Tag: motorcycle

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Fun-Factor

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Attending this year’s Dealernews Dealer Expo in Indianapolis is a motorcyclist’s dream. As a small town boy I’m no stranger to looking out over my handlebars at the tall grass pastures of Kansas, but here in the Convention Center, standing on acres of confetti inspired carpeting it becomes apparent that I need to get out more. As always, anytime you can see and touch new motorcycle industry related products versus the internet, or worse yet, hearing it second-hand from the guy down the street who got his information from some other guy further down the street…I think you get the idea. So for those of you out of shape, I recommend walking mile after mile on carpeting. You will thank me. But seriously, it’s great to see what’s new and what’s improved for the coming year. There was plenty of enthusiasm in everyone I met and I think we all agree it will be a good year in the motorcycle industry.

I always recommend walking through events like these with your head up scanning the room. I know it’s hard to resist the patterns on the carpet but trust me you’ll be surprised at who and what you’ll see. I ran into Marc Cook with Mortorcyclist Magazine and we had a very good talk about the past, present and touched a little on the future of this great sport. We both agreed the smaller displacement motorcycles coming out recently are going to surprise many new and seasoned riders. We also talked about how big is big enough. My first “real” motorcycle was a Yamaha DT175 and at the time I felt like that was all I would ever need. It could run on the highway, pull wheelies and go off-road. Sometimes all within a block of my house. Remember, I grew up in a really small town.

Marc mentioned his first motorcycle was a Yamaha RD 400 Daytona. Another relatively small displacement motorcycle but cool nonetheless. He told me that his friends actually tried to talk him out of it because it was probably too much motorcycle for him. You know what? There is some truth to that statement! We often look at a GSX-R600 as a starting point, and I have to admit, I have been riding for 40 years and a 600 has more than enough power on the streets where stop signs and potholes live. You can always move up, but let’s be real here. A new rider that gets in over his head may never throw a leg over another motorcycle if the experience starts out as a bad one. So think about that for a minute. Your first won’t be your last as long as the “fun factor” doesn’t become the “fear factor.”

I think we need to get back to the reason we all ride. It truly is for the fun of it. Sure, size matters but fun is where it’s at. If my skill level exceeds that of the motorcycle I’m on it’s still fun. Next time you walk up to your bike or any bike for that matter, look for the Fun Gauge. You won’t find it anywhere – until you climb on it. You see, WE are the Fun Gauge. We determine how much fun we have on any particular motorcycle, whether it’s slow and down on power or just ridiculously fast, on road or off-road it doesn’t matter. Either way, our internal Fun Gauge will tell us the level of fun we’re having. We all to often get caught up on the “bigger is better” mentality and for some that is what they were told by the guy down the street who got it from…You get the idea.

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Bucket List

sunsetBack in the day some bikers refered to a helmet as a “lid” or “bucket” when sitting around telling mostly true stories with their buddies. We all have certain terms for things as we often refer to our motorcycle as a “ride” or “steel horse.” So let’s take the “bucket” and use that as a question. What is your “bucket list.” Or better yet, what is your helmet list? All of us are in different stages in making our helmet list and often that list changes as we get older. Some things are crossed off the list with enthusiasm, while others seem impossible to achieve. As I ride I find some things just cross themselves off as if I set out to conquer it, but in reality it was just by chance that the item on the list happened without even trying. The whole reason for our helmet list is to make sure that we experience and enjoy life, no matter what it is you set out to do. 

Now you just don’t fall out of a plane by accident when the goal was to go parachuting, but to see the sunset from the most random place is quite frankly, a pretty big deal to me. To have a great conversation with a long-lost friend might not make your list, but for me is one that I can check off. I think that sometimes we make our helmet list so difficult we find ourselves miserable when we can’t get anything crossed off.

