Tag: hazards

Posted on

84. ‘All dressed up’ – coping with loose chippings

This is based on an article I wrote for the old ‘Survival Skills’ forum on a now-defunct bike forum back in 2007. Having looked over the text (which has had a mild rewrite for clarity) nothing I wrote two decades ago has changed; at least, not the advice about dealing with the freshly-load surface itself. However, what has changed, and changed significantly, is that we now have solid research evidence showing that chip seal isn’t merely an unpredictable low-speed stability problem — once fully cemented in place and when riding speeds are back to normal, it’s exceptionally destructive to rider clothing once things go wrong. It’s one of the harshest abrasion environments we’ll meet on public roads. That makes clothing choice for open-road riding to the fore. The danger is that riders who accept lighter kit because it’s “fine for ordinary road speeds” may be making assumptions that surface-dressed chip seal roads directly undermine. This shifts surface dressing and chip seal from being “a handling problem” to being “a personal protection problem” too, and that’s something all riders ought to be aware of.

‘All dressed up’ – coping with loose chippings

One worry that new riders have (and I guess a few more experienced ones too) is how to treat roads which have been ‘surface dressed’; this is the low cost repair where a new layer of chippings is simply spread on top of a layer of sticky resin sprayed on the old surface. The road is then re-opened with a temporary low speed limit and relies on the passage of vehicles to ‘roll’ the loose chips into the resin binder to form a permanent bond and create a durable surface. Eventually, a sweeper comes out and hoovers up the remaining loose chips. This surface is quite common on quieter UK roads. In France and the US, I’ve found surfaces treated this way to stretch for miles at a time, and is widely used in Australia and New Zealand where it’s known as ‘chip seal’. The locals cope, so we can too.

Most concerns focus on the loose chippings themselves, and on how each lane of traffic quickly becomes a pair of relatively clear wheel tracks with a ridge of loose stone between them, as well as another ridge along the centre line, and one more at the edge of the carriageway.

Generally speaking, riding in a wheel track makes sense since it’s usually the cleanest line and offers the most predictable grip. I’d normally pick the offside wheel track since it keeps us well clear of unexpected hazards on the nearside, and I wouldn’t attempt swapping lines on twisty road. On narrow roads where oncoming traffic could get close, I’d likely chose the nearside track though.

Either way, it avoids riding directly on the deeper ridges of loose stones, and it’s rarely as dramatic as people fear. Provided we avoid hard braking, excessive lean angles or handfuls of throttle, then we can treat the gravel in the wheel tracks much like any other low-grip surface..

If we genuinely have to ride though the deeper, loose material — maybe the road has only just been reopened to traffic — it’s still perfectly possible to ride through it. Counter-intuitively, trying to crawl along at walking pace can make the bike feel less rather than more stable. A modest, steady speed creates momentum and that helps stability. The bike may squirm slightly beneath us, but that movement is normal and self-correcting. The trick is to use the ‘brace position’ — the posture where we keep our upper body, shoulders, elbows and wrists loose to allow the bars to move around but lock onto the bike with the knees on the tank. This is the key — to stay relaxed and let the bike move under us. But keep good gaps and get braking done early and in a straight line. There’s often more grip available on loose chippings than riders expect, but sudden inputs overwhelm it quickly. Keep cornering lean angles modest, maintain a neutral or gently positive throttle, and wait until the bike is upright before accelerating.

If we need to cross a ridge of loose stones, do it deliberately. My tip here is to turn the bike as much as possible so as to cross the ridge as close to a right-angle and as upright as possible. It should go without saying, we should avoid braking or accelerating while in the deeper deposit.

Other hazards worth watching for include:

    • Piles of chippings mid-corner or at junctions, where traffic sweeps them sideways, and at downhill stops where stones fall from car wheel arches. Brake early and positively, then ease to a stop with minimal front brake pressure at walking pace.

    • Hidden potholes, sunken repairs, and speed humps, which can disappear completely under fresh stone. Visual clues are reduced, so read the wider road environment carefully.

    • Freshly laid high-friction surfaces (such as Shellgrip), which often shed loose aggregate initially. Treat them with caution until they’ve bedded in or been swept.

Finally, I’ve found that speed limits are often set unrealistically low and as a result they are widely ignored. If we ride too far below the prevailing speed, we’re simply inviting close overtakes and being sprayed with flying chippings. I’d recommend riding at something closer to the general flow, whilst leaving a generous gap to the vehicle ahead. That way we can avoid being pebble-dashed as we ride, and we’ll also have plenty of space to brake smoothly if we need to.

Surface dressing isn’t pleasant, but it isn’t a lottery either. With good observation, smooth inputs, and sensible decision-making, it’s just another surface — not a reason to tense up or tiptoe.

 

Posted on

81. Developing “What IF…?” “…then THIS!” routines

Seeing a potential hazard is only the first step. To ride safely, we must pre-plan our response and rehearse it until it becomes automatic. The brain works best when it recognises patterns and has a ready-made response, allowing split-second reactions without freezing or overthinking, and dramatically reducing the risk of panic-driven mistakes. It’s not enough to notice danger; we must know exactly what to do, and have practised doing it, particularly when under stress when decision-making speed slows and cognitive load spikes. This is supported by research into dual-task interference and real-time hazard response. Cognitive psychology research supports this principle: hazard perception without a prepared response has limited protective value. This threat-response model explains why experienced riders consistently outperform novices; it’s not because they “see more” but because they know what to do when they see it. However, while planning responses is essential, riders must retain flexibility. Hazards rarely present identically each time.

This is another article that developed from my original ‘Spidy Sense’ tip, as I investigated how we respond to hazards and was incorporated into my paperback MIND over MOTORCYCLE, which you can purchase at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills.

Developing “What IF…?” “…then THIS!” routines

A fundamental part of the Survival Skills approach to riding is to develop an understanding of the risks of riding, and having a strategy to manage those risks. And an essential part of the approach is to have those strategies in mind when we detect a hazard. Here’s what I mean. Asking the “What if…?” question is a good start because we’re making some educated guesses about what will happen next.

But here’s the problem.

If we ask the “What if… the driver pulls out anyway?” question, we need to follow it up with an answer. Why? Because when things start to happen, it’s almost certainly too late to figure out the correct course of action. The situation changes very rapidly when we’re riding and we’ll almost certainly succumb to SURPRISE! and set off all the unwanted ‘Survival Reactions’ that Keith Code has talked about. We’ll freeze or we’ll panic. We need to know how we’re going to deal with the problem BEFORE we actually have to take emergency action.

I’ve talked about how we can apply sports psychology techniques to riding and this is another place they work. We need something akin to a ‘pre-shot routine’. A golf course, for example, is designed to set traps for the golfer. Bunkers are full of sand, greens slope, and the ball can vanish into water hazards and long grass. There are two ways to play hazards. We can try to get out of trouble after things go wrong. Or we can make pro-active compromises to the ideal shot that gives us the best chance of avoiding the obstacles.

That’s not too different from the road if we consider the road to be full of traps too. We too need a routine that applies a pro-active response to the next hazard once we’re aware of it. And here’s how. Asking the “What if…?” question is good, but we need to follow it with a statement about how we’ll then proceed; we extend the “What if…?” question to include a “Then this…!” answer.

Here’s a very simple example. We see a car waiting ahead of us, indicating and clearly ready to turn right into a side road on our nearside. “What if… the driver doesn’t see us and pulls across our path?”

It’s almost certainly too late to figure out the correct course of action if we wait until the car starts to move. Even if we have time (unlikely) we’ll almost certainly succumb to SURPRISE! and all the unwanted Survival Reactions that Keith Code has talked about. We need real answers in our heads, ready to apply to the problem BEFORE we actually have to take emergency action. Seeing a car about to turn across our path at a junction should trigger a veritable cascade of possible defensive responses – mirrors, reduction in speed, possibly a change of position, use of the lights and / or horn, preparing for a possible emergency stop, or getting ready for a swerve if we can see an escape route. Even, finally, if a collision is inevitable, Malcolm Palmer’s version of an ejector seat, the ‘jump’ routine.

Each and every one is a possible “Then this…!” response to the “What if… the car turns across me?” question. But none of them will be in the front of our minds unless we already understand that they are possible responses.

Here’s another example. Having seen a bend, “What if… it tightens up out of sight?” “Then this… we check mirrors because we may need to change speed or position, perhaps select a lower gear, ensure we don’t turn-in too early, and maybe even slow down mid-corner so we don’t run wide”. But if we’re to avoid a nasty SURPRISE! we have to be aware of our options and have them in our minds as we approach the corner.

In many cases the “What if…?” trigger event is a ‘visual cue’. We can use the colour and shape of road signs (which is why they are different shapes and colours), the presence or absence of vehicles in a junction or even the fact that we have a view or there’s a ‘vision blocker’ obscuring our line-of-sight. A hazard warning sign should trigger us to check mirrors and consider slowing down, whilst scanning harder for the specific hazard we’re being warned about. A vision blocker might prompt a change of speed and position, and readiness for an emergency stop.

Of course we can use other senses. “What if… we hear a siren?” “Then… start searching for the emergency vehicle!” What if… we smell diesel?” “Then… start scanning the surface for the tell-tale traces!” What if… we feel an unexpected vibration?” “Then… pull over and find out what’s wrong with the bike!”

The great thing about the “What if…?” “Then this…!” routine is that it IS a routine – and that means it is:

  • consistent

  • efficient

  • effective

  • easily repeated

Still struggling to see how extending the “What if…?” question with the “Then this…!” answer will benefit us?

