How to Fall on Purpose

I am thirty-five years old and going over the handlebars of a 2005 Triumph Tiger on a dirt road in Oklahoma. The cause is straightforward. I came over a rise faster than I should have, found a hard left where I had expected another quarter mile of straight, and made the wrong decision quickly. The wrong decision was to ride the corner the way I knew how. I dropped my shoulder, slid my weight to the inside of the turn, and leaned the bike into the curve the way a rider leans into a sportbike on tarmac. The bike, which lived in a different world than my technique, slid out from under me with the particular indifference dirt has for road instincts. I learned in the next half second what I have spent the rest of my life teaching: a road bike and a dirt bike share a name and almost nothing else. The techniques are not similar. The techniques are opposite. Weight to the outside peg, not the inside. Standing, not seated. Trust the front wheel by getting your weight off it, not by loading it. Every instinct the pavement taught me was wrong at the moment I needed something to be right, and so I went down.

I tell this story now without embarrassment because I have come to believe that the first fall is the one that begins your education. The trouble is not that you fall. The trouble is that most adults have not fallen down in twenty years and have therefore forgotten how. We have engineered failure out of our lives. We have ergonomic chairs, child-proofed corners, anti-lock brakes, and an entire culture that confuses comfort with progress. Then one day somebody in their middle forties decides to learn to ride a motorcycle off-road, and the first thing the motorcycle does is throw them to the ground in front of strangers, and they discover that they have no idea what to do with that information.

What they are supposed to do is get up. This is the entire curriculum.

I have been teaching people to ride adventure motorcycles for many years. In that time I have watched hundreds of adults take their first fall, and the first fall always shows me everything I need to know about who is going to make it through the rest of the weekend. Some people get up too fast, dust themselves off, and announce that they are fine. They are not fine. They are managing the fall as if it were a social embarrassment, and they will spend the next two days trying not to fall again, which is the surest way to fall many more times. Some people stay down and grow quiet. They are doing the harder and more useful work of letting the body absorb what just happened. They will be slower at first and steadier all weekend. Some people laugh. Those are the ones I worry about least.

You can practice many things in adult life. You can practice patience. You can practice the violin. You cannot, in any other arena I have found, practice failing. The gym does not let you fail; it scales the weight. The job does not let you fail; you get fired. The marriage does not let you fail in any way you can rehearse. Adventure riding is the one corner of an adult life where falling is normal, expected, structurally required, and not the end of anything. The instructor catches you. The bike picks up. The body learns.

Some falls are funnier than others. A friend named Dave was once on a tour in Colorado, behind a guide whose pace had begun to push the line between leadership and showing off, when the road bent through a chicane that Dave entirely missed. He went straight off a twenty-foot embankment and into a bog. We needed two Polaris rangers and six grown men to pry the bike out. Dave was uninjured. The bike was, against all reason, also uninjured. The lesson Dave took from the bog was not, as far as I could tell, about chicanes. It was about choosing your guide more carefully, which is a useful skill in motorcycling and in most other things.

The Oklahoma fall taught me one kind of lesson. There is another kind, which I learned later, when I had been ADV riding long enough to develop the more dangerous of the two beginner sins.

The first sin is undertraining. The second is overconfidence, and overconfidence is worse because it can hide for years.

I once tried to ride a 1250 GSA, fully loaded, up an incline that began as a gentle climb and ended as something close to vertical. The objective was to get the bike onto a ledge above. The plan, if it can be called a plan, was to carry enough speed at the bottom to make the transition at the top. I carried far more than enough speed. I carried, by some measurements, the speed of a small rocket. When the incline went vertical I went vertical with it, and then I went past vertical, into a stretch of clear blue sky that the bike was not designed to occupy. I remember thinking, with what passed for clarity, that I seemed to still be going up. The bike was the first to recover its sense of physics. The nose dropped, the front wheel found gravity again, and I came down from six or eight feet onto rocks. I had two clean shakes of the handlebars to try to save what could not be saved, and then I went over the front of the bike while the bike, sensible at last, slid back down the slope from whence it had come. A friend named Steve who had watched all of this gave me a NASA patch the following week.

