First Little Fall

Our riding lessons are going fabulously well! The overall education course is very well-designed, and each hour-long lesson is very well guided, one-on-one, by an experienced motorbike instructor. The lessons are divided in two steps - Basic Motorbiking, and Advanced Motorbiking. Last night we did the final lesson of the Basic level, and tonight we get started on Advanced.

But I had my first little fall on the bike last night - lost my balance on the "ippon bashi" (a narrow sort of strip) and toppled over.

Falling is a good thing - I find my biggest problem is being too tense and overly cautious. This was true with mountain biking and downhilling in the beginning, too - forgetting to stay loose, and forgetting to 'look where you want to go, don't look where you don't want to go'. Those are two very basic, beginner tips for mountain biking. I think they extend to motorbiking too; and now that I've had a little fall, perhaps my deep inner-psyche (nick-named 'self-preservation') will understand that a small fall isn't the end of the world (of course, after toppling over at about zero km per hour, the bike and I were unscathed:-)