How about the humble traffic light? We all know that red means stop, green means we can proceed if clear, but what about amber? It means we “should stop unless it would be dangerous to do so”. So how do we know if it would be dangerous or not? What dies dangerous mean in this context?

Well, it could mean being too close and / or too fast to brake without risking a locked wheel. Or it could mean that we’d put ourselves at risk from a following vehicle if we braked. So our third “What if…?” question is:

“What if… the lights change when we are right on top of them?” “Then we have to decide whether it’s safe to stop or safer to carry on!”

Generally speaking we don’t ride through red lights or stop at green lights unless we are completely distracted by another task. But even the best of us WILL cock-up when it changes to amber IF we haven’t already made a conscious assessment of the situation. How long has the light been green? Is it likely to change? How fast are we approaching, and how much space would we need to stop? What’s behind us?

If we haven’t asked those questions and got some answers, then getting the stop / go decision right is going to be guesswork.

Posted on

77. Visualisation – how to improve riding from an armchair

This was another article that pulled the concept of mental rehearsal — widely used in sports, aviation, and emergency services — into the realm of riding motorcycles well before its potential was recognised. Research shows that mental simulation activates many of the same neural pathways as actual physical practice, helping to consolidate procedural memory. Paired with structured, progressive practice and periodic mental review—what cognitive psychologists call “spaced repetition”—visualisation becomes a powerful tool to maintain and enhance riding skills, even from the comfort of an armchair. It bridges the gap between safe practice and unpredictable road conditions, preparing both brain and body for situations that cannot be safely replicated on the tarmac and overcomes the limitations of controlled drills which rarely replicate the surprise element of real-world hazards. The predictability of training vs. unpredictability of the road is a critical gap in rider preparedness.

Visualisation – how to improve riding from an armchair

In the last previous Spidy Sense article, I looked at how experience allows us to develop our red-alert Spidy Sense. But I’m going to describe an incident that happened when I was a basic trainer. At the time, the current two-part Module One / Module Two test was still a couple of years off, so the special exercises – including the emergency stop – were still tested on-road rather than off-road at the special sites adjacent to the test centre. One wet afternoon, the examiner came back early minus my test candidate – she’d crashed doing a real-life emergency stop. As we’d spent a lot of time working on this very skill, I dug into the research to try to gain a better understanding of how we react in an emergency. And what I unearthed was quite scary; the emergency stop we practice before the motorcycle test is almost entirely useless in terms of preparation for a real-world emergency. The basic concept was expanded in ‘MIND over MOTORCYCLE’, a book which you can purchase at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills]

Virtually everything I’ve talked about to date – and of course what I deliver on my practical advanced rider training courses – implies that we have to be actually out on two wheels to improve our riding. But step back a pace.

How do we develop skills for an event for which we CANNOT practice?

If the examiner returns minus trainee, there are several possibilities. The bike may have broken down, the trainee could have lost the examiner, or the test might have been abandoned. Or the bike’s been damaged – occasionally a low-speed topple-off on the U-turn would snap off a lever – I always had carried a spare for that reason. So when the instructor said my candidate had crashed and was unhurt, I wasn’t unduly worried until he told me she’d been trying to avoid a car that had pulled out of a junction and sped off.

“When the car pulled out, she locked the front wheel on the wet surface.”

The odd thing is”, he mused almost to himself, “we’d only just moved away after she made a perfect emergency stop for me.”

Over five days, Sue – my trainee – had performed at least fifty wet and dry emergency stops off-road during her training, and was perfectly competent at making controlled stops on the road too, because we’d practiced them there too.

I was puzzled too, and over the next few days, I wondered what had happened. Eventually, the reason for the crash became clear to me. It was a combination of WHERE the emergency stop is taught, and HOW the response was triggered:

WHERE – the e-stop is taught off-road in a safe environment

HOW – the instructor or examiner stands out of the way and signals the trainee to stop by raising an arm

So the first thing to note is that there’s no real emergency – it’s simply an exercise, a drill, that creates a repetitive ‘routine’. And the second point of note is that the instructor or examiner is giving the trainee a visual ‘cue’ to drop into that routine – ‘off the gas, on with the front brake, on with the rear, squeeze harder, etc.’ routine. It’s what they would have performed at least a couple of dozen times in the past. By the time the trainee met the examiner, that routine would be well-oiled.

And in fact, as the examiner explained, when my trainee responded to the examiner’s cue of a raised arm, she performed her routine and demonstrated a perfect wet road e-stop.

So what went wrong moments later?

The answer is simple. She might have mastered the TECHNIQUE. But she had no awareness of when she might need to use it. The real-life emergency that happened just a few seconds later came out of the blue and she was taken completely by SURPRISE!

Surprised, her careful “squeeze, don’t grab” technique deserted her. Insted of her learned drill, the threat of harm alerted the primitive reptilian brain, which took control of the situation, and responded with one of the ‘Survival Reactions’ I’ve talked about elsewhere. She grabbed a handful of front brake, and down bike and rider went.

If a freshly-trained rider who’s just performed a perfect e-stop on the same road cannot stop safely in a real emergency just a few metres away, then it’s small wonder that collision investigators often find that in the “Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You” SMIDSY collision, the bike could usually have stopped and it was the rider failed to deliver.

And think about the current emergency stop and swerve routines in the latest version of the test.

It removes even the tiny element of SURPRISE! that came from wondering just when the examiner might raise his or her arm.

Practiced in a safe environment around cones, where the rider aims past the speed trap radar, All the rider has to learn is to pass the trap at an appropriate speed, then stop or swerve in a reasonably brisk fashion.

No wonder we haven’t solved the SMIDSY problem!

So what could we do better? How could riders be trained to respond to an emergency that off-road training cannot reproduce?

We need to introduce ‘unpredictability’ into the training. Only half-jokingly, I suggested long ago that maybe instructors should pushing a hidden rubber car out into the trainee’s path.

A rather better answer would almost certainly be a simulator. Airline pilots learn to fly in simulators, and are put through all manner of training situations so they have an idea of what COULD happen before they’re out flying the plane and get into trouble. Increasingly, high-fidelity simulators are being used in research into driver and rider behaviour because it’s been realised that many of the earlier studies were unrealistic and “based on still photos, short video clips, or contrived on-road trials” as one research paper put it recently. We may not be able to afford a simulator with all the bells and whistles of an airliner, but even a cheap ‘three screens powered by a PC’ simulator would be a start. I first saw one demonstrated in the 90s. I’m still waiting for trainers to be offered the software to run on one.

So failing that, we can exploit a technique from Sports Psychology. It’s called ‘visualisation’ and it’s a way of using our own brain’s built-in simulator – we call it ‘imagination’.

All we have to do is close our eyes and imagine the scenario we want to learn the response to. Our imagination has the ability to fool the brain into thinking “I’ve been here before and this is what I did last time” and the more vivid and realistic our ‘experience’, the better the learning process.

Don’t just imagine seeing the car pull out and applying the brakes, ‘see’ the whole run-up to the emergency. ‘See’ the junction warning sign, spot the gap in the hedgerows, ‘feel’ the road surface under the wheels, and ‘hear’ the sound of the bike. Visualise the car at the junction. ‘Watch’ it starting to move and the look on the driver’s face as he spots us and stops in our path. If we also talk to ourselves by saying what we’re going to do to avoid the collision, and AT THE SAME TIME make the real-life muscle movements at our imaginary controls as we take our successful evasive action, the brain will memorise the events as if they were real.

And here’s the pay-off.

When we face the situation for real – EVEN THOUGH WE’VE NEVER BEEN IN THAT SITUATION – the brain will remember. It can recall the “been here, did this last time, and it worked” response.

Sports-people and other performers have used this technique for decades to avoid ‘choking’ on the big stage – the sprinter who’s used to running in front of a few hundred people suddenly in front of 100,000 people at the Olympics, the county cricketer making his test debut at Lords, the actor appearing in the West End for the first time.

On the bike, the ‘memory’ of our successful emergency stop prevents the primitive reptilian brain kicking in, taking control and grabbing that big handful of front brake. Practicing visualisation gives us a chance to respond to a real emergency with the same well-oiled response we’ve learned offroad in a safe and sterile environment.

But visualisation is not just for emergencies. Visualisation can help us recall and perform a sequence of steps in the order when stress means we we have a difficulty recalling some elements.

For example, there are a series of steps involved in performing a successful U-turn. Even off-road, trainees are often so focused on balance and moving off smoothly that they forget the all-important ‘look over the shoulder’. When a trainee had a problem, I used to get trainees to shut their eyes and do a mental run-through in their minds-eye. If they remembered this visualisation trick just before committing themselves to their once-only attempt on the bike test, they had a far better chance of successfully completing the exercise.

We can also use visualisation if we don’t ride so often. We can actively pre-program the brain by imagining going for a ride, thus mentally ‘rebooting’ ready for getting the bike out again.

And here’s a final point.

One of the biggest problems of any kind of learning is that we don’t retain much of it. In fact, a couple of weeks after training, we’ve forgotten most of what we learned. This is a psychological issue we’ve known about for over one hundred years. What makes training permanent is repetition. Each time, a little more becomes embedded. It’s not practical to expect trainees to keep coming back over and over to repeat training…

…but we can use visualisation to mentally repeat and review training to make sure it sticks.

So if you’ve completed a Survival Skills advanced rider training course, you should now have an idea just how you can review what was learned from the comfort of your own armchair – visualisation.

