Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Motorwayness

Life, as Celtic minstrel of pop Ronan Keating once sang, is a roller coaster. It has its good bits, and it has its bad bits, the ups and the downs and the round and rounds. As a simple allegory for both life and biking, it’s not so bad – if glorious sweepy A roads disappearing into the horizon are the ups, watching the mileometer click round and round on the motorway has been the nearest thing to a down that I’ve found so far. But if that’s as bad as it gets, I suppose I shouldn’t really complain. 

I’ve only done the odd brief dual-carriageway transit section before now, but as I’ve two alternate routes to work, one the aforementioned top-class A road, the other a 40-mile stretch of the M40, I felt it would be remiss not to put some time in on the motorway, especially as that’s the route I take when I drive to work. So last week was motorway week, 400 miles of three-lane blacktop through late winter/early spring chill. In the car, it’s not such a bad commute – my daily bit of the M40 isn’t too bad at all, there are stretches where you’re down to sixty or fifty, but generally speaking things keep moving right along. Get Chris Evans going on the stereo and the 45 minute commute passes in no time, comfortable and snug in my little tin box. The bike is another matter… 

I don’t think it helped that my first day on the motorway was pretty blustery. In a new environment (hey, it’s all pretty new to me at the moment, but motorway was brand spanking at the start of last week), I was crushingly intimidated – 

sitting at seventy felt terrifyingly quick, I felt swamped in a sea of traffic, half of which I could only catch the barest glimpse of in the tiny mirrors, and with the odd sprinkling of rain, I was being blown around so much I hardly dared take a hand off the bars to clear my visor. 

The sense of insecurity was almost overwhelming. Whereas I felt completely happy lifting a hand to clear the visor whilst cruising at sixty on the A roads, it was a real fight to do the same on the motorway – I felt, completely against everything I knew intellectually, that as soon as I lifted my hand, the otherwise stable ‘Cat would instantly flip out of control. Hogwash, of course, and when lack of vision forced me to overcome the feeling, everything went as smoothly as you’d expect, but the conviction that I had to keep both hands on the bars ‘lest the Yamaha reared out of control like a startled horse was amazingly strong, almost like a sense of vertigo, but there were times where I had serious doubts that motorway travel was going to play any part in my foreseeable future. So wrapped up in trying to keep control was I that I didn’t even identify how windy it was until I got off the bike at the end of the journey. 

Familiarity breeds contempt, however. By the end of the week, the sense of terror had passed and boredom had sunk deep into my bones – it took maybe another couple of journeys for fear to be utterly overwhelmed by the tedium of it all. Other than it gets me there more quickly than going cross country, there’s just nothing to redeem it – the wind at seventy bites deep and cold, vigorously battering limbs and head, there’s fast-moving traffic all around that isn’t particularly paying much attention and certainly isn’t leaving much room for fellow road-users, and the all-important road itself is just dull. Flat. Straight. No scenery. Not much in the way of elevation, and even less in the way of entertaining curves. Where’s the fun in that?  

As an experiment, it’s not been an unsuccessful week, I feel like I’ve learned a lot. For example, I’d always pondered sportsbike riders in the past who crept past me at eighty crouched under the bubble like John McGuiness trying to squeeze an extra half a mile an hour out of his Fireblade on the flat-out run up the Mountain at the TT. Now I know – it took me a couple of days, and frankly I felt like a bit of a tit at first, but the lower I draped myself around the tank, the more comfortable it was out of the wind. It sounds stupidly self-evident writing it now, like how I realised it was less painful when I wasn’t banging my head against the wall, but hey – I didn’t know any better.    

But even well tucked in, the motorway is not the most pleasant place to be. It’s just dull – it serves a purpose, but that’s it. I’m sure it will do the mileage figures good (although maybe not this week – twice I’ve done the large part of the journey in fifth, revelling in the pick-up and acceleration right up to the point I realise I’ve been stupid), and as it saves me twenty minutes each way, I envisage a future where I travel one way by motorway and the other way via those lovely A roads. Yin and yang. Good and bad. Straight and swoopy. Life is a rollercoaster, but you get off the ride with a bigger smile when it excites – no-one craves the boring ride.