AGV Backmarker: Rider Narrative—remembering
the ride, with mind and body
April 20, 2006
By Mark Gardiner
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Last week I was invited to speak at the joint conference of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. Somewhat surprisingly at a gathering of university profs and Ph D.s, there are always a few sessions on the role of motorcycles in popular culture. This year, one session was on the theme of “Rider’s Narratives”—describing the experience of riding. My talk was on an aspect of motorcycling that is familiar to all racers, though I haven’t often heard it discussed: the way we learn courses and remember races in our bodies, as well as our minds. This phenomenon is called “proprioceptive learning,” and it is at the root of the great Dunlop “language of racing” television ad, in which racers communicate with their mechanics with body language.

Here is the text of my talk, only slightly edited for the more racer-centric www.roadracerx.com reader:

One of the longest straightaways on the TT course is Cronk-y-Voddy straight. That’s Manx Gaelic for “hill of dogs.” This is my dog, Stout. Cute, eh? He’s a total chick magnet, too. There’s only one problem; women see only him and don’t notice me at all. In fact, I don’t think they can even see me. No $#!+, I think if they looked up the leash, to their horror, they’d see one end of it hanging in thin air. Mark Gardner photo

Although I began riding motorcycles at 14, I came to motorcycle racing relatively late in life. Still, I managed to progress through novice, amateur, and pro racing licenses; eventually I received my AMA and FIM expert licenses. Those allowed me to race in U.S. national championship events, and at international races, which I did—admittedly with a conspicuous lack of success. It’s no accident that this column is titled “Backmarker”!

Over the course of that 100-race “career,” I found out that there are lots of excellent reasons not to race motorcycles. Don’t kid yourself: for every million-dollar star, there are a thousand guys whose careers end when they’ve got a limb in plaster and a smashed bike drooling oil in the back of their truck; and the truck’s broken down, too. They’re tapped out—flat busted broke—and their credit cards are maxed-out and their friends won’t lend them any more money, either.

Oh yes, there are a lot of reasons not to race motorcycles. It’s hard to learn, dangerous, and almost always costly. And yet, there are thousands of guys (racers are still overwhelmingly male, although the female presence is growing) who devote all their free time and more money than they can afford to race. So there must be some very good reason to do it.

Mountain climbers have a cryptic phrase—“Because it’s there”, almost a Zen koan—to explain why they risk life and limb for the satisfaction of standing in some very high places. Non-climbers seem to have been conditioned to accept that response to the question, “Why on earth would you want to do that?” In fact, it’s so ingrained that people rarely question the motivation—or sanity—of alpinists.

As a motorcycle racer, I was always jealous that we lacked an answer to the (admittedly very good) question, “Why would anyone want to drag his knee on the pavement at 100 miles an hour, or risk his life in last-gasp pass? To win what? A wooden plaque or plastic trophy?

A few years ago, I set out to answer that question, by writing a book I’ve called Riding Man. My response is longer than three words—about 119,000 words longer, in fact. Part of the difference is that when George Mallory coined the phrase “Because it’s there,” he was being flippant. I’m being serious.

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While I would have to read all of Riding Man to give you a complete, nuanced understanding of why people race, here’s the executive summary: we race because it is an opportunity to learn things about ourselves that are almost impossible to learn any other way in the civilized world.

A real, as opposed to cognitive, map of the TT course. To lap quickly, you need a little more detailed knowledge than this. Mark Gardner photo

Risk is central to this notion. Racing is about willingly exposing oneself to danger—and its complement is fear. Simpletons and couch potatoes addicted to reality TV think they get it: “You must be some kind of adrenaline junky,” they say. But they don’t get it. On Fear Factor, risks are perceived but never real. On the track, risks are real but not always perceived. I suppose the ultimate adrenaline junky sport would be Russian roulette, but motorcycle racers—at least the good ones—hate that kind of random, uncontrolled risk. In fact, they are control freaks; for racers, the unexpected is anathema.

