The Class and Beyond How I learned to stop worrying and ride the bike

The end of August rolled around, and with it the weekend I'd been waiting all summer for: the class.

Friday night I piled into a small classroom with Patti, Rusty, Jeff, eight other people and our instructors, Jim Cain and Chris Hogan. The evening was spent covering SIPDE, FINE-C and some of the basics we'd need on the range the next morning. The good news is that much of it looked familiar, so at least the things I'd been reading up until then were the right things.

Saturday we got up at the butt crack of dawn. On the way to the college, we stopped at the grocery store and and loaded up on grapes, drinks and ice, which ended up in our boxcar-sized cooler. By 7:00 we were assembled on the range and ready to make bikers of ourselves. The bikes used for the class were a mix of 125s and 250s, and I managed to nail down a Honda Nighthawk 250 as my steed. Mine bore the number 13 on its license plate, which I wouldn't notice until we put the bikes away for the day. Our first exercise was exercise: we pushed our bikes from the corner of the parking lot all the way out to the range. In retrospect I'm glad they didn't use heavier bikes, because I don't even like pushing my 484-pound Vulcan up the driveway. I won't go into the gory details of everything we did that day, but suffice it to say that by 10:00, we were running around the range in circles, ovals and figure eights and running over the occasional one of MSF's stubby little cones when judgement wasn't quite right.

Sunday started much the same way, only this time we got to ride out onto the range, where we picked up where Saturday left off. The exercises were more complex and in some cases much harder to execute. I'll have to admit that I muddled my way through a few of them but got lots of excellent feedback on how to improve things.

Just as things appeared to be going well, disaster struck. Five exercies from completing the class, we got a much-needed five-minute break. While I sat under a tree cooling off and guzzling Gatorade, Patti took off to visit the little bikers' room. Not too much later, Rusty came bounding over the hill to let me know that Patti had fallen and injured herself. So, sore and sweaty, I ran down to where she was to find out what was wrong. While walking over there, she'd tripped on the corner of the sidewalk and sprained her ankle, putting her out of the class. She didn't think it was too serious, so she stayed on the side watching us finish up and take the riding test. The whole thing blew my concentration (and riding) for the next few exercises, but once I regained my composure things got back to normal.

Needless to say, I passed the class, and on Wednesday, September 2, 1998 I became a card-carryin', hard-ridin', neighborhood-terrorizin' biker. Okay, maybe not. But the Virginia DMV did find it in their hearts to add the Class M endorsement to my driver's license.

Now that I was allowed out on the street, it became time to take everything I learned to do slowly in a parking lot and convert it to real street riding. Come back and visit sometime and I'll tell you that story.