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A philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant (1726-1804) said that humans have knowledge that precedes and goes beyond their personal experiences. Motorcycle riders prove this to be true because they knew, before ever throwing a leg over a bike, that they’d love it. There is an inclination to try to categorize and define this bond. Shall we call riding an art, a passion, a skill, a compulsion, an instinct, a desire, an ego booster, sheer entertainment or simply a challenge? Celebrating my sixtieth year of riding, I still don’t know which it is and that doesn’t bother me. Why ride? The question has no practical significance, it is a moot point. I knew, from the first moment I considered it, as you probably did too, how it would, could or should feel. Riding fits into an already existing recess in our (riders’) souls, our urge to live, our sense of existence, our core aliveness, our essential being. Deny it at your own risk: enjoy it to your great happiness. Only one point should concern us: losing that sense of discovery. It’s that open, childlike view we must preserve where everything is fresh paint and dewy grass except you have a set of bars and a throttle in your paws and where each corner becomes an adventure and a world unto itself. I abandoned trying to discover “why I ride” long ago. Defining the qualities of a perfect ride; finding that groove where it all flows, where you are there but detached, where all things are obvious and yet simple keeps my passion alive. A good ride has qualities that transcend the moth-goes-to-flame category of experience. Here is a description of some of them that are on my list. I seek the perfect balance of focused but not too focused. Aware of what I am doing but not pushed into it like with my face pressed against a window. Focused more on a result than on the skills or technique I need to get the result. I have to be willing to crash but not have my attention on crashing. Keep my expectations of how well I'd like to, or think I should, be riding on the back burner. I’ve found there is a fine balance between taking small errors in stride and not feeling stuck with them but not ignoring them either; that’s a trick: I open up my mental riding software program which allows me to maintain enough free attention to identify an error and hit “save” so I can later make some decision on what I can do to correct it. Be willing to make changes but always keep in mind that sometimes a very slight change can make a world of difference. That means don’t be too darn greedy for change. Realize the instant that my focus is broken and either put it back together immediately or reduce my pace. On the track, I have to separate what a practice session is from a go-for-it session. Trying not to feel weird about it when someone quicker passes me is still a battle. I have to be willing to go slower to learn something new. Give any technique a fair chance of success and try it enough times to know if I can or cannot do it. I always accept coaching that I trust. I know that self- coaching is quirky; it’s easy to delude myself and miss what is important. Once I notice some little thing I’m doing I try to discover what it is. I keep in mind that riding is a universe unto itself and being a universe it has limitless opportunities to discover its intricacies and one’s own connection to them. With all of that in place, I have a great ride. What’s on your list? Keith Code PS: We still have some open spots for our Las Vegas schools in October and November. Weather is usually perfect at that time of year in Vegas. Check out the schedule here. Copyright 2017, Keith Code, all rights reserved.

In 1976 I figured I had the world by the tail once I discovered how to use Reference Points while riding and racing. That realization set me on the twisty road of rider-improvement discovery and began my maiden voyage of exploration into rider training. I began coaching students one-on-one, developing a curriculum that relied heavily on Reference Points and how to use them at tracks. I applied the data from that coaching and the Superbike School which was born in 1980 just after retiring from racing. Prior to those coaching experiences, Reference Points (RPs) usually only meant having braking markers. Lines were a topic of discussion but no procedure existed on how to figure out a line, how to dissect one or how to stitch a track together with RPs. From experience gained at the schools and later, coaching several factory riders, I wrote more on how to find and use RPs. That info came out in the first A Twist of the Wrist book in 1984. Today we know much more about RPs and what kind of visual skills a rider needs to develop. RPs assist us in defining the Space we’re in and the Speed we’re traveling through it. Accuracy with those elements relies heavily on having a minimum of three Reference Points (RPs). An accurate orientation in space begins with two external Reference Points. We find two points or objects or areas first and this then gives us a reckoning of our own location where we become the third point of orientation. Together, that creates an accurate tracking of the direction of our progress in relation to the other two. With those three, our eyes begin to create 3D space, which in turn improves our perception of relative speed and direction of travel. Also, and importantly, our sense of time and timing switches on quite automatically. In short, RPs help us create perspective. Finding and using Reference Points is quite natural and native to our survival: rarely do we walk into a closed door or bump against the furniture nor do we count how many steps it will take to walk across a room. RPs are automatically taken into account and coordinated. Some riders have a hard time finding and using RPs. While their very survival has relied on that ability they still insist that it’s difficult. This peeked my interest to find out why they struggle with something they already do. In riding there are many barriers but only two freedoms: The freedom to change the speed and to change the direction of the bike. Without RPs it’s impossible to do them well. Having the bike pointed where you want it to go is another ingrained-use we make of RPs. Whether conscious of it or not, we always have an intended destination, a location we are seeking to reach. Arriving at a location simply refers to staying in your lane, missing a pothole, not running wide, picking your turn entry, finding a line, recognizing you are on a line at all or simply avoiding hitting a car. Accurately gauging when and how much to gas, brake and turn so we can arrive somewhere depends on having three RPs. So why the difficulty? Accuracy and purpose both have something to do with it. Starting off with the idea to keep the bike on the road is a good goal; when it comes to cornering motorcycles it isn’t enough. Lining up for a corner right on the edge, in order to open the turn’s radius as wide as possible is correct thinking for most turns. Starting that turn 3 feet inside the edge defeats that purpose; especially on the road where 3 feet is 25% of the whole lane. Not accustomed to being that accurate, riders default to “safe in the middle of the road”. There are other visual and control weaknesses that can contribute to this common error. Not being adept at steering the bike can make any rider edge-shy. If they subscribe to so called ‘Body Steering’ they’ve experienced the bike lazily changing directions often enough to avoid being too close to the edge of their lane. RPs themselves have a viable range of application. Too close or too far away on the road’s surface are their chief parameters. Too far to one side or the other of your intended line can also create problems. The how, when and where of using RPs is nicely wrapped up in the two dozen drills I’ve developed which can be coached by someone trained to recognize the rider errors resulting from not having sufficient RPs. That’s good news. The bad news is we now run smack into every rider’s mortal enemy, that of Target Fixation. Target fixated is bad; it signals the onset of varying degrees of panic. The kicker is that the main reason we panic is because we’ve lost our other RPs. When target fixed we only have that one RP and we need two. Drilling and coaching on correct visual techniques with simple and doable exercises heads off the classic visual faults humans seem stuck with. It seems impossible to eliminate target fixation, tunnel vision and over-active scanning. However, through understanding and drilling of what, where, how far ahead, how wide and even how long we should look at our RPs we can make deep inroads into the problems and find solutions to them. At the schools we haven’t sat still on these problems. At this point in time, we’ve developed 64 visual exercises our coaching staff use regularly to help their students understand and to improve what you could easily say is the most important part of any rider’s skill portfolio. © 2017 Keith Code. All rights reserved.