ADDING A DIMENSION

“Before you ride,” they tell you, “have a plan.”

Big words. So big, they make you write them down—on the front of your lesson booklet, while sitting in class: B-E-F-O-R-E and so on, everyone in the room saying the words aloud, and then you are there, staring at that paper, wondering about the language.

Who, I thought, ends up on a racetrack without a plan?

A lot of people, it turns out. Me included, though I never would have guessed it. I walked out to the bike with a plan, and then I took a motorcycle on a track for only the second time in my life and tried to get my body to move and work right, all while concentrating on the usual motorcycle stuff like hard-braking downshifts and cornering lines and just plain-old not falling off, and somewhere in there, my plan said,