Sure, I have several things I want to achieve in my life but I also want to enjoy every possible experience I can. After all, that is what life is about. Experiences. Riding a motorcycle can open the door of experiences you may not get anywhere else. You can meet some amazing people who can also share experiences they’ve had along the way. Of course, in some cases it may not be a helmet list to them, but maybe a “bandana list” is more their style. To each their own!

If you haven’t made your helmet list, you should. If you don’t have a helmet, get one. And a motorcycle as well. You might find that as you ride, that list inside your bucket will slowly disappear, along with some things you weren’t expecting. At least for a while, the stress of life and the problems at work have a way of sorting themselves out. Take a ride to the coast, ride through the mountains or to the corner store. But ride. Mentally cross off those things you see that weren’t on your list. Looking over my shoulder at a beautiful sunset while pumping gas is one of mine, and I tell myself – at this moment, right now, I am right where I want to be. Check.

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The Wheels Keep Turning

The road has a way about it. A way of taking your inner thoughts and creating a one-sided discussion with no one but yourself. A dark side that reveals your hopes and dreams and mixes them with thoughts you are trying to suppress. A life of what could have been, what might be, and what will never happen. Alone with just these thoughts and feelings, they somehow become reality if only for the ride. The highway disappears beneath your rolling wheels into the back of your mind, taking you places that few people know. The sound of the motor is there but you can’t hear it as it pulls all of this to the surface to be seen only by you.

Each ride starts out the same, but as the motion begins and the miles become a blur, the thoughts of where you are in this life becomes apparent. Some answers to questions are clear, some are not so forgiving as they become buried asking only to be answered another day. So you ride. Riding harder and faster than ever before. With a hope of pulling all that tangled confusion in your head back into a straight line. The feelings and emotions owned by no one but you. We twist the throttle as if demanding our head to become clear. But the ride is never long enough. I don’t know if any ride is long enough to create the world I see in my dreams.

On every ride, our reality is right around the corner. It is the Destination, the Stop sign or that final turn down the driveway. Like a bookmark, we mark our place until the next ride. We will pick up where we left off as we try to figure out where this story is taking us. Who knows what lies ahead, but we keep searching for it. The truth. The truth as we see it or as we want it to be.

We may never untangle the mixture of feelings we carry or unload the burden of mistakes we’ve made, so we keep the  wheels turning. In our mind and on the road.

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100 Miles

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One hundred miles sounds far, doesn’t it? If you had to walk it or even ride a bicycle that far you would have a full day ahead of you…or in my case several days ahead of me. But we ride motorcycles and one hundred miles may take a couple of hours if you find the right road. You see, as bikers it’s not about how fast you get there, it’s about the quality of the ride. It can actually be a “longer is better” mentality. Do we do that in our car? If you drive a classic Mustang convertible or a Jeep Wrangler with the top off you might feel this way. But the Chevette isn’t the “long way” approach of getting there.

That’s the difference of enjoying the ride or plain transportation. The motorcycle can pull double duty combining the commute with the long way home and that is often the case for the motorcyclist. For those of us that ride we might even take the long way home while driving our car because we know the mental benefits of doing so. But I might add that if you don’t ride a motorcycle and you find yourself taking the long way home-you are a biker in the making. You just don’t know it yet.

So this one hundred mile theory works just the opposite for bikers. We WANT the ride to take a couple of days if not literally, then figuratively. We NEED the ride to last longer than a mile a minute, so we take the long way. If it was all about getting there in a hurry we could drive-maybe not in the Chevette, but you know what I mean. We want one hundred miles to feel like three hundred.

I can’t change time and distance from the seat of my Road King, but I can change the speed it which I travel. I can change my attitude and the direction I go. So in a sense, I have a little bit of control over how late I will be when I get there! If you ever find yourself tired with your commute, that same old road you travel every day, think about taking the road less traveled. Motorcycle or not, you control how you get there. If you’re in a hurry, you might have to ask yourself “why.” Don’t we spend enough of our day in a blur? Slow down, go the extra few miles, and appreciate the scenery. You might be surprised how good the “long way” really feels!

