The last vestiges of comfort are gone shortly after dawn, with the sun still low in the sky. By the time the first session begins, the suffusing heat and humidity which would mark the day are already rapidly climbing. Georgia in July is hot. It's surely not a day to worry about getting heat into your tires.
Nor is it a day on which one expects to crash.
But something is amiss. As I pull into the pits 20 minutes later I'm still trying to figure out what it is. It's not the bike, which seems reasonably sorted. Nor is it the track-the circuit here at Road Atlanta is providing the sterling grip that it usually does. But still, something doesn't feel quite right. I don't have that dialed-in feeling that I usually expect.
I shrug it off, chalking it up to first-session jitters.
But then the second session is the same. I feel a general sense of lethargy, a torpor which is reflected in my riding.
Heading out for my third session, my mind shoves aside the frustration and abides a moment of gladness at being here, with two full days of track time in front of me. Up the hill out of turn one, I drag my attention back to the task at hand. I'm still building speed out of the pits, searching for that synched-up feeling for pace that frames a day at the track.
I know I should give my tires a couple of laps. But as I start down the long, storied, back-straight I can already feel the exuberance building. A half-minute later I steal a quick glance at the concrete wall as I sweep past the pits. A voice in the back of my mind whispers a caution as I head into my first flying lap. But that voice is already being drowned out by a sudden determination to push through my morning disquiet and get to the crisp, fast laps that I came here for.
Slicing through turn two, I hold to that moment of restraint necessary before heading into the decreasing-radius turn three. Perfect. It sets me up for a clean entrance into the downhill esses. I nod in satisfaction as I head into those.
Pressing now, hard into the right-hander, I add a couple clicks of throttle. Although my boots are as high and tight on the footpegs as I can get them, my toe slider is nevertheless down on the pavement and my mind, in a curious bit of worry, imagines the tiny strands of plastic trailing off behind me. I wonder how long the sliders will last. I didn't bring a spare pair.
And then, in the flash of an instant, I'm down.
I'm awed by the violence. There is a cacophony of formless shape and color exploding through my field of vision and I realize that I'm tumbling, not sliding. There's a surreal sense of disbelief, a voice saying this can't be happening. But the sudden headache from where my helmet smacked down and the sharp pain from my right ankle tell me otherwise. I wonder how bad this will end up being.
As I finally come to rest against the tire wall across the grass outfield there's a quick sense of relief-a lot of things hurt, but everything more or less seems to work. Slowly sitting up, my thoughts begin to congeal around a single question.
"What the hell happened?"
Crashing a motorcycle sucks. It is as stark a reminder as our sport has that we screwed up. The only good that can ever come from it is...a lesson. A lesson in what not to do again.
Riders crash for all sorts of reasons. With newcomers to the sport it's often simple inexperience that brings them to grief. They already have a built-in tendency to concentrate too much on the machine-to stare at the instruments and to over think what they are doing. They use an inordinate amount of their attention focusing on the bike rather than the environment. Combine that with the peer pressure that often comes with riding with buddies who may have more experience, and it's no surprise that new riders often fall down-with reasons that are usually obvious.