fine tuning the connection between Six and Seven.
The “trust me” line can be a metaphor for choice points in life, combining the values of two seemingly contradictory bits of wisdom: “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost.” These appear to be competing notions about how to deal with challenging situations until you realize they work sequentially. Life never allows a full view of the future, yet success requires commitment. This makes it absolutely necessary (if you want to make progress) to absorb information all the time because you’ll have to go with what you know from past experience as you navigate the present on your way into the future. So, we must look carefully before each leap, accumulating knowledge that will help us hesitate less on subsequent efforts. These aspects of life can be captured and packaged neatly in the concept of the “trust me” line. Metaphors serve as efficient symbols to abbreviate lessons learned in one realm and allow us to apply those lessons more generally in other realms.
Here’s another example from the same riding school at the same track. A lengthy, nearly constant radius turn on the back half of Road America is called, aptly enough, the Carousel. When I was there some years ago, before recent improvements, this section was rather bumpy and provoked lots of jarring bike movement while heeled over, which was unsettling for both rider and machine. The common reaction to this is to reflexively tighten up everything from your hands’ grip on the bars to your butt’s grip on your underwear, none of which is helpful. What does work is to stay relaxed, allowing the bike to hunt its own way through the mess, trusting (there’s that word again) that your machinery was designed well enough (and, in the case of modern bikes, it was) to get you through unscathed, as long as you don’t panic and do something abrupt with the throttle or brakes.
Here, the life lesson is about the counterproductive nature of excessive control. Anxiety can propel us into the pursuit of a death grip on our circumstances or the people around us, which in turn usually drains or scares away our resources and does little, if anything, to change the situation for the better. Clenching up, micromanaging, or overreacting in life’s Carousels is a recipe for self-defeat. What we need is a calm, attentive approach that allows as many things as possible to work themselves out on their own, reserving interventions for those relatively few tactical points where they’ll be effective.
The author tipping it in at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course—or was that Road America? Though rarely captured in photos, every racetrack has its own unique personality, joys, and challenges.
Metaphors aren’t just tricks for deliberately tucking away life lessons. They’re at the very foundation of our thinking about everything. In just the previous two sentences, check out the storage and building images. The concept of a container is one we use all the time, even though we’re often not referring to actual physical receptacles. The components and process of building a physical structure find their way into all sorts of ideas about other concrete items, organizations of people, and even how ideas “build on” other ideas. It’s pretty difficult to think or talk about most anything without employing a metaphor. Linguistics and cognitive psychology overlap in this area (catch the spatial metaphor?) and seek to understand the way virtually all thoughts are rooted (!) in our experiences in the physical world.
Now, obviously, motorcycling is not the only source for rich, meaningful, and valuable metaphors. But if motorcycling is something you’re interested in, it’s more likely to serve as just such a resource. Riding utilizes so many different faculties, provides so many different sensations, and requires so many different coordinated and complex operations that it may be nearly inexhaustible as a wellspring of metaphors (and their less poetic cousins, analogies). The only problem with riding metaphors is that only other motorcyclists who have engaged in the same activities and who’ve had similar experiences will be able to digest our wisdom in those terms. We might educate someone else about the “trust me” line as a conceptual analogy, and it could have some meaning to him or her. But it’s the experiential reference points that really make metaphors come alive and shed compelling new light on things.
Metaphors allow us to articulate and mentally manipulate what would otherwise be impossible to grasp. The more metaphors at your disposal, the more options—tools, if you will—you have for working with a novel situation. You apply metaphors, one by one, until you can choose which will fit best and provide clues and cues about what to do next. For instance, if the Carousel metaphor applies, I can try to relax and look for strategic moments to take action. But what if a different metaphor is more appropriate? What if, for example, it’s a situation more akin to emergency braking, wherein it’s of vital importance to act now with decisive force? Then a different constellation of variables and response patterns comes into play all at once, with the focus on quick, but still measured, application of intense effort.
How can I gain maximum “traction” in an argument? Where in my routine is the mixture of solitude and socializing too “rich” or too “lean”? What portion of my work needs a better “saddle”