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This Life Of Mine

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I know it sounds crazy but I just don’t feel my age. It’s a younger me that rolls around in my head and there is a constant argument of how young I think I am, and the reality of how I look and feel on the outside. Let’s face it, I think I’m in my thirties and some would say I act even younger than that. What’s the old saying? “Act your age not your shoe size.” Well I would say I act a little older than ten and a half but not by much.

We all have those days when the mind and body are not talking to each other. It might be the weather, our health or it’s simply that time in our lives when no matter how hard we try we just can’t get ahead. Our mental state can be affected by just as much as our physical state. And those rare days when both are humming along at the same speed life is good!

So with age comes experience in life that we don’t have when we are young. But if you think about it, what is wrong with the youthful enthusiasm and curiosity that some lose as they get older? I can appreciate the experience I’ve acquired over the years but I still want to live my life and take some chances that I did when I was younger. I just don’t want to repeat the stupid mistakes that gave me the “life experience” to know better. We need to get that enthusiasm and curiosity back and take those chances with the experience that adulthood gives us to really find that perfect mix.

We all have our ways of feeling young. Some live vicariously through our kids, while some are active in their own forms of recreation. I ride motorcycles. I’ve been riding a long time and it has always been a way for me to connect to my youthful side. Do I think I could go out and win a few trophies at my age? Sure! The key word here is “think” and I do believe I could. Could I go out and ride hard enough to win? Maybe. Would I be embarrassed to try? No, I would always have my age to blame!

I think the secret to that youthful feeling is “living in the moment.” As kids or young adults, we specialized in living right there in the moment. Not worrying about yesterday or tomorrow, or even an hour ago or an hour from now, and that gives you sense of freedom. Some adults are still good at that. But for me? I go on worrying or at least thinking about adult things. For a short time while I’m riding my motorcycle that will usually go away. Right there in the moment, riding nowhere in particular, and for a brief time my head will clear. I’m sure if you had me hooked up to a machine you would see stuff like my heart rate go down, my bad cholesterol clear up, or my waist size shrink, who knows for sure. But one thing I will say is I feel better and I feel like a kid again.

I’m not suggesting we all go out and re-live our youth, that would spell trouble. What I think we need is a double-shot of whatever comes out of the fountain of youth. When I was young the fountain of youth must have been the end of the garden hose because I sucked on it all summer long. Whatever we do that gives us that feeling of “acting our shoe size” is exactly what we need to have that balance of our youth and adulthood. Don’t feel bad when your body says you “can’t”, it just hasn’t received the memo.  

 

 

 

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The Reason I Ride

sturgis100_4434To look back over the forty years I’ve been riding motorcycles is easy. I like thinking about all the experiences I’ve had and even looking at the photographs I’ve got stored away in an old envelope on the shelf. Notice I said “shelf” not “memory stick” or “hard drive”. That’s back in the day when someone had to take your picture and then a conscious effort was needed to get the film developed all the while hoping at least one of the pictures wouldn’t be blurry. If nothing else the old photos prove that at some point in my life I have been in shape and I have had a full head of hair.

So as I look back I often wonder why the motorcycle impacted my life instead of football or any other type of sports or recreation. Simple explanations for gravity or inertia I can give, but an explanation of why I ride might be difficult. But I ride when those friends of mine don’t. They’ll watch football or basketball and I’ll watch Supercross or Moto GP racing. The funny thing is the majority of my friends don’t ride motorcycles. I know what you’re thinking. A guy like Jeff must be surrounded by the latest and greatest machinery out there. He must ride a million miles a year and his house is filled with trophies of championships and with friends who ride and do nothing but talk about two-wheeled adventures. The reality is I do ride a lot and I rarely hang out with my motorcycle friends. My close friends all watch the games on TV and come Monday I’m at a loss for what to say when everyone is talking about the weekend in sports.