Racing is not about seeking risks, it’s about eliminating them—this is why many racers don’t even ride on the street. It’s about eliminating one variable after another. First, we ride on tracks where the risk of oncoming traffic is eliminated. Then we put flagmen on every corner, so the risk of coming upon an obstacle in the road, or an oil slick, is eliminated. Machines are carefully safety-wired so that there’s no risk of a vital part falling off. One by one, variables are eliminated until only one variable is left: the rider. What he knows or thinks he knows. At that point, the rider decides—and that is a key word—to test both his knowledge and his confidence in his knowledge. That decision has meaning because the consequences of an error in judgment are, quite simply, disastrous.

To test oneself in this way and prove worthy is a profoundly satisfying experience. When I set out to write my book, I sold everything I owned and spent my life savings to move to the Isle of Man—the Mecca of motorcycle racing—so I could compete in the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy races.

The Isle of Man TT began in 1907. It was one of the first motorcycle races and now it is the last great race run on public roads. Most of the greatest riders in the history of our sport have proven themselves on the TT course. And after having done so, they’ve been nearly unanimous in saying that the TT is the ultimate test in motorsport. Thirty-seven and three-quarters of a mile long, the TT course passes through cities and towns and crosses the Island’s highest pass. It is narrow, bumpy, and unimaginably fast. It is lined with stone walls, trees, and buildings. The course has about 140 turns. Coincidentally, that is about the number of racers who have died there. The TT races are without question the world’s most dangerous organized sporting event.

To write Riding Man, I had to ride in the TT because it was there, on the Isle of Man that the risks—and thus the rewards—of motorcycle racing were brought into the sharpest focus. The Isle of Man was also the only place on earth where motorcycle racing was central to local culture, and not an obscure subculture.

Racers memorize racetracks wherever they go. But a lap of the TT course is 15 to 20 times longer than a typical modern circuit. Not only that, but because it is a public road, each mile is full of hazards—deteriorating pavement, road camber, bumps and potholes—that are never problems on purpose-built tracks. There are literally hundreds of places where the road ahead disappears around a bend, behind trees, or over a crest. Most of them don’t even require slowing down, but there are still dozens of places where deadly hazards lurk around treacherous, decreasing-radius bends—and, again, I’m not using “deadly” as a figure of speech.... No matter where you stand on the whole 37-plus-mile-long course, you can see some spot where a racer has crashed and died. So it’s vital that TT riders commit a long and complex lap to memory. Years ago, I took a university course in urban geography; they called such geospatial memorization “building a cognitive map.”

The races take place every June. I arrived in January and began bicycling around the course to commit it to memory. All told, I rode about 50 laps on my mountain bike, and about another 50 on motorcycles before the roads were closed in May, when the official race practice began. I also walked much of the course. My study of the Mountain course occupies several extended chapters in Riding Man. Much of the time, I was accompanied by Peter Riddihough, who made a documentary film of my adventure, called One Man’s Island. I took hundreds of photos and filled two notebooks and a sketchbook as aides memoire.

Steve Hislop knows all about memorizing tracks with his body. Stephen Davison photo

Most of the process was conscious and rational—or at least as rational as motorcycle racing can be. However, one of the things I became aware of is that the course is also memorized in the rider’s body, not just in his mind. This “muscle memory” is a very deep and long-lasting kind of memory—at the root of the folk wisdom that, “It’s like riding a bicycle; once you’ve learned it, you never forget.”

It crops up in Riding Man when I chat with Steve Hislop. Steve’s since died in a helicopter accident, but I met him early in 2002. Here’s my account of that meeting:

Towards the end of April, Peter Riddihough is set to come over to start working on his film. Of course, in the days before he arrives, I have experiences that make me think, “Peter should be here to film this!”

Since I’m leasing a CBR from Padgett’s for the race, I’m “on the firm” as Mr. Hodgson says. I seem to be welcome to hang around the shop whenever I feel like killing time. One day, Steve Hislop stops by to chat. He’s a Scot, direct and not too bashful to say that if he hadn’t switched from the roads to short circuits, he’d have overtaken Joey Dunlop’s record of 26 TT wins. The three of us sit around on mismatched furniture, drinking instant coffee. Hodgson tells a story about watching a race from the kink at the end of Cronk-y-Voddy straight. “You were the only one,” he says to Hislop, “who went through there without rolling off the throttle.”