Posted on

76. What is ‘Spidey Sense’ and how do we develop it?

This is another article which pushed boundaries at the time I wrote it — and got a lot of push-back too — but the core concept that experienced riders developing a subconscious “sixth sense” through pattern recognition is very much valid. Modern research into situational awareness, threat perception, and tacit knowledge in driving and riding supports the idea that repeated experience trains the brain to detect subtle cues. The description of Reptilian / Mid-brain / Neo-cortex interactions has turned out to be a rather over-simplified model and neuroscience today sees the brain as far more interconnected than this triune model suggests, with threat detection and decision-making distributed across multiple networks, but it works well for communicating automatic vs. conscious responses to riders and in the context of helping riders understand their reactions, it remains a clear, accessible metaphor. Experienced riders develop Spidey Sense by building a large internal database of patterns, so potential hazards trigger an early warning before the threat becomes immediate. Coupled with proactive scanning and deliberate practice, this allows us to anticipate, prepare, and respond effectively, reducing reliance on panic reactions and improving overall situational awareness.

What is ‘Spidey Sense’ and how do we develop it?

If you’re anything of a fan, you’ll know that when the bad guys are around, Spider-Man gets a “tingle” from his ‘Spidey Sense’. And experienced riders will also report how they get a sixth sense that things aren’t quite right, so they slow down, look around, just before something unpleasant happens, and thank their lucky stars for the warning. When that happens, we’re developing a kind of biking Spidey Sense. As you have probably realised by now if you’ve read some of the other related articles, the design brief for our 200,000 year-old brain never included the ability to ride motorcycles, so we have to make considerable compromises to ride motorcycles. But what exactly is this ‘sixth sense’? A quick lesson on how our brains are put together will help.

One model of the brain is the so-called ‘triune’ brain, because it consists of three parts.

At the top is the ‘Thinking Cap’, the Neo-Cortex which the most modern and largest part of the brain. In very simplistic terms it’s where conscious thinking is performed and where our reasoning skills are centered.

At the bottom – it’s directly connected to the spinal cord – is the most primitive part of our brain. It’s sometimes called the ‘Reptilian Brain’ because we share it with crocodiles. Responsible for controlling many of the basic body functions, it’s also constantly on guard for danger. It’s blisteringly quick in responding – it needs to be if we’re to duck when someone hurls a rock at our head – but it doesn’t think. It only chooses the most basic fight or flight responses.

Sitting between the two and hard-wired to both is the Mid-brain. Here the Reticular Activating System works with the Limbic System to control attention. This part of the brain works completely below the level of our awareness and acts as a filter on incoming data, attempting to pick out parts with meaning. You’ll probably know how we can hear someone mentioning our name across a crowded room, and how that perks up our conscious attention. The same process goes on to filter relevant information from the vast amount of visual data sent to the brain by the eyes.

But in certain circumstances, the Mid-brain can also route data perceived as a potential threat straight to the Reptilian brain, which goes into automatic fight or flight mode. In biking terms, that’s usually manifested as a panic grab at the brakes, freezing completely and target fixation. Recognise those reactions? You should, because these are the ‘Survival Reactions’ that Keith Code identified in Twist of the Wrist some years ago.

With the proviso that to learn, we need to survive, we can learn from emergencies. We may do some reflective thinking after the event and come up with a better option – why controlled braking is better than a panic grab, for example.

But it seems that scary incidents are also subconsciously ‘logged’ and become embedded. As we continue to ride, what seems to happen is that the Mid-brain continues to process the incoming data – remember, this is happening below the level of consciousness – but increasingly compares it against a database of stored memories, trying to find a match. The more riding experience we have, the bigger the database of past experiences and the more likely the Mid-brain is to find a match. If the past event had unpleasant consequences, then a “things aren’t right” message gets sent to wake up the Neo-cortex. Just as hearing our name across the room flicks us into full-on attention, we’re suddenly on full alert with Spidy Sense triggered.

Of course, it’s not foolproof.

For starters, inexperienced riders don’t have much experience to call on. So in novel circumstances, there is nothing alarming enough to trigger the Mid-brain to wake up the Neo-Cortex. We ride, totally oblivious, into danger. Only when the threat of personal harm becomes obvious enough is control turned over to the Reptilian brain – and that’s when the panic responses kick in.

For a more experienced rider, there’s a second issue. Although we are now on high alert, we’re still only aware that things aren’t quite right. That may help us to take some pro-active action – slowing down is nearly always a good first step – but it’s no guarantee we’ll respond appropriately.

Worse, we may be out of time before we finally identify the source of our anxiety. Analyses of accidents and in the laboratory suggest that it can take us two to three seconds to consciously turn our attention towards a developing threat, to analyse the situation and figure out what’s happening, and come up with a solution. 200,000 years ago, that might have been acceptable, but on modern roads and travelling at a very modest 30mph, it’s an age. We’ve covered forty metres in three seconds. So out of time, the Mid-brain may hand over control to the Reptilian brain. We’re no better off than the novice rider who never saw the threat coming.

A partial solution is to create ‘muscle memory’ pathways to defeat the Survival Reactions. Despite the name, the links we build are really in the brain, but they do control muscles. For example we can learn to overcome the instinctive front brake grab when a car pulls out, or the frozen steering when we’re running wide on a corner, by ‘burning’ learned responses. And we do that by mastering, then regularly practising, techniques such as progressively squeezing the brakes and controlled swerves. The idea is that even when the Reptilian brain tries to take over, we don’t let it totally control our reactions.

But there’s one more thing to think about. The trigger for the Reptilian brain to kick in is often motion detection in our peripheral vision, which is incredibly sensitive to movement. If we suddenly detect movement close at hand, swerving the other way can save the day. But it’s essentially a ‘reactive’ response, after the problem has developed.

The clearly-focussed, colour cone of vision which allows us to see sharp detail is a very narrow, just a few degrees wide. If we only look at the road ahead of us, we won’t gain information about hazards left or right of our path. So we need to be PRO-ACTIVE with our observation, keeping our eyes moving so we are actively searching out potential hazards before they become bigger threats that tingle our Spidey Sense.

By developing ‘situational awareness’ we reduce the chances of having to rely on Spidey Sense too often. And then we give ourselves a MUCH better chance of avoiding triggering the Reptilian brain’s panic reactions. Find out how to develop situational awareness of a Survival Skills advanced motorcycle training course.

Posted on

75. Apex or Exit – what’s important when cornering?

I have little to add to add to this except to say that twenty years on from penning this article, riders are still obsessing over finding the apex on the road, when that’s really not what matters. Waiting until we can clearly see where the road leads beyond the bend is what allows us to select the line that copes with mid-corner threats and avoid the classic ‘turn-in too early, run wide later’ cornering error.

Apex or Exit – what’s important when cornering?

Back in the summer of 2006, I was seduced by a magazine’s big cover splash promising “Twenty pages on cornering faster”. Despite reading it cover-to-cover, I could only find a couple of pages on cornering technique. The remaining eighteen pages were thinly-veiled adverts for expensive aftermarket accessories or services to get the bike tweaked. Anyway, cynicism aside, the two pages on riding were the valuable content because the best bolt-on accessory on any bike is the rider, and the most cost-effective tweaks we can do are to our own skills. A good rider can still corner well on a wallowing hippo of a machine. But all the bolt-on bling in the world won’t turn an incompetent owner into Valentino Rossi or Marc Marquez. It’s depth of wisdom, not depth of wallet, that helps us to good cornering out on the road.

So what did the article say? Well the writer spent a lot of time talking about “finding the apex”. You may be wondering what the apex of a corner actually is, because it’s a word bandied around with some freedom when talking about corners. Think of a triangle – stand it upright – the pointy bit at the top is the apex. Now, connect the three points with a smooth curved line and the point at the top is still the apex. If we now give that curved line some width, so it becomes a road, the apex is where the point of that triangle touches the inside of the corner halfway round.

On a race track, where we can use all of the surface, if we start on the OUTSIDE of the corner and if we also exit on the OUTSIDE of the corner, by just touching the INSIDE of the track halfway through the turn – the apex of the triangle – we take the maximum radius (and thus the fastest) ‘racing line’ through the corner. So if the corner is a nice symmetrical one, the apex is ‘mid-corner’, halfway round the bend.

What about ‘early’ or ‘late’ apexes, two more terms you’re likely to hear in any discussion about riding a track? An early apex comes before we are half-way though the corner, and generally indicates an increasing radius turn – the corner opens out. A late apex comes after we are half-way through the corner and may indicate a decreasing radius turn – a corner that gets progressively tighter. On the track, we learn our lines by going round and round until it all flows nicely. Even on a blind corner on the track, we learn to use marker points (which is why they put cones out on track training sessions) to guide us round.

But the road is not a track, and this ‘racing line’ which may be the fastest way around the track, is not a great idea on the road where we have to deal with a number of other problems. For starters, we don’t get the chance to learn a bend by going round it over and over, and we don’t get markers (at least, not handy cones). We have to ride it as we see it, which isn’t easy when most of the corners on UK roads are blind – that is, we can’t see all the way through them from beginning to end. Aiming for an apex where we cannot see out the other side of the corner isn’t a great idea – we could end up turning-in too early, which inevitably leads to running wide later in the corner.

But even when we can see right through the corner, cutting into the apex on a right-hander brings us into close proximity to oncoming vehicles. And on a left-hander, cutting into the apex puts us close to where there might be hidden turnings and driveways on our nearside.

