By: Intimid8er

Oops! Maybe not! I was rudely wrenched out of my reverie this morning on my ride to work. The State D.O.T. is resurfacing a stretch of concrete (not macadam) highway along my route. They’ve ground down the surface for rain grooves. It makes for some tricky riding, but once you are used to it, it is okay. Some of the grooves are deeper than others and can influence your line of travel.

So I’m tooling along, and it’s March. Around here, that heralds the beginning of the gusty wind season. The gusts are kicking up lately I’ve noticed. I’m watching traffic around me, getting buffeted pretty hard from both sides, and of course the front at an 85 mph (indicated) speed to keep slightly ahead of traffic, but people are still blowing by me like I’m standing still. I start thinking about some of the questions the new riders have been asking, and realize there’s a pattern to them. I begin mental checks of all the advice given over the past couple of years that I’ve seen here on how to ride in the wind. I check the advice against my techniques, and see if there is anything I’m lacking or could add, when all of the sudden….Wham! I get hit with by a crosswind. Hard enough to move me from the left of the lane to the right side. However, I don’t make it all the way to the other side. I get caught in a large groove that forces the bike to follow it’s course. In a sense I’m stuck, and I wonder how the bike is being glued to the line. I realize that I neglected my pressure check (on the tires), and that may be a culprit. And I wonder how newbies deal with this kinda thing.

Now a groove is not an edge trap, but I begin to think about how edge traps will be a cool discussion. How to deal with them etc. Strategies, and so forth. I’m playing the thread titles over in my head, and acknowledge a 53′ trailer pull over into my lane suddenly. I mentally note that it is not a secure trailer but a canvas covered box trailer. The lanes are packed solid on both sides of me, so I back off the throttle a bit to build some distance. I couldn’t get over, so I settled in a good four or five lengths behind the truck. I hate them for the fact they shed tires and obscure other road debris from my view. I briefly think about a motorcyclist that died a few weeks back around here because he was struck by a flying pallet that was unsecured on a truck. As I start to think about the thread topic again, I briefly took my eyes off the trailer to shift to the far left of my lane and try and look around the trailer.

Something shiny catches my attention. In that brief moment of inattention, I’m not clear if it was kicked up by the tires or fell out of the loose canvas door flapping in the breeze, but a piece of new angle iron was airborne and heading my way.

Immediately, I pushed hard to get to the far right of my lane. Out of the path of the incoming missile. I clamped the brakes down, and built more distance. The metal object hit the ground in a fanfare of clangs and sparks as it twisted, and tried to settle down. Settle down it did, sliding about seventy miles per hour with the vee facing up down the left hand portion of my lane. I realized it wasn’t going to do any crazy flips (yet), so I gassed it and passed it. The noise the metal was making as it went past me was something like I’ve never heard before.

So after the adrenalin dump wore off. I critiqued what happened. Where’d I go wrong? What else could I have done?

So I see myself as target fixating too hard, because while I was slowing down, trying to see what if any crazy hops it’d take or if it was going to be a hit, to minimize the impact speed, and set the bike for an appropriate impact angle. In the meantime, the lane next to me completely opened up, and I missed that opportunity for escape.

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