At this point, I have to interrupt, “ But it’s so featureless! I’ve been through there a hundred times and still haven’t found a single landmark.” The course kinks down and to the right; a blind approach with a wall on one side and steep berm on the other. “How,” I ask, “do you time the turn-in?”

For a moment, Hislop looks at me as though he’s wondering if he should give away a trade secret. Then he thinks, “What the hell, I’ll never ride the TT again anyway....”

As Hislop starts to answer, he closes his eyes, and leans forward in his chair. His hands float up, as if grabbing an imaginary set of handlebars. “Towards the end of the straight, you come to the crossroads, but that’s much too early to turn in. You can’t feel it at all on open roads but when you’re flat out, there’s a little rise after the crossroad. If you’re tucked right down, you’ll feel the bike come up...” eyes still closed, he exhales sharply, and lifts his chest—he mimes the tank hitting his chest, then lets his body sag back down for a moment.

“As soon as you feel the bike settle back down,” as he says it, his body scrunches into a tuck, “you throw it to the right, aiming at the end of the hedge.” He opens his eyes, and looks at me with an expression that asks, “Got it?”

I wish Peter had been rolling tape. It’s been 15 years since Hizzy last rode through that kink wide open. But when he told me how he’d done it, he hadn’t been dredging up a distant memory; it was still right there, in his body. When he closed his eyes, he was there .

Technically, this kind of muscle memory is called “kinesthesia” or “proprioceptive learning.” Modern sports scientists talk about a proprioceptive sense—based on the Latin root for “coming from within” and distinguish it from our five exteroceptive senses—of taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch. Proprioceptors are cells and organs throughout the body, including the inner ear. Collectively, they allow us to know—without looking—where our limbs are relative to our bodies, and the location and position of our bodies in space. A highly developed proprioceptive sense is one of the traits that define gifted athletes. In the former east-bloc, state-sponsored coaches even referred to this as “physical IQ.”

Cronk-y-Voddy straight, where Hizzy timed his turn by feeling the pressure that the tank exerted on his sternum, is a windswept hill looking west over the Irish Sea. Somehow, when I was there I took a picture of these trees, not the road. Maybe that was my problem.... Mark Gardner photo

I’m a physical idiot. My motorcycle racing skills were developed in spite of, not because of, my proprioceptive abilities. But even I can learn in this way. Since this is, literally, the deepest kind of learning, it is perhaps appropriate that I describe my own muscle memories of the TT course in the very last paragraphs of Riding Man.

When every room here in the Onchan house was filled with people, I got into the habit of sitting on the stairs to check my email. There’s a big sunny window there, making it the warmest spot in the house. So I kept the habit of sitting there to write, even though, once again, I had my choice of empty rooms, tables, and chairs.

One morning—there I was—with my computer on my lap, a coffee beside me on the carpet. Suddenly, in the middle of typing some altogether unrelated thought, I had a vivid, vivid sense of being out on the course.

I was at Greeba Bridge. You get to the bridge after the beautiful, flowing section past the castle. You throttle back a little at the kennels, but then it’s wide open through Greeba village; the road wiggles, but it’s easy to see a straight approach to the bridge, which is in the middle of a sweeping left turn.

This is one of the widest, smoothest parts of the TT course. I never noticed it on open roads, but there’s a slight hump to the bridge, right on the apex of the turn. For two weeks, I’d been taking it in fourth, cautiously increasing my speed each lap. But every lap, I found myself with too much road on the exit. "Too slow!" I thought, time after time.

Anyway, sitting right there on the stairs, I felt myself braking later and less; downshifting only once, instead of twice. I saw the paint mark on the bridge wall that I used as my turn-in point. I felt my left knee on the pavement, gauging a steeper lean angle—and this is the important part—I felt the bike lift over the hump in the bridge and drift wide. But I held the throttle steady. Because suddenly I knew that the road, right there, was smooth enough and wide enough that the bike would settle, the tires would grip, and I’d get through. I knew I could carry 10 or 15 miles an hour into the next acceleration zone, which is at least a thousand yards long. There were seconds to be saved there. There, again, was my hundred mile an hour lap.

But there I was on the stairs, not on the bike where I could do anything about it.

This Dunlop TV spot is based on some of the concepts Gardiner discusses in this column.