As it happens, the way to learn a track (if the handy cones are absent) is to work backwards. We start by finding the direction we want to be headed on the way out of a bend – the ‘exit’. Keith Code’s definition of the exit is a good one to work with – it’s where we can put the power on as hard as we like. Once we know where we want to be pointed at the exit, then we can find the line backwards to the ‘apex’, and from there back to the ‘turn-in’ point where we would cut across the track to clip the apex, and ultimately back from the turn-in point back to the ‘entry’ which is where the corner forces us to steer or run off the track.

On the road, as I explain in the articles on ‘Point and Squirt’, the solution is to delay turning-in to the corner to the point where we can clearly see through the exit and where the road goes BEYOND the end of the corner. So if – as is likely – our view around the corner is obscured, we simply stay on a wide line around the outside of the curve until we CAN see the exit – where we’re pointed where we want to go next and can accelerate in a straight line, remember. Only when we reach this point do we decide if we should turn-in tighter, aiming to cut across the lane and exit the corner in as straight a line as possible, and this is the key to corners on the road – staying wide in the turn till we can actually see the exit.

Get this right and we avoid almost all ‘running wide in the corner’ errors whilst the apex looks after itself – it’s not something we need to worry about. In fact, far from being an aid to cornering on the road, the apex is a red herring and even a distraction from focusing on the exit and the mid-corner hazards I mentioned a moment ago. For good cornering on the road, simply ignore any debate about the apex.

Posted on

74. Overtaking on left-handers – experts only or best avoided?

Some things don’t seem to change. And how motorcyclists kill themselves is one of those things. I said in the article that “half of out-of-town fatalities result from overtakes that go wrong” is valid, and the data that the UK’s DfT continues to collect reinforces this point. Overtaking generally is rarely ‘necessary’, and overtaking around a left-hand bend is even less so. Remember, in most cases a better, safer opportunity will appear within moments.

Overtaking on left-handers – experts only or best avoided?

Back in 2005 and 2006, one of the best series of articles on advanced riding techniques was penned by Andy Morrison from Rapid Training, and published in Bike magazine. But when he talked about the technique of overtaking in left-handers in February 2006, I think he went the proverbial ‘bridge too far’. He stated plainly enough that it’s dangerous but then goes on to assert that it’s a manoeuvre within the grasp of the expert rider. The article gave the impression that all that’s needed is a high level of technical skill and judgement yet whatever dissenting voices might say, there is something every one of us should understand: contrary to claims elsewhere, overtaking is NEVER, EVER ‘safe’. Even if we can be reasonably sure WE won’t make a mistake, when overtaking there are always other humans involved and one thing we can be sure of is that humans can and DO make errors. An overtake ALWAYS exposes us to the risk of someone else’s mistake.

I read the article and the first thing that struck me was that it focused on technical execution. Yet to my mind, understanding that the skills to carry out a tricky overtake are complex is far less important than developing our understanding of risk and our ability to see that technically complicated manoeuvres are more likely to go wrong. It’s our ability to make a realistic risk assessment that allows us to place a manoeuvre on the risk / benefit scale. To my mind, for a relatively limited benefit, this one is far over towords the risky end. We really need to understand the difference between ‘need’ and ‘nice’.

Overtaking generally sits further towards the ‘nice to do’ end of the spectrum than the ‘need to do’ end – it’s very rarely an absolute ‘must-do’. You may have heard people say that “if I didn’t overtake, I might as well not be on a bike”, or that “I overtake because I want to demonstrate I can make progress”.

Personally, I think they are deeply flawed reasons. My own thinking – based on that risk / benefit calculation – is that we need to balance the risks that might arise through making the overtake, with the risks of staying put. If there’s no particular problem with following – for example, when moving in a steady stream of traffic – the less-risky option is nearly always choosing NOT to pass.

I’d suggest that overtaking only begins to move towards the ‘need to do’ end of the scale if sitting behind a vehicle puts us at greater risk than making the overtake. Maybe we’re following a tractor on a rural road, when a queue of traffic begins to form behind us. If a relatively straightforward opportunity to pass arises and we don’t take it, we are now part of the problem. The chances are that someone will try to overtake both the tractor and our bike. That makes the overtake more difficult for the driver, and potentially increases our own risk. So if we can see a way to set up an overtake in such a way to minimise the risk, does that tip the balance? Perhaps. The crux of the matter is “if we can see a way to set up an overtake in such a way to minimise the risk”. Too many overtakes are assessed from the “what do I gain” perspective first, with risk trailing a very poor second.

And so we come to overtaking out of left-hand bend. Compared with setting up a pass out of a right-hand corner, overtaking out of a left hand bend generates a lot of “What ifs…?” that aren’t easy to answer.

We start by setting up the overtake by sitting to the nearside, looking up the inside of the vehicle ahead. The article pointed out problems of dead ground (that is, the areas that are blind to our search) but however thorough our search, we need to be absolutely clear that if we cannot see over the vehicle, there’s a blind spot ahead of it on the offside. As we move out to the right to commit to the pass, that blindspot doesn’t go away – it simply moves. There is ALWAYS this blind spot.

Some years ago, I watched a rider set up exactly this pass around a sweeping left-hand bend from the car. His line-of-sight up the nearside was good, but he couldn’t see what I could, thanks to my driving position offset to the right. It was the local postie climbing into his bright red post office van that was pulled up in a layby on the other side of the road. As the rider moved across behind the truck, the post office van started to move forward. The rider came out from behind the truck just as the PO van moved into the road.

And of course, if a vehicle could pull out, the one we’re overtaking could turn in, and we may not be aware of the turning for the same reason. This is another point I always make – overtaking ALWAYS relies on the driver we’re passing to do what we predict. Setting up an overtake where we’re visible in the driver’s interior or right-hand door mirror means that there’s at least a chance the driver will know we’re there. But sat to the nearside of the vehicle we’re about to pass, not only are we far more difficult to see, few drivers would expect to find us overtaking around the outside a moment later. We really do need to hang back long enough to clear the view right along our path and eliminate any openings.

And there’s a further problem. It’s the pesky extra warning about making sure the road not just clear but that we can “expect it to remain clear”. The neatly-drawn diagrams in the magazine showed how the rider would need to ‘visually sweep’ the road ahead of the lorry before attempting the overtake. Although the text talked about “far enough ahead” the diagrams showed a distance of just a couple of lorry-lengths. I know the diagrams were drawn distorted to make the point (rather like the ones showing how a wider position gives a better view in ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’), and Andy did mention the danger of meeting an oncoming car head-on, but what wasn’t emphasised was just HOW far ahead we need to see.

Let’s do a few quick sums. Let’s assume the truck is travelling at 45 mph. That’s 20 metres per second. Let’s assume we pass the truck at 60 mph – we’re thus travelling 15 mph faster than the truck (6.7 m/s). Assuming a typical HGV (16.5 metres long), it’ll take us approximately 2.5 seconds to travel from front to rear. In that time – whilst we are riding at 60 mph or 27 m/s remember – we’ve travelled no less than 67.5 metres.

But of course, we have to move out and move back again. The total distance travelled during the entire manoeuvre is not going to be less than three times 67.5 metres, so to accelerate, pass and tuck back again, we’re looking at a minimum total distance of around 200 metres.

Except we need treble this distance.

Why? What about the effect on other road users when we pop out from behind a truck and the oncoming driver suddenly sees us? Assuming the car is coming the other way at the same speed we’re making the pass and we want to move out, make the pass, then manoeuvre back with a minimum MARGIN FOR ERROR between us, we actually need to COMPLETE the overtake in around one-third of the total “distance we can see to be clear”. So the minimum distance we actually need FROM THE MOMENT WE COMMIT is AT LEAST 600 metres – that’s over one-third of a mile. And we’re now mentally juggling with speeds and distances at which the human brain struggles to make accurate computations.

Of course, to make up for the lack of forward view, the temptation is to nail it. But the faster we attempt to make the pass, the more difficult it is to bail out when it starts going wrong.

My take on this is not to hurry into such an overtake. We definitely shouldn’t underestimate the the difficulties of seeing far enough ahead and the blind areas. Technical ability is NOT a substitute for sound judgement. In practice, I’d suggest only the shallowest left hand bends with the very best views allow a reasonably risk-free overtake past the slowest-moving vehicles, which brings us full-circle to whether an overtake is ‘need’ or ‘nice’.

What was left pretty much unsaid was that a better opportunity will probably come along in a minute. I intensely dislike this ‘take every available opportunity’ approach to riding. It may be appropriate to police riding, but I doubt the validity for civvie riding, even at ‘advanced’ level.

Most of all, I was concerned at its publication in a magazine, where Andy had no control over the riders reading the article. It’s an issue I’m very aware of when writing my own riding tips of my own, and even when delivering my own Survival Skills advanced motorcycle training courses. It’s why each tip tends to have exhaustive discussions of the risks as well as an explanation of benefits.

Statistics show that around half of out-of-town fatalities result from overtakes that go wrong, so to my mind we should be eliminating the technically-tricky ones with the highest potential for going wrong. I’m certainly not going to say I’ve never overtaken in a left-hander but I can definitely say there have been a few times I wished I hadn’t bothered.

Posted on

71. Off-siding – a technique that crosses the line?

The crucial decision here is to balance risk versus benefit, the potential gain in situational awareness versus the real possibility of putting ourselves in a dangerous position. The perception of our manoeuvre from the other driver’s perspective is all-too-often completely overlooked. However, that doesn’t mean we should never consider taking up a position on the other side of the centre line and hazards such as narrow single-lane bridges can create real vision problems if we don’t exploit the full width of the road.

