Dirt Riding: the Untold Story
Dirt Riding: The Untold Story
EDITORIAL
Preserving life on the streets
TO MANY STREET RIDERS, DIRT BIKES are instruments of the devil, loathsome contraptions to be avoided at all costs. Only service-station attendants and other primitive life-forms own dirt bikes. And the only thing worse than owning a knobby-tired motorcycle is actually having to ride the wretched thing in the dirt. Horrors!
It’s too bad that a lot of street riders think this way, because they’re missing a Good Thing. Not necessarily a Good Thing as in having fun, but a Good Thing as in staying alive and in one piece.
What on earth, you may ask, could thrashing around off-road on a dirt bike possibly have to do with the health and welfare of anyone who rides on the street?
Well, almost everything. Streetbike riders need to know some basic survival tactics if they want to minimize the chances of becoming a statistic; but learning those tactics on the road can be a long, risky, expensive and— worst of all—painful process. Dirt riding, on the other hand, allows a rider to develop virtually all of those requisite survival skills,and regularly practice them, at a greatly reduced risk of life and limb.
There are some mighty good reasons why. The most obvious one is that dirt is a much friendlier surface on which to fall than is pavement. And dirt bikes weigh only about half as much as streetbikes, which makes them considerably easier to maneuver and much less likely to cause serious injury should you happen to tangle with one in the midst of a get-off. What’s more, many of the large obstacles an off-road rider must avoid are considerably softer than those an on-road rider faces; and even the ones that aren’t more yielding at least are stationary, so they don’t pull out in front of you or come speeding at you head-on.
So even though dirt bikes do slip and slide and bounce and bound and skitter and hop far more often and to a greater degree than streetbikes do, they’re easier to learn how to control. And when you do fall down or run into something—which can happen with great frequency, particularly while you’re in the neophyte stage— the chances of sustaining any serious injuries are a mere fraction of what they are in street crashes. This is assuming, of course, that you're wearing the proper off-road riding gear. The point, though, is that while all this off-road flailing and floundering is going on, you're gradually learning how to keep a motorcycle under control, and what to do if it succeeds in getting out of control. And even though you learn these skills in the dirt, they are directly transferable to the street.
Dodging rocks or slaloming between trees off-road, for example, is wonderful practice for on-road maneuvers such as swerving around cars that pull into your path or avoiding huge potholes that crop up out of nowhere. What you learn while negotiating downhill trails teaches you how to grab a handful of front brake on a rain-slicked street without locking the wheel. Powering-sliding out of a fireroad corner or brake-sliding into one conditions you to react properly when your streetbike’s rear wheel breaks loose on a slippery spot in the road. Riding along a rough, rutted trail teaches you how to maintain control when a motorcycle starts violently twitching and wobbling. Even the frequent spills that usually occur in the dirt are instructional, for they tend to help teach you how to fall off a bit more gracefully.
Understand, of course, that I’m not talking about wide-open, deadnuts-serious dirt riding here; I'm not claiming that all dirt-detesting street riders ought to take up Open-class motocross or try to qualify for the ISDE, or that they should start doing some serious cowtrailing with experienced, go-for-broke playriders. But I am suggesting that they try a bit of easy trail-riding, some casual jaunts along dirt roads, firebreaks and open trails at a relaxed pace. I’m talking about riding only as fast as ycOi want to ride, speeding up when it feels comfortable and slowing down when it doesn’t—a luxury you often don’t have on the street. But off-road, you don’t have to worry about keeping up with the flow of traffic; you are the flow of traffic.
Neither am I suggesting that dirtriding neophytes should dash right out and buy a brand-new, $3000, double-throw-down dirt racer. That would be senseless, because precisely what a rider of this ilk does not need is a bike with buckets of horsepower and a suspension that has more adjusters than a State Farm convention. What he does need is a cheap, used dirt bike, one that’s a few years old at the very least, but is in reasonably good shape. There are literally thousands upon thousands of them out there, languishing in the want-ads or collecting dust in the corners of garages and basements from coast to coast. They aren’t the fastest, mostsophisticated things on knobby tires, but they're inexpensive and perfectly suited to teaching a lot of people what they need to know: how to be a better, safer street rider.
All of this can be hard to believe if you’ve never ridden off-road, but it’s true. Don’t take my word for it, though; just ask any of the legions of riders who have earned their spurs in the dirt after years of riding strictly on the street. In one way or another, they will tell you that their road-riding competence increased so dramatically that they wonder how they ever survived before taking up offroad riding.
Besides, in addition to helping keep you alive and well, there is one other compelling reason for giving dirt riding a try: It’s fun. Who knows, you might even like it. —Paul Dean
