Going downhill

It’s a truism that, if you stop learning, you stop living. I think one of the reasons that I am still enjoying life so much is that I have been blessed with an enquiring mind. I’m always interested to learn new stuff. Most every Friday morning I meet up with a couple of mates in town for breakfast. One is my old mate from the Army days, a retired Science Master and the other is a guy who was a work colleague of my wife’s until he retired a few years ago. The conversation is lively and sometimes controversial but it’s always fun. One of the reasons why I enjoy it so much is that both my mates, in their own way also have enquiring minds and I never fail to go away from our brekkie meets having learnt something that I hadn’t known before we met.

As a sixth generation Australian and a teacher I pride myself on being a pretty keen student of Australian history but I learned a new fact yesterday morning. When Matthew Flinders circumnavigated Australia and mapped its complete coastline in 1801-1803 he took a cat with him (having a ship’s cat was quite common in those days, for obvious reasons). I didn’t know this but my two breakfast companions not only knew this obscure fact but also the fact that the cat was named “Trim” (a nautical term for a nautical cat!) For my part I was able to add to their storehouse with some little-known facts about the bushranger, Captain Thunderbolt.

And so I left the City Cafe yesterday not only replete with food after a lovely breakfast, but also replete with a new piece of knowledge that I previously hadn’t had.

Oh, and, returning to the car I found this parked in the next space, a delightfully original and unrestored 1951 Ariel

So, anyway, what does this have to do with going downhill? Quite a lot, actually. Firstly, my intellectual ramblings are part of me making sure that I’m not going downhill mentally, but in a motorcycling context, my title today represents a discovery that I didn’t make until well into my motorcycling journey, and it has to do with LITERALLY going downhill.

Until I arrived back in Wollongong in 2004 (gad, has it been 13 years?) the bulk of my riding had been on the flat, as it were. 20+ years of living in Canberra meant that, while I had had plenty of fun exploring the twisties, I hadn’t really done a lot of mountain riding. Riding in the Illawarra means that, unless you’re only satisfied with riding the narrow strip of the coastal plain here, you’re going to have to negotiate lots of mountains. Where I live the coastal plain, from the foot of the escarpment to the sea is about 2kms, that’s all. And so I started reacquainting myself with the mountain roads to my west and there are dozens of them.

Problem was that, even though I enjoyed a very different type of riding, I found that I had fallen into some bad habits, the worst of them being that I was constantly making a hash of downhill corners. Now, if you go UP, you are eventually going to have to come DOWN so I experienced quite a bit of frustration over this. I found that I was running wide on corners and having to slow for the downhill bends much more than I thought I should be. Once I started riding with friends down here the gap between my abilities in this area and their’s became even more obvious. I decided that I had to do something about it. Now a sensible person would consult the internet and the myriad of riding tutorials on YouTube but not me, oh, no, I had to figure it out for myself.

Bizarrely, I actually did, and it was such a revelation to me that I can still remember exactly where I was when the penny dropped. I suddenly realised that day that, when approaching downhill corners, especially sharp ones, I was locking my elbows, a natural reaction against the braking forces, to be sure. At the next corner I bent my elbows and, voila, not only did the bike not run off-line on the exit but it felt so much more in control (of course, it was). On the way home I practised more just to make sure that I hadn’t imagined it, nope, bending your elbows was definitely the trick.

Later it occurred to me that I probably would have been able to get away with my old style forever if it weren’t for the fact that my favourite riding roads were now up hill and down dale like you wouldn’t believe. It also occurred to me that you are never too old to learn a new trick or two. Suffice it to say that my regular lap of Kangaroo Valley and all the ups and downs that it entails became much more enjoyable after having figured out a more satisfying and effective way of going downhill. So my riding AND my knowledge base aren’t going downhill at all – at least I hope not.