Off-siding – a technique that crosses the line?

I originally wrote this tip as an expanded response incorporating questions being asked by a nearly-new rider. With a year’s experience since passing the bike test, he was shown the technique of ‘offsiding’ on a riding assessment. If you’re not familiar with the term, offsiding is positioning to the RIGHT of the centre line (here in the UK) to improve the view ahead, rather keeping within our own lane. I remember being told many years ago that “you’ve paid to use all the road – so do so”. I’m not implying he was being encouraged to use this position but many riders do, myself included on rare occasions – I’ll explain the limited circumstances in a moment. In the time I’ve been involved in rider training offsiding seems to have gone from a technique that was generally accepted “but do it carefully” to one that’s generally frowned upon as “controversial and we really shouldn’t”. So what’s the right answer? Is there ever a time when it’s a good idea to cross the centre line to gain a view?

Before we go any further, we need to sort out if it’s legal. So long as the centre line is broken – that is, we’re looking at crossing either the short lane divider markings or the longer hazard line, it’s not illegal – we can cross a broken centre line. But we could end up on the wrong side of the law if we’re seen to be riding carelessly or even dangerously – in the case of a longer hazard line, the Highway Code says we can cross the line “if safe and necessary to do so”. Much will depend on who is interpreting ‘safe and necessary’. My view may not be the same as that of a policeman or magistrate.

If we can say “yes, it’s legal”, my approach on Survival Skills advanced motorcycle rider training courses is always to get trainees to ask two questions in order to perform a basic cost / benefit analysis:

  1. what are the benefits

  2. what are the risks?

The usual benefit that is proposed is extra vision – the further right we move:

  • the further we can see ahead around a blind bend to the left

  • the more we can open up a view into a blind area on the left

  • if we can see further, we may also be seen from further away

Let’s start with the the blind bend, and the idea that we can open up the view from riding right of the centre line. What about the risks? The most obvious one is in riding along the ‘wrong’ side of the carriageway, sooner or later we WILL meet someone coming the other way. As we’re on the same side of the road, we’re on a collision course.

It should be fairly obvious we need to be able to return to our side of the road WELL BEFORE the other vehicle gets anywhere near us. But if we have this kind of clear space, isn’t it likely we’re already seeing a long way ahead? What exactly are we adding? As I’ve said elsewhere, the practical reason for extending “the distance we can see to be clear and expect to remain clear” is nearly always to carry more speed. Whilst speed might be essential as part of a police rider’s pursuit activities, it’s NOT part of the remit for an ordinary civvie rider.

If there’s a bit of a question about the advantage, what about the disadvantages? A bit more thinking should reveal some real problems:

  • the shock experienced by the oncoming driver who finds a motorcycle on the wrong side of the road in front of him

  • the need not just to get back left of the centre line, but to shed any extra speed too

Let’s reverse the position. If we were rounding a right-hand bend and suddenly found a car approaching on the wrong side of the centre line, how would WE respond? Would we be thinking calmly: “ah, advanced driver doing a bit of off-siding”? Would we be thinking at all? What’s the chance we’d respond with a WTF and a panic grab of the brakes? I rather think it would be the latter. And what if we panic-swerved too, to our right into the other lane and away from the car? What happens next? This confusion alone is a very good reason to avoid offsiding into a blind corner – we should always avoid putting ourselves into situations where our safety depends on other road users behaving reliably. Even if we don’t scare the bejasus out of the driver, we still have to return to our side of the centre line. A typical response is along the lines of: “I only off-side at a speed that allows me to return to my side of the road in time”. But what if the other driver is going a bit quicker than usual? What if the oncoming driver has cut the corner to straighten it out? Check out the worn paint on the middle of a lot of fast kinks – the reason it’s worn is vehicles straight-lining that bend.

And if we were carrying more speed towards the corner to exploit the better view, we now have to get rid of it. Have we got enough space to do so? And if we’ve had to cut back to the left closer to the bend, does that means we’ve just turned into the corner too early? And is there a risk we’ll now run wide later in the bend? ‘Turn-in too early, run wide later’ is a classic bike cornering crash accident so why take a line that could actually precipitate this error? About the daftest ‘benefit’ to offsiding I’ve heard is that “you get a longer braking distance because you’re not directly behind the vehicle in front”. Eh? Have a think about that for a moment. What if something comes the other way? Could we now safely return to our side of the road and slow down before running into that vehicle going the same way? I’m baffled by the thinking here, and if I feel my braking distance is being compromised by the vehicle ahead, I’ll open up space ahead, and probably slow down too.

If the argument FOR offsiding towards a blind left-hand bend is that we have plenty of space to deal with the above problems, then we can make an argument AGAINST offsiding that our view around the left-hander probably isn’t that bad in the first place. And the sharper the left-hander, the less the benefit but the greater the risks.

However, there is a time I will CONSIDER offsiding approaching a left-hand bend, and that is where an off-side position will MAINTAIN a view that I already have – that is, I can already see clearly and by crossing the centre line I avoid losing the view ahead. It’s sometimes possible that as we exit one corner – typically but not always a right-hander, we can see round the following left-hander, usually because it’s a gentle kink.

For example, on one of my training routes we encounter a narrow single lane bridge. As we exit the previous right-hand bend, we actually have a long view ahead, across the bridge and for around 400 metres further down the road. So if we turn IMMEDIATELY onto the ‘wrong’ side of the road we MAINTAIN the view that we already had, as we ride up to and over the bridge, and we can see if there are oncoming vehicles we might have to give way to.

But if we don’t offside, and do the conventional thing and remain in the left-hand lane, the view ahead gets cut off by the hedge. Now the bridge is blind, and we have to ‘pop out’ from behind it to GAIN the view over the bridge at the last second. In this case, the long forward view beyond the bridge more than compensates for any potential hazards from oncoming vehicles – we have ample time to ‘see and be seen’ and we can move back if necessary – there’s also a chance the driver coming the other way will give way to us.

So if by moving to the right of it we can MAINTAIN the view we already have, then there is an argument for offsiding. But early planning is essential. What I nearly always see in this kind of situation is that riders take too long to work out the lines-of-sight, then move too late, often only when they realise they have lost the view. Now we are attempting to REGAIN it. It’s risky because even if it’s only takes a couple of seconds, that’s a couple of seconds we’ve been riding blind. Sometimes, riders will anticipate a right of the centre line position could open up a view and move to GAIN it, but move far too late. Now the risk is we might gain a close-up view of the front of a Scania – something we didn’t really want to see.

There’s one last case. I mentioned that crossing the centre line can open up a view into a blind area on the left, and that may help someone see us coming:

a driver about to pull out of the blind area to see us coming. The roads are littered with blind driveways, entrances and side turnings, and sometimes I will spot a particularly risky one. I could slow right down just in case a vehicle started to emerge, but I could also slow down AND move to the right if the view ahead and behind shows the road is free of traffic

approaching a left-hand bend with a car parked on my side of the road on the corner. It’s a situation not dissimilar to the bridge I mentioned earlier – by moving right early, I MAINTAIN the best possible view around the parked car, and give the oncoming driver the best chance of spotting me coming. What I don’t want to do is pop out jack-in-the-box style, and GAIN a view only to meet someone head-on

So, to sum up…

…there are some occasions when I will cross the centre line. But it’s always tempered by the realisation that whilst I am in control of my own speed and position, I cannot control how the driver coming the other way reacts. I also have to distinguish between the advantages of ‘maintaining’ a view and the risks of attempting to ‘gain’ a view.

Posted on

69. Where does Point and Squirt come from?

It’s the cornering technique that pulls everything together but I didn’t learn it from Motorcycle Roadcraft. If there’s one topic I’ve always felt UK-based training at basic and post-test level has been seriously lacking, it’s a comprehensive approach to cornering that goes beyond the mechanical inputs and positioning, but covers hazard recognition, risk assessment and risk management. In short, I picked up the various elements from a number of different sources, tested them via trial-and-error, then combined them into a system of cornering that I used personally. When I started post-test coaching, I taught riders what I’d learned and called it ‘Point and Squirt’ for the “slow in, late apex, quick steering, delayed and upright acceleration” combination that seemed to me to work best on awkward bends. It remains a highly practical and, adaptable approach to cornering.

Where does Point and Squirt come from?

Although I’m often told that what I teach on my Survival Skills post-test training course is the same as you’d find if you read the police handbook ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’ (the most recent critic called it “Roadcraft with lipstick and blusher” which made me chuckle), that’s not actually correct. There are plenty of areas of commonality, not least that the aim of ‘Roadcraft’ and Survival Skills is to try to keep riders upright and that there’s nothing any rider can do with a motorcycle except change speed and direction. But Survival Skills is most definitely not ‘Roadcraft’ under a different name’. The Survival Skills approach avoids seeing ‘progress’ as the goal of advanced riding and changes the ‘do it the right way’ approach to riding to a more pragmatic ‘have we prepared for things to go wrong’ approach. And in particular, Survival Skills has always offered a far more organised approach to cornering. In the mid-90s, the current edition of ‘Roadcraft’ barely covered the topic – steering wasn’t even in the book. Even now, with a much-improved updated edition, it’s my opinion that the Survival Skills Performance: BENDS and Performance: SPORT course go way beyond ‘Roadcraft’s’ new content. Read on, and decide for yourself.

