Ruminations in Korea

Time.

I have had half of a year to ponder a half of a second of my life. Of the past six months, three were spent flat on my back in a hospital bed. That affords you quite a bit of time to think. When you turn such a short period of time over and over and over in your mind for such a long period of time, you see things and make connections that were not immediately apparent at the time the event occurred.

On 23 September 2006, at approximately 9:50 am, I was involved in a motorcycle accident. Within the space of half a second, I went from riding normally to slamming into a concrete pole, shattering my thigh bone, and cartwheeling down the road. What I initially thought had happened at the time of the accident is quite different from what I came to realize actually happened.

Immediately after the accident and for a while thereafter, I believed that I was traveling at a normal speed, taking a normal curve in a normal manner, when my rear tire slipped on some gravel or sand. I believed that this caused me to slide toward the pole, when my tire caught dry road and stood me up into the concrete pole.

What I first assessed to be the result of an unfortunate combination of bad luck, fate, and karma turned out to be the result of a mixture of complacency, haste, and inattentiveness. I now realize that those three things, complacency, haste, and inattentiveness, created a situation where I was setting myself up for an accident. What follows is a detailed analysis of my ride on that fateful day and the bad decisions and mistakes that led to the accident.

Twenty-three years of riding experience does not mean that you will never have an accident. In fact, experience can be a contributing factor in accidents. Experience breeds familiarity and assumption. Familiarity and assumption breed complacency. Complacency breeds carelessness. After nearly two and a half decades on a bike, I know my abilities. I know my limitations. I know what I am doing. As such, the vast majority of my actions have become mechanical and are performed without thinking. Much has become instinctual, much has become habit, and much as become simply thoughtless action. Thus, I spend virtually no time practicing or honing various biking skills. I have become somewhat complacent toward riding and its dangers. I certainly do not give riding the intense attention that a beginning rider does.

In addition to the familiarity with myself and abilities, there is also the familiarity of the road. Statistics say that a large portion of accidents happen within 2 - 5 miles of home. This is because people are very familiar with the roads that travel most often and tend to pay less attention to those roads. I had my accident about two miles from my home. It was on a road that I have travelled regularly for 10 years. So my over-familiarity with the road and my complacency about riding combined to create a situation where I know that I was not paying as much attention to the road as I should have been. The first strike against me on the day of my accident was the complacency that had built up and become part of my riding style and habits over the course of the years.

The second strike against me that day was haste. One important aspect of riding that a lot of riders overlook is taking the time to warm up the tires. In order to get the most traction out of the tires, you should ideally spent 15 to 20 minutes of slow to moderate driving to warm the tires up. I know this is particularly important for Harley riders who use stock Harley tires. Harley tires seem to be significantly harder than other tires on the market. However, on the day in question, I had a very important appointment at 10:00 that I could not be late for. My home is about 13 minutes from my appointment location, and I got on my bike exactly 13 minutes before the appointment. I hopped on my bike, started it up, and took off at normal speed down the road. In my haste, I did not take time to warm up my tires. Thus, the tires didn’t have the traction that they would have had if I had warmed them up.

Initially I estimated that I was going 30 or 40 km/h around the curve. My estimate was based not on any empirical data, but rather on the weak premise that I didn’t THINK I was going very fast. However, in retrospect, as I was attempting to keep a scheduled appointment with no time to spare, it is reasonable and fair to assume that I was going faster than I thought I was. Thinking back on the accident, I would guess that I was actually travelling at 50 - 60 km/h.

While that may not be fast for some longer curves, it was too fast for this particular curve. The curve is very poorly engineered. When I say “engineered,” I mean “not engineered at all.” The road curves to the left. In a properly engineered curve, the road would be built so that the vehicle would be drawn toward the center line to get the vehicle to stay on the road and in the curve. However, the curve where I wrecked was built in such a way that the when you go around the curve to the left the road slopes toward the right side of the road, which causes vehicles toward the shoulder of the road and toward the concrete telephone poles.

In my haste, I ran off down the highway without warming up the wheels and drove a bit to fast around a curve that I knew was dangerously constructed.

Given my intimate familiarity with the stretch of road where the accident occurred and my general complacency about my riding skills, I must admit that I tend to be somewhat inattentive to the road and the hazards of riding when I am close to home. Thus, when my complacency combined with my haste, I was most likely a bit more inattentive than usual. I have come to realize that because I was being inattentive, I made some very basic, beginner-type mistakes.

In addition to the mistake of driving a bit too fast on an unsafe curve with cold tires, I made the seriously stupid mistake of applying my front brake while in the middle of the curve. One of two things will happen if you apply your front brake in a curve. If you apply the brake fast enough and hard enough, the bike’s front wheel will slide out from underneath you and you will slide across the ground. If your wheel doesn’t slide out from under you, the bike will, for some reason having something to do with physics, attempt to stand up and go in a straight line, which means that the bike will try to go to an upright position and straighten out to a certain extent.

Thus, what appears to have happened all in the space of about one second is that I was going around a curve a little too fast and my rear tire slipped slightly while I was in the curve because the wheels were not sufficiently warmed up. When I felt the wheel begin to slip, I was planning to bail off the bike, but I made the stupid mistake of using my front brake to try to slow down a bit, but this caused my bike to go upright slightly and go straight rather than turn. This helped my tire to gain traction again, which resulted in me going relatively straight into the concrete pole and smashing my leg between the bike and pole.

Had I warmed up the tired properly, not been so hasty and leaned deeper into the corner rather than using my brakes in the middle of the curve, chances are that I would not have hit the pole, or at least hit the pole with the bike rather than my leg.

The moral of this long and painful story is to remain aware of yourself and your surroundings, slow down, and avoid making simple, stupid mistakes.