MSF Review: Day 1 and 1/2

Total Miles Ridden: 10

Superficial Lesson Learned: Hair does not like motorcycle helmets, particularly for upwards of six hours. Prepare for that Mad Scientist look.

I am a day and a half into the two-and-a-half day "Basic RiderCourse" offered by the Motorcycle Safety School in the Bronx. The only alternative around here is to go all the way out to the Queensboro College campus, where Trama's Auto School has a campus. Both courses had a waiting list of about a month when I first signed up in the beginning of July. Given the 7:30 AM start times, I went with the Bronx.

The facilities leave a lot to be desired, but I suppose in New York City it's either that or else pay even more than the already-high $350 for the course. Picture a trailer in Mott Haven on the Bronx River with a couple of port-a-potties and a lined course about the size of a smaller supermarket parking lot.

And really, if you want luxury, buy a Lexus. So I forgive the Motorcycle Safety School for not having a sauna.

There is no way for me to get to know our primary instructor, who teaches the classroom sessions and is present for both six-hour stints on the course, well enough so that I could (maybe) present him as anything other than a blue collar Bronx-Irish stereotype in the few days that I am going to be in his company. Since I can't escape this low-brow literary device, I might as well embrace it and tell you to envision a vein-bulging, eye-popping, eighty-decibel-shouting bearded Harley rider with a Bronx accent.

Of the 11 students (10 men, 1 woman), two are my age (mid-late twenties), a couple people in their early-mid thirties, one eighteen year old kid (who was distressed that he was the only kid) and the rest in their late 30s to mid 40s.

Of the gentlemen present, only three of us did not have visible, large tattoos, and one of those three is the 18 year old who just recently turned old enough to get some.

I am fairly certain that I was the only actor.

The first day (last night) was all classroom work and he was amicable, encouraging, and soft-spoken. He obviously wanted to make everyone feel comfortable. He pointed out the schools' passing rate of 94% (88-92% on their first try). Even today, after several of us gave mixed performances on the course, once you got off the bike, he was pretty forgiving.

On the course, though, this is the School of Abuse. He and his fellow instructor weren't patient or supportive. If they explained the instructions and you didn't ask a question and then had a problem, you didn't get words of encouragment: you got threatened with being "counseled out," a polite euphamism for The Boot, and not even an especially accurate one since all of us (particularly those of us who ride) are very good at ignoring counsel and you could sooner ignore a stampeding elephant than Our Instructor Irishman.

I am very lucky that I took quickly to all of the exercises that we were doing and so I avoided most of the instructor's wrath. If you had to screw up, screwing up something difficult like a tight turn was largely OK; stalling was verboten and doing anything other than what the instructors said was sure to win you a warm place in their hearts.

I was mostly paying attention to my own bike and the person in front of me, so I don't have my own sense of how the rest of the class did. But based on Minutes Spent Receiving a Lashing, I am near the top of the class. We will find out tomorrow, during the road test, if this parleys into actual performance.

There are a few reasons why I thought the tough guy behavior on the instructors' part might be an act.

There is a school of thought in teaching proficient motorcycling that says: Riding a motorcycle is not only not a natural thing for the human mind to learn, but it is also a stressful pasttime. Particularly since you never go above 3rd gear and about 20mph in the MSF, they cannot possibly simulate what it is like to pull onto the Jersey Turnpike with an armada of SUV-driving cell-philes busily discussing nothing at all right along with you. Because it is the instructors' job to prepare you as best they can for real-world riding, they should take every opportunity to inflict real stress on you -- especially as whatever abuse they send at you, however distressful it might be, isn't actually going to endanger you like a real road situation might. There are no physical safety consequences of being yelled at.

The opposing school of thought probably says that destroying a student's confidence within two hours' of their first time ever on a motorcycle can result in their failure to develop both proper riding aptitude and proper riding attitude and is more likely to make that student fail the course, give the MSF and motorcycle safety the New York One-Fingered Salute, and find some backwater place in the boonies to take their DMV road test on a Vespa -- or maybe just skip the whole licensing step entirely, since, as they informed us, a lot of riders involved in crashes are not licensed.

I'd like to think that this is one of those situations where a middle road is best, but I am not a Motorcycle Safety Instructor, and ours has been teaching for sixteen years. So I can't bring myself to be very critical of his style of the hands-on aspect of the course where you actually learn to ride a motorcycle, particularly as, at least in my case, I am much more confident and capable on a bike this evening than I was this morning. How much more? Nine more.

The other reason I thought that our instructors might be in a bad mood was because the temperature hit the mid-nineties today and the only relief that anybody has on a motorcycle course comes from being on a motorcycle at speed. We got very little speed and so were miserable the entire day, despite drinking our body weight in water and gatorade. Students performing poorly means more time on the course means a longer day in wretched climate and so I assumed that our collectice ineptitude had pushed the day, originally scheduled from 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM (with threats of immediate failure if you arrived late for any reason), well past 6:00 or 6:30.

When I finished my written test this afternoon and left, it was 3:30 PM.

The classroom portion of the class consists of a few hours before you ever sit on a bike and a few more hours after your first day on a bike. We would read the MSF Basic RiderCourse Manual, watch an MSF Basic RiderCourse DVD Companion, and then answer questions from the study guide in the back of the manual to prepare for the written test -- 50 questions on subjects from the book.

On the plus side, the book presents some difficult concepts in a very straightforward and brief manner. It doesn't get into physics or detailed explanations of why things are the way they are or why you should do This but not That -- presumably on the basis that you can only absorb so much knowledge over three days and this is probably not the time to become one with your motorcycle.

My criticism of this part of the class most likely does not contain any really original thoughts. The problem with the content of the class is that it's very, very canned. Here's the best example:

The instructor asks the class to name some things that can impair the rider's ability, judgment, or vision. The obvious things like drugs and alcohol are named, along with hunger/thirst, emotions, and a couple others. Thinking of David Hough's Proficient Motorcycling, I remembered an incident he described while touring through Europe with a group in which a pair of English bikers along with him suffered from heat stroke and weren't aware of it -- so by the time they actually stopped, both riders had high fevers and were incapacitated. They were hospitalized -- if memory serves, for over a month.

I volunteer that weather can impair a rider.

The instructor looks at me like I'm crazy. "Weather? Impair a rider?"

To which I replied: "Yes!"

To which he replied: "Nonsense!"

I don't take this personally, because I'm there to learn everything I can and not to assert my own, puny knowledge of Motorcycles to people who have been riding them longer than I've been alive, but one possible reason for his rejection of my comment immediately became clear with a little MSF-sponsored memory trick to remember major categories of impairments:

Hunger
Anger
Limits
T....something I don't remember.

Of course, you could say that things like hypothermia, dehydration, or heat stroke all fall under "limits" since you've exceeded the safe operating parameters of Yourself. Hunger and Anger could easily fall under that umbrella as well. There was no question about this on the test and I can think of no reason why anyone should learn by rote four and only four categories of human impairment.

But that gripe is my only real complaint and other than being shot down in front of the class (most of whom were already sore at the instructor for threatening them with failure) there were no consequences.

The written test, based entirely on the content of the book and videos, was fifty questions. It took about three minutes to finish.

Tomorrow comes the hard part of completing the course -- the road test.