In the UK, and with just a few exceptions, most advanced training – whether it’s delivered by the IAM, RoSPA-certificated instructors, or even in a watered-down form by the ERS (thanks to the connection with the DVSA) – has its roots in UK police practice – the police handbook ‘Motorcycle Roadcraft’ is recommended background reading and they all apply the ‘Police System of Motorcycle Control’ as a core component of their training.

However, whilst I make USE of ‘Roadcraft’ as well as the IAM’s offerings and various books from the DVSA, my training certain ISN’T ‘Roadcraft-based’.

Looking further afield than the UK, there are other training schemes around the world and many writers with valuable things to say about riding, so I have drawn heavily on outside sources. I’ve looked at the work of US rider coach Keith Code (of the California Superbike School) and his concept of cornering reference points. There’s David Hough’s huge amount of work, the laid-back approach of Nick Ianetsch, as well as ideas from Lee Parks (Total Control) and Reg Pridmore (CLASS) all to be found in my courses. I’ve obtained training material from contacts with the US-based MSF which have influneced my thinking. I’ve incorporated techniques from the Australian ‘Ride On’ programme. Even more recently, the internet has allowed me to swap ideas with and ride with trainers and other motorcyclists from all over the world. And I also have my not-insignificant time as a courier to draw on, something that taught me how easily things can go wrong on the road.

Survival Skills cornering courses have always focused on three aspects of cornering:

  1. hazard awareness, risk assessment and risk management

  2. a system of ‘reference points’ that allows any rider to navigate around any corner

  3. a method of mapping machine inputs – braking, steering, throttle control – to the reference points

Put together, Survival Skills has delivered the unique ‘Point and Squirt’ approach to cornering since 1997. So, is my Point and Squirt approach to corners “Roadcraft with lipstick and blusher” as that critic claimed? Not in my opinion.

Almost as soon as I bought a bike – a lovely little Honda CB125S – and set off on L plates (no compulsory basic training back then) I wanted to find out more about cornering. Just a few months into my riding career, I got hold of the old ‘Blue Book’ police manual. I soon added an IAM book, and progressively added more – who remembers ‘Superbiking’ by Blackett Ditchburn? No? I thought not!

Unfortunately, despite learning about the ‘Police System of Motorcycle Control’, trying to apply it to corners didn’t help much when nobody had told me how to steer – it wasn’t in ‘Roadcraft’ back then. I actually discovered counter-steering thanks to a magazine article whilst I was at college. Turn the bars the wrong way? Madness! But it worked. I taught myself to ‘push right, go right’ and ‘push left, go left’. Even though it wasn’t in ‘Roadcraft’, it got me round corner and also I realised it could help me swerve out of trouble – something that saved me a number of times when I became a courier.

I also learned about how I should use “acceleration sense”, matching the throttle opening (and thus speed) to the radius of a corner as judged by changes to the ‘Limit Point’. Opening and closing the throttle as the radius of the bend changed worked OK on a 12hp 125, and reasonably well a couple of years later on a 37hp 400-F with stiff suspension when I passed my test. But when I added a CX500 to my collection of bikes in 1982, a bike with 50-odd horsepower and a shaft drive, I found any on-off throttle round corners destabilised the soft and relatively long-travel suspension. By trial and error, I found the best way to keep the bike going where I wanted was to slow down a bit earlier, then to keep the throttle steady all the way through the corner from entry to exit. If the bend changed radius, rather than try to change speed with the throttle, I changed lean angle instead. It also worked better on my 400-F, and the technique I’ve continued to use successfully on every bike from a Husqvarna 610TE enduro to a GSX-R sports bike. In short, it works on anything.

Another learning experience was that using a ‘maximum radius’ line that “works the tyres less hard” (that’s a quotation from an early 2000s West Midlands BikeSafe video, one I have in my collection) could have its downsides. When I started riding, the advice in the Highway Code was that riders should still ride three feet (just under a metre) out from the kerb. But more and more riders were rejecting that. So what to use instead? Well, there were lots of magazine articles about the ‘maximum radius line’ where we exploit the width of our lane by riding a ‘wide in, clip the apex, wide out’ racing line. Even if not explicitly suggested, it was definitely hinted at in Roadcraft – just to check my memory was correct, I recently dug out my old ‘Blue Book’ edition of Roadcraft and it does indeed show near-symetrical maximum radius lines worked into the full width of the lane.

So I started using it. There’s another article which goes into more detail but suffice to say, I discovered its drawbacks on the road when I nearly had my head removed by an oncoming police car in the middle of a right-hand bend. In retrospect I suppose ‘racing line’ should have been a clue. The driver didn’t seem too impressed with it either. I’d also discovered that if I got it a bit wrong on a left-hander, I would (and did) end up in a field, I started to use less-aggressive lines that avoided both grass and oncoming police cars. Nevertheless, it’s still being talked about in that much later BikeSafe video.

Although I was still reading anything I could lay my hands on, my cornering skills stagnated through the 80s, mostly because nearly all my riding was as a courier mostly in and around London. But then in 1990 I moved back to Kent. And now I was doing a lot of cross-country courier runs and clocking up a LOT of miles on twisty roads. By coincidence, a series called ‘Survival Arts’ began appearing in the old ‘Motorcycle Sport’ magazine.

In April 1990, the article on cornering jumped out at me. The diagrams showed the rider going much deeper into a corner, then turning tighter later in the bend keeping well away from the centre line (right-hander) or the kerb (left-hander) before exiting on a far less extreme line. It was very different line to the line I’d seen before. And yes, I still have that source too, to double-check.

I remember the day I tried out the Survival Arts line. I was on a run out to Wales on a nice sunny day, and finding it difficult to pass a tractor on a twisty road. I suddenly realised that taking a line on right-handers which went a little deeper in to the turn gave me a good view on the way up to the bend, kept me away from oncoming traffic mid-corner whilst using a quicker, more positive counter-steering input to square off the corners helped me get upright and lined up with the straights sooner. Coming out of a right-hander, I turned the bike tighter onto a straight long enough to pass the tractor. Having got past, I kept trying it, and found it made riding the twisty road a lot easier on left-handers too. It was an absolute revelation. I’ve got some notes dating from 1992 when I actually started to write up the ‘on the road’ benefits of what would become ‘Point and Squirt’. Why Point and Squirt? Because that’s exactly what we do. We wait till we see where the road is going next, then turn sharper, ‘point’ the bike at the exit and turn the throttle harder to ‘squirt’ the bike out down the road to the next hazard.

Soon after, I borrowed a buddy’s copy of Keith Code’s ‘Twist of the Wrist 2’ because I was about to do my first track day. Although a lot of the book was irrelevant to the road (and some almost incomprehensible on first reading), I did take away some postives. Code confirmed my ‘open the throttle all the way through the corner’ approach was right, and his thinking on stability issues and the need to keep the bike upright as much as possible, also confirmed the benefit of the Survival Arts deep in, quick steer approach. He also said “turn only when you see the exit” which I realised is what I was doing with my Survival Arts line. Code’s “steer once” advice and his definition of the exit (“where you can do anything you want with the throttle – pull a wheelie if you want to”) all made immediate sense given what I was already doing.

Code supplied a crucial missing link with his concept of ‘reference markers’ (repeating and easy-to-recognise points in bends). You won’t find this in ‘Roadcraft’ or any of the books based on it. Yet Code’s ‘Two Step’ technique (in short, an approach which gets us to search for one reference point, then when we see it, move our eyes further forward to look for the next) explained when to look, where to look, and what we are looking for. Code provided some crucial missing links and by putting Code’s quick-steer approach, the ‘Two Step’ and the reference marker concept altogether, we have a way of timing braking, steering and acceleration inputs consistently.

By combining what I’d learned from Code with my Survival Arts cornering line, I developed a consistent style that used positively-timed (but NOT ‘harder’) braking to slow whilst upright, a slower, squared-off turning point late in the corner that gets the bike upright earlier, allowing early, positive and upright acceleration out of the bend. My cornering technique took another big step forward – rather than carrying corner speed using the ‘maximum radius’ line as I had on the 125, I was positively sacrificing it.

I got plenty of chance to polish Point and Squirt on long rural courier runs, so let’s fast-forward to 1994 when I got online and began to discuss riding, including my Point and Squirt cornering approach with riders from all over the world. MSF instructor Don Kime sent me some training material which showed how to break down corners using the ‘Slow, Look, Lean, Roll’ approach (quite a few years before Thames Valley Advanced Motorcyclists hi-jacked the technique, incidentally). Now I’d added a way to break the corner down into easily-defined chunks which matched Code’s machine inputs. I also got useful feedback from US riders who’d done Code’s California Superbike School as well as Reg Pridmore’s CLASS in the United States, where the ex-pat British former racer seemed to be teaching a road line not-dissimilar to my Point and Squirt.

By 1996 I was working down in Lydd as a CBT instructor, and I joined a local IAM group. Boy, Point and Squirt did not go down well with my observer. Braking, squaring off, then accelerating upright out of corners; nope, that was all wrong. Instead, I was told how the ‘proper’ approach to cornering was to “vary throttle and speed with radius” and to “smooth out the radius of the corner”. OK, maybe not quite so close to the white paint as my old approach to right-handers, but essentially I was being shown the throttle control that hadn’t worked on my old CX and a near-identical line to the one I’d discarded after the near-decapitation by the police car.

