GREER, SOUTH CAROLINA. Maybe you grew up riding, but as I’ve mentioned before in these pages, the most I ever rode as a kid was a pedal bicycle. Nothing powered. When I did finally learn to ride a motorcycle, I did it as an adult, and I did so not long after I had also first learned how to drive a car. Now, because I specifically learned to drive a manual transmission car, I’m pretty sure that fact helped me with wrapping my head around riding a motorbike.
I’ve now ridden on the street for close to 20 years, and while I’ve had the odd crash and injury here and there, thankfully, none so far have been serious. But riding the street is a completely different thing from riding dirt or off-road. And as I’ve since learned from talking to loads of folks who grew up riding dirt and/or teaching it to others, it seems that it’s a whole lot easier for a dirt rider to learn good street techniques than it is the other way around.
Part of that, I’m told, is because those of us who learned to ride on the street first tend to have a lot of bad habits we need to unlearn if we’re going to be successful at riding off-road. Thankfully, as I’ve also repeatedly heard, developing good off-road skills tends to translate to better street riding skills. So I was definitely looking forward to that.