That was a fall delivered by skill, which is a kind of fall you cannot have until you have skill. I do not recommend skipping ahead to it. It will find you in its own time.

I had been riding ADV seriously for almost a decade before I learned the thing I most needed to know about falling, which is that you can choose to do it.

There is a stretch of mixed sand and pea gravel in a Texas riverbed where I once worked harder than I have ever worked on a motorcycle to keep a motorcycle upright. I was pulling muscles in my groin. I was burning energy I did not have. I was protecting a tank, a set of bar ends, a paint job, and the small ego that whispers to most people that a perfect bike is a sign of a serious rider. After about a mile of this I made it out onto a road, parked, sat down, and thought about what I had been doing. Then I got up, walked back to the bike, and kicked it over on purpose, the way Leonidas kicks the Persian envoy down the well, with a slow grin and considerable theatrical conviction. I picked it up and kicked it over the other way. I scratched the tank and the bar ends and a fairing panel that had been spotless that morning. I changed bikes by changing nothing about the bike.

These bog ADV bikes are hammers, not scalpels. The big adventure bikes are designed to be dropped. They are built to be picked up, and a great deal of expensive engineering went into making them survive the kind of treatment that, if you keep saving them from, you will eventually injure yourself trying to save them from. If you are protecting the paint and the bar tips, you are on the wrong bike. You are on a street machine that happens to have knobby tires. The first time you stop saving the bike and let it go where it wants to go, you will hurt less, ride better, and discover that an adventure bike often looks better with the scratches than it did without them.

This is the deal. You stop protecting the object. The object stops being the point. The point becomes the country you are riding through, and the country opens up.

I do not want to suggest that falling is free. The hardest fall of my life happened by myself, deep in the back country near the Alabama River, on a logging road I should not have been on alone, on a day when it had been raining hard enough that the trucks had left ruts the depth and width of bathtubs. The cab tires cut one line. The trailer cut another. I picked what looked like a clean path between them and was wrong. The front wheel found a rut I had not seen, the bar snapped right, the bike shot left, and my leg went out the way legs do when they are smarter than the man attached to them. My foot dropped into the rut a half second before the bike came down on top of it. I blew the anterior cruciate ligament with a serious bone contusion badly enough that the surgeon, who probably should have waited for the bone to recover before he operated, would later say the bone gave way like butter under a hot knife during the surgery.

I lay on the cool south Alabama ground for a while with banjos in the back of my head. I do not know how I got the bike back up. I do not know how I got on it. I do not know how I got out of there. I stopped at a gas station and could not get off because my knee would not function, so I asked a man at the next pump if he would mind filling my tank for me, and he obliged without comment. I rode the rest of the way to my brother's house in Birmingham without stopping. I ran every stop sign and every red light, carefully. As I pulled into his garage it occurred to me that the kickstand is on the left, and the left leg was the leg in question. I put my right foot down, leaned the bike against a post, slid off, and used a push mower as a walker to reach the back door, where I cried for help. I went to the hospital immediately with an injured knee, an injured hip, an injured shoulder, and an injured pride, in roughly that order.

I would do it all again. I have done versions of it many times since. This is the part of the essay where a writer who did not know better would tell you that the falling was the point, that the suffering revealed the true joy of the riding, that there is some easy lesson here about the value of difficulty. There is no such lesson. The Alabama fall was not noble. It was painful, lonely, and avoidable, and I would unmake it if I could. What I would not unmake is the years on either side of it, in which I have been a man with the use of his body, in country that asks the body to do something, on machines built for the asking.

What I would teach a new rider, and what I would teach most other people in most other parts of their lives, is that the first fall is going to come whether you brace for it or not. The bracing is what hurts. The willingness to be on the ground, to be wrong, to scrape paint that cannot be repainted, to discover that you are not as good as you thought you were and continue anyway, is the door you walk through into a different kind of adulthood. You cannot rehearse it in a chair. You cannot pay someone to do it for you. There is no app. The only way through is to kick the bike over yourself, and pick it up, and ride.