Just a few month later, I ran my own advanced course for one of our trainees who’d recently passed his bike test and turned up with a new machine. I got a day’s warning from the boss, spent the previous evening roughing out a syllabus, and rather than the IAM line it was my own Point and Squirt approach that I showed him. When launched Survival Skills Rider Training in 1997, this reference point-based, slow in on the gas, quick steer and late-turn line was a key part of the two-day Survival: SKILLS course. I’ve continued to develop Point and Squirt, but the essentials were in place.

In early 2000, I was invited to run an advanced riding section on a national motorcycle forum. It rapidly gained members, and questions soon popped up about cornering. When riders had issues cornering, I’d describe the benefits of the Point and Squirt approach. And suddenly, I was being told that this was “the line you’d take if you’d followed the advice in Motorcycle Roadcraft” or that I’d “misunderstood Roadcraft and that if I’d taken IAM training, I’d have been shown how to ‘interpret’ it correctly”.

I checked over my extensive collision of books, articles and videos which date from the early ’70s to see if my memory really was failing but, nope. The Survival Arts line is quite obviously different from diagrams in the ‘Blue Book’ edition of Roadcraft. And there’s that 2000s West Midlands BikeSafe video too (even if the footage clearly shows the rider demonstrating what I’d call Point and Squirt. With hindsight, I’ll concede that there IS a written warning to “tuck in tighter and not to exit too close to the white line on left-handers” in the Blue Book, and the “turn only when you see the exit” advice IS in the mid-90s editions of Roadcraft. But in neither book is the message given any great prominence, possibly because – as is also regularly pointed out – the book was intended to be read alongside the police practical training. However, my response to that is “why write a book with half the story?”

A less charitable suggestion was that I was trying to “score points over other trainers”, or wanted to be the “sole Guardian of the Truth” – if that were true, I’d hardly be explaining how Point and Squirt worked, would I now?

For what it’s worth, a few years after the first “Point and Squirt is just Roadcraft properly explained” bun fight, I met a very nice bloke on a group trip in Europe. He’d had his IAM pass for 20 years but was active in his group. At the end of one of our rides, he quizzed me on the lines I was taking. I explained Point & Squirt. “Nah”, he said, “I don’t like that… it’s all stop/start and sudden jinks… I like match the throttle to the bend mid-corner… and I like to lean the bike and use wide sweeping lines because the bike’s more stable… it’s how my two mates who are both ex-police riders ride too”. Next day I followed him. He was rolling the throttle on and off mid-corner and taking the maximum radius line round bends.

So if Point and Squirt really isn’t ‘Roadcraft-revisited’, does anyone else teach something similar? Some years AFTER I’d talked about Point and Squirt online, Andy Ibbott – then director of the UK outlet of Code’s California Superbike school – wrote about Code’s cornering in ‘Motor Cycle News’. Without calling it Point and Squirt, Andy Morrison of Rapid Training explained it very well indeed in a series in ‘Bike’ magazine between 2005 and 2006, more than ten years after I first started writing about Point and Squirt online, and almost as long after I started teaching it.

So I think I’ve shown that there is a significant difference between the Point and Squirt approach to cornering and what’s covered by Roadcraft-based training. If you’re still struggling to accept that after reading my explanation, maybe book up a course and see for yourself.

Posted on

68. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – riding in fog

Fog remains one of the trickiest hazards for motorcyclists, particularly at night or in low-light conditions. Research supports my discussion of visual disorientation and increased reaction time. Modern lighting may help see, high-visibility gear might help others see us — hardly any bikes have a fog light, but the core principles haven’t changed: reduce speed, generous following distances, and riding to what we can actually see, not what we expect. Ultimately, preparation and anticipation remain the rider’s best defences—fog is never enjoyable, but with forethought, it can be managed reasonably safely.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – riding in fog

I’m pretty sure Keats didn’t ride a motorcycle, but it’s not unusual for spells of settled weather to develop during late on in the autumn, and fog can be a major problem. I still remember two trips vividly. Years ago, when I was only a few months into my riding career, I rode from Maidstone in Kent to West Drayton near Heathrow. The ride took twice as long as expected because the fog came down, and I very nearly didn’t make it. Following the kerb along the inside lane of the A40, I didn’t notice I had drifted off the main carriageway into a slip road. I nearly collided with the Armco barrier on the corner. Thankfully because of the thick fog, I was only riding at about 20mph and took some evasive action. A few years later when I was despatching, I took a package from London to GCHQ at Cheltenham. I left in lovely afternoon shine. I got to Cheltenham in time for a beautiful sunset. And the return ride turned into a nightmare of freezing fog, accidents and traffic jams. So riding in fog and particularly in fog at night, is probably my least favourite part of biking. And if I can, I’ll stay put. But sometimes it has to be done. So what are the problems and how best to deal with them?

Fog forms when moist air travels over colder ground. Although we could encounter for at any time of year, the densest fog often forms in autumn – November is a favourite month for fog. Warm air can still make its way up from the near-continent and it holds more moisture than during the winter months. But the nights are long and fog forms more readily than in summer, and it can be slow to clear – it may even persist all day.

Like all other weather-driven hazards, first stop is the weather forecast. Forewarned is forearmed. Find out what the day-long forecast is. Whilst fog may be slow to clear in the morning, it’s pretty obvious when we wake up in it. But if the weather changes and become clear and still during the day, fog can easily be a problem on the dark ride home. Maybe we can change our departure times.

Towns are generally a bit warmer than the surrounding countryside so it’s not uncommon to drive out of town into fog. We can anticipate where we’re likely to find it. It can be low cloud, so worse on tops of hills. Or it can be caused by cold air that’s sunk into low-lying areas after a still, clear day – damp meadows and river valleys are classic places for fog to form on still evenings. Or it can be blown in off the cold sea. Kent, where I lived for many years, used to get all three types. For example, the M2 being near the coast would often be affected with sea-fog. But the M20, being a few miles inland and crossing the North Downs, was often affected by hill-fog. Watch out for patchy fog, because we never quite know where it is, how thick it is, or how long it’ll last. Don’t be tempted to blast into a wispy looking bit of mist drifting across the road. It could be a lot thicker than you think.

It’s often cold riding in fog, thanks to chill air temperatures, but also because the tiny droplets evaporate from clothing and suck away body heat. If riding in leathers, put waterproofs on, and layer up to stay warm.

On the bike, the first problem is simply seeing out the helmet. The visor gets covered with water droplets on the outside and mists up on the inside from your breath.

Wax polish like Mr Sheen on the outside helps the water bead up and run off, often just by turn our head. Try to avoid wiping a finger – the oily crud on the glove gets smeared across the visor and makes it even more difficult, and long term it scratches it. If the visor gets covered in salt spray or road film, a damp cloth kept in a ziplock bag (I spray that with Mr Sheen too) can clean and re-wax the visor.

Holding our breath all the way home is impractical, and I’ve never yet found a helmet that demisted itself from the vents that were supposed to perform that trick. Breath deflectors also help, but an anti-mist treatment is usually needed. Whilst they do seem to work, they need regular reapplication. Quite honestly, I used Fairy Liquid as a courier, applying a dab of the neat stuff, then polishing it on with a clean cloth. The other option is a Fog City-style add-on. It’s effectively double-glazing for the visor, but I’ve found that at night they reduce visibility, partly because they scratch easily. I’ve heard they can be tricky to seal effectively on some visors.

Having sorted yourself out, make sure the bike is in good shape too, with clean and properly adjusted lights. If dip beam is too low we won’t get any forward vision. If it’s too high, even on low beam it will light up the fog – now the light’s bounced back as glare. Extra-bright lights can actually be a disadvantage when this happens.

One of the problems of riding in fog is a sense of ‘dislocation’. A road we’ve ridden dozens will seem totally different in fog, as our normal visual cues will vanish. So use everything available. Reflective posts are red to the left and white to the right, so if we see a line of red posts, we’re approach a right-hander. And vice versa. Triangular warning signs are reflective and are there to flag up hazards. Watch the centre line – longer ‘hazard lines’ indicate just that, and cat-eyes get closer together too when approaching a hazard, and really close – almost a solid line – when the centre line goes solid. Coloured cat-eyes help on multi-lane roads – red to the left, amber to the right, white between lanes, green where vehicles leave or join a carriageway. Ride to what you can see, not what you think you ought to see.

In general I try to follow the centre line rather than the left hand edge of the road – it keeps you further from dangers to the left which will be harder to see – but be cautious entering cross-hatched zones in the middle – there may be unlit traffic islands in the centre of the road.

Unless we meet someone with no lights, it’s usually easy to see oncoming cars, but side-on there’s little to warn us. We can normally see the tail lights of cars ahead, but don’t simply follow the guy in front – if they run off the road, so will we. Fog’s water so it makes the road surface damp, and potentially very slippery, so a good following distance is important.

We need to remember that with no fog light, the driver behind us will have difficulty seeing us against the brighter lights ahead in a queue of traffic. If we do a lot of foggy miles it might be worth fitting one – I used to fit a fog light as a courier. I’ve also seen riders using bicycle LEDs and was surprised how effective they were, although technically they are illegal if fixed to the bike. Typically, reflective material on hi-vis vests is too high up when everyone is driving on dip beam or fog lights – it needs to be low down to be seen.

And finally, make sure the bike’s easy to ride. Many riders use ‘rat bikes’ for winter riding, but make sure everything works properly – we need every ounce of attention for riding, not to worry about stiff clutches, dodgy brakes or cheap and nasty tyres.

Riding in fog is never fun, but we can make it less stressful.