Going through my formative years at school in White City, I just didn’t play much football or basketball. In a community where team sports are the talk of the town, I was riding my motorcycle out to the trails to practice, eventually racing motocross until I broke my leg in 1987. Was I any good? From the side of the track I probably appeared to be somewhat awkward and squidish. From inside my helmet looking out I was awesome! Fast and smooth and wheeling away from the pack! But average is more like it, although I finished my best year ranked third in the state.

I think the real reason I ride runs a little deeper than just individual sports versus team sports. I missed my chance to play team sports and if I could do it over I would have played more in school. This is something I’ve come to realize as I have gotten older. Again, from the sidelines at the game I’m sure I would have appeared awkward and squidish, but I would have been there all the same. I wouldn’t necessarily change things as they turned out, but it would have been a life experience to add to the many I already have. So back to the reason… 

Just like those folks that like football or NASCAR, I like motorcycles. It really doesn’t need to be explained at all. We are individuals that have our likes and dislikes and I like the two-wheeled kind. I think most people associate me with motorcycles by now and that’s no surprise. They sure don’t mistake me for a guy in shape with a full head of hair!

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Chasing Horizons

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The need to get there. You know…over there. Someplace you are not. We bikers are real bad about that as we are constantly searching for the “new” perfect road. Even as we travel the same old boring rides over the years, there is a pit in our stomach that there might quite possibly be a more perfect way of getting there. You know…over there. Better trees, curvier curves, more scenic bridges and more hilly terrain. I think you get the idea. And so the search continues.

Just when we think we’ve found our utopia, we realize it’s just not enough. Like a kid is to sugar, we bikers are to scenery. Our drug of choice is the feel of the wind and the sound of our bikes as we ride down another less congested highway to somewhere we’ve never been. Sounds easy right? Right. But life can be that way. We should always be searching or at least looking around with our head up instead of walking in circles looking at the ground. We should be wanting to discover things and places we have never experienced. Some people do and others…well, do not.

I must admit when I take on a new day I’m just as much in a rut as the next person. But once in a while I do wander out of my little world and take life on. It’s exciting to be somewhere new and to talk to new people, experience new things and make some new memories. But the searching I speak of is different. It is the horizon that we just can’t get to. It’s always just over the next hill. You know…over there. It’s that constant drive and curiosity that keeps us in motion. And besides, what would we do when we get there?

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The Price We Paid in the ’70s

As a teenager in the ’70s I was completely distracted by girls and motorcycles. If I only knew then what I know now, I would be in better shape with both motorcycles and women in general. You see, some of the motorcycles I owned back then have become new again. Highly desirable and worth more money than originally priced. Examples include, Honda 305 Scrambler,  1975 Yamaha DT175, Harley-Davidson X90, 1976 Husky 175, a Yamaha TY250 Trials and the list goes on and on. Sometimes, even in the moment, we are aware we should hold on to something with everything we have knowing we may never get them back. I know now I was never thinking they would be worth more than what I had invested, but living in the moment has its price. And I paid that price in full.

I was a child of that era and it goes beyond just motorcycles and girls. Cars and trucks came and went just as easy. 1966 Plymouth Fury, 1970 Dodge Charger, 1972 Dodge Charger, 1956 Ford truck, 1961 Ford truck Uni-body, 1949 Chevy truck, 1967 Chevy short-wide bed truck…see the trend? What was I thinking? But you have to remember, to me, cars and bikes were just a moment in time. Girls on the other hand were different. Like hair styles and bell bottoms. High School and dating. Transportation and recreation. Buy and sell or trade. Some were great deals and others were, well… not so great.

Even the Levi’s I was wearing back then are worth money! Say what? Yes, and in high demand. I’m not sure the pea green or sky blue leisure suites my mom made for me with her McCall’s Patterns would be worth much now, but who knows? Stranger things are happening. Some people save things from their past with hopes of it being worth something, but when it comes time to actually sell said things, they can’t part with them. They have a name for that. Hoarding.

