Math Tests

I remind myself that it is, when you boil it all down, essentially a math problem. Weight plus speed equals momentum, and the rubber/asphalt coefficient of friction times the surface area of the contact patch of the tires tells me the forces I’ve got to manage, and what I’ve got available to manage them. Really just a math problem.

 

Except it doesn’t feel like a math problem, it feels like I’m carrying 70MPH into a corner that is quite a bit tighter than I expected, I’m already leaning in while just BARELY trailing the front brake, and I know if I ask much more of that credit card-sized contact patch up front it’s going to throw up its little hands and decide its life would be simpler if we all just took a moment to slide across the next couple hundred feet and go rest in that barbed wire on the side of the road. I’d rather not.

 

So I ramp up the front brake as much as I dare, lean the bike down HARD to tighten the corner and somehow, inexplicably, don’t even so much as cross the painted stripe outlining the edge of the road along the shoulder. I try not to look surprised that I’m still wearing all the skin I came with, though no one is there to see, straighten the bike up as we exit and make the triple soar toward its redline while the front wheel goes light.

 

I’ve never been good at math, but I’m pretty good at this. Curves and apexes, momentum and friction, put faces on the numbers and forces I struggled with when they were abstract ideas in a classroom. The little chatter you get from the front tire when it’s braking as hard as it can, right before it locks and starts to skid, is math in a language I can understand. The weight of bike and rider shifting inward and down as I countersteer into a corner is applied physics that conveys, with visceral precision, the tightening of cornering forces that will keep us on this curvy, twisty road and out of the trees-or worse, yet, that barbed wire.

 

It’s best not to look too hard at the barbed wire as it shudders past, speed making it turn to snaking ribbons that whip along the road. It’s best not to look at the oncoming traffic, either, or to wonder if the driver of that big SUV is going to cross the centerline and swing into my lane. Trainers call it ‘target fixation’, and avoiding it is a learned skill, but in reality it’s just exercising that most magical of human abilities; the gift of ignoring what isn’t relevant to the moment. It’s how a person can live their whole life happily, knowing they’ll probably die in pain, or wracked by illness, or alone far from home. Right now, I’m ignoring the fact that a minor miscalculation in some fairly complex mathematical calculations taking place somewhere in the back of my head could bring down the curtain on my own personal little world. Ignoring it, and simultaneously glorying in it; living in the math problems like a pop quiz where one mistaken answer means, at the very least, pain.

 

I’ve never been that good at math, but I’m pretty good at this.