What Can You Learn From Books?
Postie turned up this morning with all of the paperwork for the Yamaha Training School (see blog passim), where I am booked in on Friday.
In the meantime, I have been reading up on all of the offroad biking tips I can lay my hands on, and watching all the videos and video clips that the Internet has to offer.
When I started riding road bikes seriously, I read and read and read as much as I could on the subject. The theory, the physics, the practice, the gotchas, the advice - the whole lot. I then started putting it into practice - every day over a couple of hundred miles.
My road-riding techniques, aka "roadcraft" is now absolutely superb. This was helped along even further by enrolling on a couple of BikeSafe courses (where you go out on your bike accompanied by experienced and helpful traffic cops for a 1-day training course).
Incidentally, the most fantastic book on road riding in the real world is Motorcycle Roadcraft (the Police Rider's handbook). Before you getting all snooty and thinking "Yes, but what can you learn from a book?", try reading it. The chapter on "Observation", for instance, deserves a book of its own. One example still springs to mind:
Anyway, the point is that there are things you can learn from books. The problem with learning from books is that it is all theory and it must be put into practice before the learning can become real.
So I am swotting up on all things motocross and enduro. This doesn't mean that I think that I will be an expert just because I've read a couple of books. Quite the opposite, reading these books is showing me just how much I have to learn.
And the learning proper starts at Yamaha on Friday.
In the meantime, I have been reading up on all of the offroad biking tips I can lay my hands on, and watching all the videos and video clips that the Internet has to offer.
When I started riding road bikes seriously, I read and read and read as much as I could on the subject. The theory, the physics, the practice, the gotchas, the advice - the whole lot. I then started putting it into practice - every day over a couple of hundred miles.
My road-riding techniques, aka "roadcraft" is now absolutely superb. This was helped along even further by enrolling on a couple of BikeSafe courses (where you go out on your bike accompanied by experienced and helpful traffic cops for a 1-day training course).
Incidentally, the most fantastic book on road riding in the real world is Motorcycle Roadcraft (the Police Rider's handbook). Before you getting all snooty and thinking "Yes, but what can you learn from a book?", try reading it. The chapter on "Observation", for instance, deserves a book of its own. One example still springs to mind:
- You're riding along a country road and you see a single lamp-post ahead (possibly round a bend). What does that tell you?
- Similarly, you see a cluster of a half-dozen lamp-posts up ahead. What does that tell you?
Anyway, the point is that there are things you can learn from books. The problem with learning from books is that it is all theory and it must be put into practice before the learning can become real.
So I am swotting up on all things motocross and enduro. This doesn't mean that I think that I will be an expert just because I've read a couple of books. Quite the opposite, reading these books is showing me just how much I have to learn.
And the learning proper starts at Yamaha on Friday.
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posted by 2009 Dakar at
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
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