As much as I appreciate the beauty of the Honda 305 Scrambler or the ’70 Dodge Charger, I can truly say that I am so much happier having owned and enjoyed them without the worry of damaging them or decreasing their value in some way. We rode hard and drove hard back then because we were living life. 8-track music blaring through cheap speakers or our Levi’s bell bottom pant leg chewed up from the chain of our motorcycles. It didn’t matter because we had a date that night!

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It’s Seasonal

As September hits I’m reminded of many things. Mostly, riding in the fall and how the summer days felt when it was unbearably hot. Looking back now those hot days seem like they were tolerable. School for everyone is in session, and growing up in a small town it’s classified as a big event. One particular hot day in August, on the first day of school, I wore a shirt that I was sure would be my favorite. A typical August day, in a school without air conditioning could suffocate a horse. But even your soon to be favorite shirt (that happens to be flannel) can become a sweat shirt in this heat. Really Mom? Sending your kid to school in a flannel shirt? I’m sure it was my decision and I fought her every step of the way until she caved in. Chalk it up to learning the hard way. To this day, every time I put on a flannel shirt I think about this. In the seventies there was no such thing as a “heat day” where kids got out of school because it was too hot. Instead, every day was “suck it up” day. So I did.

It’s a wonder how fast the seasons can change when we are lost in our day-to-day lives. Go to work, come home, ride a little and repeat. All the while trying to do the things required of me around the house. Before you know it the weather is changing and the days are getting shorter. I keep telling myself that it’s only a few short months until Spring and we’ll be fine. But hold on, I still have some riding to do and believe me the chores aren’t done. In any case I will ride this winter as I do every year, but as far as everything else…

Every season has its advantages and disadvantages and some seasons we like more than others. But when it comes to hot or cold or dry versus wet it’s all good. Just remember, it’s all temporary and it’s just a few short months until it all changes again. Apparently as a Freshman in high school on the first day of class, I lacked the depth and knowledge of both fashion and common sense. I made it through the day none the worse for wear and with a valuable lesson as my reward. After all, I was a Freshman and you can’t expect anything more from me. Just ask my mother!

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Friends are Family

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This past week has brought back a lot of memories, as a close friend of mine lost his sister. We all grew up together in the sleepy little town of  White City and our two families were pretty close.  A town where we all know each other anyway, but this is different. Russ’s dad and my dad worked together and commuted to work in their old Chevy pickups, only back then they weren’t that old. In the seventies a ’67 wasn’t that old! Russ and I were in the same class and Leah was in my sister’s class. Growing up with the Sams’ was cool. Russ and I rode bicycles until motorcycles came along and then it was “game on”. Lot’s of dust and wheelies through the summers mixed in with trips to the Council Grove Lake. Where else but small town America can you ride twenty miles to the lake on the tailgate of a pickup? Right down the highway, tennis shoes touching the asphalt and facing cars as they came up behind you. Good times.

Our house or theirs, it didn’t matter. Ralph and Joyce and Jean and Sammy were our folks and as a kid I couldn’t ask for more. But as we grew older and our lives started to change, so did the connection we had. Years passing with a blink of an eye as our own families grew and Russ and his wife Kay moved away. On many occasions they would return and  a handshake and a hug got us caught up on what we’ve missed. Friends like this need no introduction. We all have them, but we don’t usually recognize them. They are there and we take them for granted. I over-heard Russ say after the amazing service celebrating Leah’s life “why does it take something like this to bring us all together?” He’s right.

Last night Russ and his son Jeremy and daughter Whitney came over to my house. We talked about White City, his property in Skiddy, dogs, senior pictures, owl tattoos and mutual friends.We talked about Leah and how her husband Jim was getting along, but mostly we just talked. In an hour of talking with my friend, we made up for several years of being away from each other. So much was said in the small talk, but you really had to listen to the conversation. As if reading between the lines I heard the words Life, Love, Friendship and God. Russ you are my friend. Truly. Leah, you will be missed until we meet again!