Pretty Much My First Big Boy Long Trip Ever

[misterprofessionality]

Long rides can be a blessing a curse. There's a lot of best practices that many old hats can give you that'll really improve the experience though. As far as building confidence in turns goes: One of the best tips i can give is to find a twisty road near you (if you have one) and take it at your own pace. then when you get to the end of it make a U turn and go back down it. Take the bike home and park it. Go out the next day and do the same thing, on the same road. You will find that every few days your pace has increased, without you even meaning to. you'll be leaning farther, braking later, exiting more smoothly, ect. every turn will get easier, because you'll be very familiar with the specific geometry of that one road. How does this help you on other roads? confidence. you'll come away from it with a much stronger understanding of how stable your bike is on the side of its tires, and you'll be surprised how much other turns in faraway places feel just like that road back home. Muscle memory is like that. cut 1000 tomatoes and by #900 you'll be perfectly dicing 5 of them in the time it took you to do 1 at the beginning. the human body is hard wired to efficiently reproduce physical actions, so reptition is the best way to build fundamentals.

Second tip: pay strong attention too foot position and where your weight is supported. There's a million youtube videos on this so i'll spare you a lecture, but it really pays off when you're cornering a bigger bike.

So, since you're a big boy now, you can make it to Caldwell OH for the rally in september right?