'Teq' talk: Beaches Blat

Doing a little bit of sitting, waiting for departure - so figured I'd at least do some sitting while I'm riding.

I wasn't 100% happy with my technique last weekend down Mac Pass, so I wanted to work on a couple of things.

Entries are the bottleneck of my technique. I exit well enough, but I generally feel slow mid-corner, and that's because I enter poorly - not because I'm not happy leaning. Even accounting for a sensible and conservative 'slow in fast out' approach, by mid-corner it is so often obvious I am travelling too slowly.

Part of the problem is that I usually run the brakes quite late. I am happy doing it, and still maintain that it is a useful technique to be comfortable with. But the SV doesn't handle the easing-off process that well - and neither do I frankly - and I don't deal that well with the busy process of entering and appropriately judging speed. I'm always conservative if I'm not concentrating appropriately on my line through the corner.

So, today I went about improving that. It was a little hard picking out some suitable roads, so I resolved to just ride to the beach, and managed to randomly generate some corners.

Without going particularly quickly, I was pretty happy with the smooth lines and effective approaches I made - given a largely suburban corner set. No breakthrough, but I felt good. No big changes to riding technique ('teq'), but a revision of focus and mindset had a huge impact on experience. And of course a noticeable difference in the corners.


Another realisation I had on the road today is that corners in the suburbs often aren't 'corners' at all. Intersections, dead-ends, roundabouts and other obstacles are all great opportunities to enjoy riding - and practice teq - and are often safer and more predictable contexts to do so than narrow, blind and unpredictable corners. So maybe the next ride I plan I won't be looking for the twisties at all.


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@JohnSBaxter
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