like “speed traps”? OK, these examples are getting silly. The point is that we almost always understand one thing in terms of another. The more “others” we have to get terms from, the better we’ll be able to understand the thing under examination, and the better we’ll be able to communicate that understanding to others. Trust me.
You Just Can’t Get There from Here
February 2002
In my work as a psychotherapist, I often witness people’s surprise as they grasp more fully something they already knew. Knowledge of the very same fact can come in layers and have a deeper impact each time. Usually it’s the social context that facilitates an openness to additional meaning, especially if it reduces our self-consciousness.
You probably know the old joke. A man stops to ask directions (which is funny already!), and, after several false starts, the person trying to explain the directions gives up, befuddled by the complexity of the numerous turns required, and utters the above proclamation.
Sometimes, however, a straight line isn’t the shortest distance between two points. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there are situations wherein the direct pursuit of a goal precludes the achievement of one’s stated objective. It’s that way with speed.
I had just returned from a day at the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School at Road Atlanta. Although I’d heard it many times before—and believed it, and preached it—the exhortations of chief instructor Lance Holst sunk in a little deeper for me than they ever had before: “Don’t worry about going fast. Speed will come as a by-product of concentration and confidence.”
Maybe it was because former MCN editor Lee Parks had kept me awake well into the wee hours of the morning, catching me up on recent events in his life. (He’d stuck around, having won the WERA National Lightweight Endurance Championship there a couple days prior.) So I was really too tired the next day to push myself into the red zone of excitement/terror out on the track.
Maybe it was because I was a little older than I was when I last rode around a racetrack. I’m now less able to maintain the illusion of invincibility and less worried about being labeled “the slow guy”—not because I’ve advanced beyond that position, but rather because I’ve grown to accept the possibility of occupying that position without so much shameful self-consciousness. I was there to have fun and see what I could see, not impress the staff or my classmates.
Maybe it was because I’d been at and on the track at Road Atlanta enough times in the past
that I always knew what was around the next corner. And I’d spent plenty of time on Suzuki SV650s, so the SV650S they provided for me was instantly familiar and a wonderfully user-friendly bike, anyway.
Maybe it was because—more than at any other track day I’ve attended (I’ve done eight, several with schools)—the staff seemed genuinely interested in helping students regardless of their ability level. So all that politically correct talk about enjoying yourself, going at your own pace, not making track sessions into sprint races, and the like all felt really real, and that attitude set the tone among the attendees, too. I detected no pressure, no condescension; there were no pissing contests for me to lose.Whatever the reason, I was the most relaxed I’ve ever been on a racetrack.
In the past, I’ve often found myself unable to resist the temptation to go as fast as possible down the straights, not so much for the sake of speed itself but to save what little face might be possible. It’s a racetrack, after all! But now I treated each one as merely a period of downtime that allowed me to review my plan for entering the next corner. This approach kept me from having the all-too-familiar experience of getting into corner after corner too hot (too hot for my abilities, certainly not too hot for the bike or track) and then having to struggle to remember—and execute—the proper sequence of turn-in procedures while frantically fighting off the distractions of panic and trying to slow down to a speed I could manage, only to then flee the disappointment of my botched corner by blasting out of it with the most violent acceleration possible, as far down the following straight as possible, and starting the whole process over again.
Regardless of what I knew, regardless of what I made up my mind to do differently the next time out, the racetrack atmosphere simply overwhelmed me again and again with my own adrenaline and testosterone, which prevented me from making the best use of all of the learning opportunities that the racetrack provides. Luckily for me, the racetrack is such a perfect learning environment that, almost in spite of myself, I always came away with a wealth of new knowledge. My gains, though limited and inefficiently made, were always more than I could hope for from a year’s worth of street riding. I can’t recommend the track enough as an educational institution.
So what happened when I stopped trying to go fast and concentrated instead on proper cornering technique? The most unremarkable thing possible: I went faster. No surprise, right? Obviously. And yet it was the first time I’d ever consistently done the thing I’d been told to do, believed was best, and preached to others. What’s up with that?
Did I not actually understand or believe in this principle before? Was I just too caught up in the fabrication of a certain self-image to heed such wisdom, even if I knew it was true? Had my personal physiology made me too excitable a lad for the task at hand? No doubt all these factors contributed to my behavior to different degrees at different times. But the thing I was most consciously aware of, what stood out to me as different from other track days, was my decision at the beginning of the day to simply have fun. I made a deliberate choice to abandon any pretense, slough off any pressure, and eliminate any habit that might interfere with my enjoyment of the day. And I made good on that decision many times over while out on the track.
I’ll close with an analogy from what I’m sure the majority who’ve been there consider the most memorable part of Road Atlanta. Turn Eleven is the most intimidating corner I’ve had the “pleasure” of experiencing at any track. The approach is a fairly steep incline; you pass under a bridge at the crest and then descend down what feels like an elevator shaft on the hill’s other side. Waiting for you waaaaaay down there at the bottom is Twelve, a flat, high-speed sweeper that spits you out next to a wall that hugs most of the front straight. Turn Eleven isn’t sharp, but it is completely blind. And when you finally can see through it, the image before you is extremely alarming—not to mention the visceral sensation of suddenly losing a hell of a lot of altitude!
A brush with greatness. Coverage of the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School in 2001 yielded not only excellent instruction on the wondrous Road Atlanta racetrack but also a handshake from The Man himself at graduation.
Anyway, even more than with most corners, the key to getting through Eleven well is to have a series of reference points to aim at long before you can see anything like the big picture of where you’re going. You start with a point on the track at the base of the incline, point yourself toward the second “U” in SUZUKI painted on the bridge, hunt for the curving dashed line that appears in the middle of the track just beyond the bridge and clip its arc, and then hurl yourself down the hill toward a spot on the outside of Twelve, where there happened to be an orange cone on the day I was there. Those more familiar with Road Atlanta may actually experience Eleven as a turn, some sort of organic whole, but for me it was always this set of reference points, none of which were the turn itself. I could do OK through the corner if I kept my sights set on these other goals, but I’d be instantly lost whenever I watched the contours of the track. The only way to navigate that corner was to aim for those other points.
In the past, I might have felt that aiming for fun was tantamount to lowering my standards, wimping out on learning how to go fast. Now I see it as the reference point that makes all those other things possible.
