A mountainbike for the cardiac impaired.
I just got my 2008 Kawasaki KLR650, and it is interesting. On day one, I dropped the clutch too quickly lurched, got twitchy and grabbed the front brake. Lets not start with how you're not supposed to drop the clutch. No one really ever tells you that the clutch is a dimmer switch on a motorcycle. What they do tell you, at length, is "Never GRAB the front brake." Then they go on to say shit like "90% of the braking force" and shit.
Anyway, I dumped the clutch, grabbed the brake and dropped the bike. The odo read 2mi and I put 6 scratches in it. ROCK!
The funny thing about that, is the bike is 440 pounds. I'm 160ish on a good day. How do you lift something 3 times heavier than you? Apparently there's a meathod. What if you don't know the meathod? A neighborhood kid rides around you on a BMX with training wheels asking you about your new motorcycle, while you struggle to lift it.
Kid: That's a pretty cool looking bike.
G: Ya. . . thanks kid.
Kid: Do you know how to ride it?
G: Apparently not.
I wasn't trying to be rude, really. I was trying, for the life of me, to lift something that I suddenly realized was much heavier than I ever imagined. I think the kid saw me more like this:
Anyway I got it up again and decided to have another go (that's what she said). Apparently though, you can't put it into first while the kickstand is down. That didn't stop me from trying for 10 minutes though before going back to read, watch a few videos, and sleep on it.
Then today I rode around my parkinglot for 6 miles. I don't have a very big parking lot, but it turned out I was riding around for about 2 hours. I started small and I seem to be doing well enough, I called it early due to my rediculous amount of knowledge about the human mind. It turns out you can only get physically better for about 2 to 3 hours a day. After that you need to sleep and let your brain work on the real part of learning. But then I grabbed a beer, because I'm just a man.
Tomorrow, I'll work more on the clutch work. I do fine at speed, but starting from inclined stops... and stops in general are still troubling me. I figure I'm almost ready to go to my local gas station which, hysterically, is 0.2 miles away. Total distance traveled today: 7.6 miles. Still not ready to go to the gas station. My max speed today was about 25 mph, so I've got a ways to go before I can hit actual traffic.
If you think back to the first time you drove a car over 40 mph you might understand. The difference here is you don't have a seat belt, or a roof. It's just you on a hunk of metal whose only real purpose is to hold an engine. And like a race car, the engine is a stressed member. Why? Because light is fast, and fast is good. I have a feeling that I'll have no need to build my super light weight sports car anymore. I have a feeling they're called motorcycles.
I hope to get up to 40 mph by the end of the week. Superleggera indeed.
P.s.
For those of you who have either ridden a motorcycle before, or are my parents, my motorcycle saftey course is on the 10th.
Anyway, I dumped the clutch, grabbed the brake and dropped the bike. The odo read 2mi and I put 6 scratches in it. ROCK!
The funny thing about that, is the bike is 440 pounds. I'm 160ish on a good day. How do you lift something 3 times heavier than you? Apparently there's a meathod. What if you don't know the meathod? A neighborhood kid rides around you on a BMX with training wheels asking you about your new motorcycle, while you struggle to lift it.
Kid: That's a pretty cool looking bike.
G: Ya. . . thanks kid.
Kid: Do you know how to ride it?
G: Apparently not.
I wasn't trying to be rude, really. I was trying, for the life of me, to lift something that I suddenly realized was much heavier than I ever imagined. I think the kid saw me more like this:
Anyway I got it up again and decided to have another go (that's what she said). Apparently though, you can't put it into first while the kickstand is down. That didn't stop me from trying for 10 minutes though before going back to read, watch a few videos, and sleep on it.
Then today I rode around my parkinglot for 6 miles. I don't have a very big parking lot, but it turned out I was riding around for about 2 hours. I started small and I seem to be doing well enough, I called it early due to my rediculous amount of knowledge about the human mind. It turns out you can only get physically better for about 2 to 3 hours a day. After that you need to sleep and let your brain work on the real part of learning. But then I grabbed a beer, because I'm just a man.
Tomorrow, I'll work more on the clutch work. I do fine at speed, but starting from inclined stops... and stops in general are still troubling me. I figure I'm almost ready to go to my local gas station which, hysterically, is 0.2 miles away. Total distance traveled today: 7.6 miles. Still not ready to go to the gas station. My max speed today was about 25 mph, so I've got a ways to go before I can hit actual traffic.
If you think back to the first time you drove a car over 40 mph you might understand. The difference here is you don't have a seat belt, or a roof. It's just you on a hunk of metal whose only real purpose is to hold an engine. And like a race car, the engine is a stressed member. Why? Because light is fast, and fast is good. I have a feeling that I'll have no need to build my super light weight sports car anymore. I have a feeling they're called motorcycles.
I hope to get up to 40 mph by the end of the week. Superleggera indeed.
P.s.
For those of you who have either ridden a motorcycle before, or are my parents, my motorcycle saftey course is on the 10th.