 

Posted on

67. SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

Even if rider training still focuses on ‘perfect performance’ to avoid errors, it’s increasingly recognised in other fields where safety is paramount — such as in airline pilot training — that skill alone won’t prevent in-flight errors, and that the ‘startle effect’ — what I refer to as SURPRISE! — is the key trigger that overwhelms even highly experienced pilots. The same applies to riding. It’s rare we outride the motorcycle. Most crashes result when our instinctive ‘Survival Reactions’ take over. Key points like the rarity of crashes and the influence of optimism bias should become fundamental concepts in rider training. Even with advanced ABS, traction control, or stability aids, anticipating the unexpected and preparing a mental and physical response remains the most effective defence against SURPRISE!

SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

There are only two things we can do on a bike – change speed or change direction. To do that, we use the same inputs – accelerating, steering or braking – every moment we ride. Accident investigators around the world find the same things when they look at bike accidents. Nearly always, the bike wasn’t at its limits; if the rider had applied the correct inputs into the machine, they’d have got out of trouble. The traditional view has been that riders make errors because they either lack skills or they make the wrong decisions. It’s easy to say “don’t make errors”, and the conventional view of road safety has always been that ‘all’ we have to do is avoid errors, then everyone would be safe on the roads. So training has always proceeded along those lines – years ago, I was told that if I “observed, anticipated and concentrated” I wouldn’t crash. Guess what? I crashed. So the big questions are these: “if the machine inputs necessary are only an extension of what we do as a matter of course, and if the errors are recoverable, why do we continue to crash?” The implication is that crashing is rather more complex than we think, and it’s worth asking “how do we know how to avoid an error, if we don’t understand it in the first place?”. But does anyone teach us about crashing? Read on…

After a crash, it’s easy to ‘walk backwards’ along the sequence of events and to produce a timeline of events. Eventually we appear to come to the precipitating error:

  1. we left the road in a bend…

  2. because we were off-line…

  3. because we turned in too early…

  4. because we ran in too fast…

  5. because we braked too late…

  6. because we had no margin for error…

  7. because we misjudged the bend!.

Such a crash is likely to be explained as ‘too fast for the conditions’.

Is that really correct? Let’s go back to the beginning and start again, this time trying to understand WHY rather than WHAT went wrong. Are we saying the corner was too fast for the bike? Or too fast for the rider? In a serious crash investigation, it nearly always turns out that the bike could have got the rider out of trouble. So it’s not machine limitations, but ‘rider error’. If we stop there, the finger is usually pointed in the direction of the rider’s level of skill and judgement and the assumption is that if the rider had better skills, the crash wouldn’t happen.

Now, let’s take another step backwards beyond where the rider left the road, to consider something nearly always overlooked. How did the rider get to the corner where he or she crashed? They had to ride there. And that means the rider successfully negotiated every PREVIOUS corner, to reach the one that he or she crashed on.

So if the problem really was riding “too fast” or “lacking skill and judgement”, how did they get as far as they did? Wouldn’t they have crashed sooner? We know that statistically a crash is a relatively rare event, even for relative novices. So whilst it IS possible it was blind luck that the rider got this far, it’s far more likely that there were some unique circumstances about this particular corner that caused the crash HERE rather than somewhere else. In short, the corner somehow set a trap that the unsuspecting rider fell into.

Whilst we can point to a lack of skill or a poor attitude to riding as loading the dice towards crashing, it’s not just new or badly-behaved riders who crash. Those groups might be at higher risk, but crashes don’t happen exclusively to the high risk groups. The majority of crashes actually happen to ‘ordinary’ riders doing ‘ordinary’ things. Moreover, even expert riders crash, and they often have the same ‘standard’ crashes that the higher risk groups do – at junctions, when overtaking and on corners.

So if experience, skill and even a controlled approach to riding only reduces risk but doesn’t eliminate it, it should be pretty clear that something rather more complicated is going on. And here’s where we can turn to the work of US rider coach Keith Code. He realised that even good track riders crashed and noticed that in many of these crashes, the rider COULD have got out of trouble. But when things started going wrong, these riders didn’t respond as expected. Instead, Code identified a string of inappropriate reactions including ineffective and frozen steering, over- and under-braking errors, and target fixation. He concluded that it was these errors that caused most track crashes. He called them ‘Survival Reactions’.

You should be able to see the parallel with accident investigations on the road. The bike COULD have got the rider out of trouble, but like the track rider, the road rider also froze, over-reacted and target fixated into the crash.

Next backwards step. If it’s these ‘Survival Reactions’ that dump us on our backside, why DO we react inappropriately in some places and not others? What triggers the ‘Survival Reactions’? Code put it down to the threat of personal harm, because the moment we’re afraid of something we’re likely to revert to instinct. Instinct, being based on the most primitive part of the brain, rarely provides the right response when riding a bike and our trained responses, everything we’ve learned, goes straight out of the window.

So far, so good, but there’s another pace backwards we can take, by asking “what triggers that fear of personal harm?” Factors acting a ‘stressors’ – that is, making us tense and anxious – such as riding on a road that technically trickier than we’re used to or riding with buddies quicker than us – appear to make us more prone to making a mistake, but don’t seem to explictly trigger Code’s ‘Survival Reactions’.

The trigger appears to be SURPRISE! It’s SURPRISE! that overwhelms our learned behaviour and kicks in the in-built instinctual responses to a threat. The bend tightens. We’re suddenly aware we could run off the road. ‘Survival Reactions’ kick in. We freeze and run off the road. We grab a big handful of brake and lock the front wheel. We target-fixate on where we’ll crash rather than look to see where the road goes.

Let’s take one final backward step. What triggers SURPRISE? The answer is remarkably straightforward. By definition, it’s when something happened that we didn’t expect. It’s a straightforward anticipation failure.

Now, I can already hear people saying “but if you’d observed, ANTICIPATED and concentrated…”

But when was the last time you crashed on a corner? As I mentioned earlier, crashes are remarkably rare events.

As I mentioned, a lack of experience and a lack of skill means we’re at higher risk of a crash, but the longer we ride without a crash, the simple truth is it becomes more difficult for us to mentally view a bend as a high risk area. It would be a mistake to call this complacency – it’s a function of the way our brains see the world outside. We’re biased towards looking on the bright side – for more on this, have a read of a book called ‘The Optimism Bias’ by neuroscientist Tali Sharot. The more we do something, and EVEN THOUGH THE RISKS ARE UNCHANGED, the less aware of the risks we become. Ask any builder who’s fallen off a ladder.

If there IS a risk of complacency, paradoxically it’s likely to come after more training. Think about it. The language of riding, driving and road safety generally is about “getting better” and the better we get (in this case, the fewer scares we have mid-corner), the more likely we are to assume everything will go right. The combination of training (which tells us that skilled riders have fewer crashes) AND a crash-free history leads us to believe it’s our training keeping us safe, rather than the laws of chance. Just like tossing dice, each bend comes with a level of risk, and we just haven’t met that unique set of circumstances that could trip us up…

…yet.

Don’t believe me? Roadcraft talks about being prepared for what we can “reasonably expect to happen”. If we don’t get caught out in a corner, that becomes the ‘reasonable’ option. We may not realise it but that’s what our repeated experience is teaching us. But what it doesn’t take away is the risk that the very next corner could be the one that’s laid a trap just for us.

Once we understand this, ‘inexplicable’ crashes start to explain themselves.

Hopefully, now we are aware of how repeated experience and optimism can warp our assessment of risk, we’ll see how to defeat SURPRISE! Instead of planning for “what we can reasonably expect to happen” and thinking that “I’ve done everything I can to ensure the corner goes right”, we MUST reverse our thinking 180 degrees and prepare for UNREASONABLE events. We need to plan for the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ to see a bend might go wrong, rather than planning the ‘right way’ to ride around it. As I explain on my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses, predicting the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ isn’t difficult, but really is a very different mindset to the standard ‘right way’ approach to riding.

Achieving this pragmatic “I’ve taken all the precautions I can but anything could still go wrong ” mindset is known as developing ‘insight’ and has been used successfully in risk management training in other fields. What’s very interesting is that the latest research is suggesting that with just a modest level of machine control ability, developing the insight that engages a “what could go wrong” mindset has significant benefits. I suggest this is because if we’re expecting something to go wrong, when the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ turns up mid-corner, we’re far less likely to suffer SURPRISE! for the simple reason we had predicted it. That would seem to be the way to defeat Code’s inappropriate ‘Survival Reactions’.

So how can we plan for what might go wrong? It’s simple enough – we just need to look at where other riders got it wrong! That’s where we are most likely to caught out ourselves. The three ‘standard’ crashes are at junctions, on corners and during overtakes and they happen to novice and expert riders alike. Once we realise that, it’s easier to be on red alert.

There’s one final step. Even if we correctly anticipate an emergency and avoid freezing, over-reacting or target-fixating, we really need a pre-planned response to beat SURPRISE! If we have to figure out a solution on the fly is about as likely as pulling a rabbit out of our crash hat. We need to know whether we’re going to need to change speed, change position, sound the horn, swerve or hit the anchors BEFORE the emergency starts to develop, or those ‘Survival Reactions’ will still kick in. That’s why even highly trained and highly experienced riders still fall victim to age-old crashes.

So yes, by all means observe, anticipate and concentrate. But learn about crashing, understand ‘Survival Reactions’ and then use that knowledge to anticipate where things will go wrong, rather than how they might go right. That’s the best way to deal with SURPRISE!