1,000 Mile Sausage: First Legover (just discovered as an unpublished post!)

So, Friday 31st May is the first leg of the Tour de Sausage (pronounced to rhyme with Farage of course) took me from home to Seaways Cafe near Driffield in the Yorkshire Dales.

However, today was not about getting to Seaways. Today was about enlightenment – a days’ motorbike training with the i2i Motorcycle Academy up on a roped off section of taxi-way at Rufforth Airport outside York – so it was a case of getting there quick and easy to preserve my powers of concentration for the wisdom that Tom Killeen (our host and trainer) can dump into me.

Tucking into my breakfast in preparation for the day I could not have known how Tom was about to mess up my brain and transform me from an unconsciously competent rider into something much closer to a consciously incompetent rider. In a good way.

Another thing I could not have known was how hilarious that little fella from the Emerald Isle made the whole day.

• 

• 

Here’s a close up of Tom, plus, being from Ireland, there’s a more likely pose just after he’s stolen something and is about to runnoft – maintaining that ever-present cheeky grin.

Unlike his fellow countrymen, Tom really did know what he was talking about though – and he made me laugh all day long whilst explaining and then ably demonstrating a) the physics of a moving motorcycle, and b) that everything I knew to be true about a moving motorcycle was in fact just fake news. He convinced me to take my hands away from the handlebars and the clutch and feet away from the gear shift and the rear brake pedal, ignore advanced teachings and commandments about what thou shalt do. Who’d have thought that these simple changes could transform (in a good way) my control over the machine? Most excitingly I can now stop the bike from high speed so quickly it consistently makes snot fly out of my nose.

I left the airfield that afternoon determined to put my new knowledge into practice and that’s what I did for the next 1,000 miles: some of it is now second nature whilst other bits still need some effort (and faith)… every time I don’t get it right I am reminded of my incompetence.

Wholly self-conscious of my new style of riding and increasingly annoyed at my constant mistakes I get myself to Seaways Cafe – my first stop on the MCN Top Ten Biker Cafes list – ranked on that list at a perplexing sixth place. I may express some thoughts about the MCN assessment methodology later.