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On this mornings ride (36 degrees, foggy and drizzling rain..uggg) I got to thinking about this thread. That was a distraction lol. Seriously, I thought a lot of what constitutes as a distraction depends a lot on age and experience. A new rider with very few miles under his/her belt had better be paying closer attention than a grizzled veteran of 25 years with hundreds of thousand of miles under their belt. A rider that rides 2500 miles a year needs to pay closer attention than some one that rides 2500 miles a month. Experience and muscle memory dictates how much time we need to perform a given task. The same task may be a minor distraction, or a major distraction, depending on age/experience. For the experienced rider, he has probably gone thru the same scenario dozens or hundreds of times and knows how to react without conscious thought, whereas the inexperienced rider who is thrown into a new situation has moves and thought processes to work through. Think about teaching a teenager to drive.
ie: what may be dangerous for one, may be marginal for another, or may be safe for for someone else.
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(02-11-2018, 01:29 AM)The ferret_imp Wrote: On this mornings ride (36 degrees, foggy and drizzling rain..uggg) I got to thinking about this thread. That was a distraction lol. Seriously, I thought a lot of what constitutes as a distraction depends a lot on age and experience. A new rider with very few miles under his/her belt had better be paying closer attention than a grizzled veteran of 25 years with hundreds of thousand of miles under their belt. A rider that rides 2500 miles a year needs to pay closer attention than some one that rides 2500 miles a month. Experience and muscle memory dictates how much time we need to perform a given task. The same task may be a minor distraction, or a major distraction, depending on age/experience. For the experienced rider, he has probably gone thru the same scenario dozens or hundreds of times and knows how to react without conscious thought, whereas the inexperienced rider who is thrown into a new situation has moves and thought processes to work through. Think about teaching a teenager to drive.
ie: what may be dangerous for one, may be marginal for another, or may be safe for for someone else.
Keith Code addresses the above with his analogy to having "ten dollars" worth of attention" to spend and needing to spend nearly all of it just figuring out how to let out the clutch as a new rider, for example. In "A Twist of the Wrist".
