My Motorcycle Crash

Thank heavens you're OK. Potentially horrific situation, particularly the near situation of being run over!
Several points to give you a perspective, and hopefully inspire you to re-engage with the world of motorcycling :

a) Same sort of scenario happened to me. As a beginner in 1967 riding in Kuala Lumpur, I had 2 accidents on motorcycles. The first occured riding a 100cc Yamaha sports cycle. I was going into a turn too fast, the bike went down at 50 kph, and I received serious road burn on my bare legs, but didn't face a possible collision with other vehicles. Took 6 weeks for the skin to heal. Obvious lesson: wear proper protective motorcycle gear--even in the humid tropics--anticipating that wherever you are riding in the world YOU WILL GO DOWN at one time or another.

(b) 2nd accident should have killed me because I was wearing no helmet or any other protective gear. Occured also in Kuala Lumpur in 1968. After a late night party at 2am, in a fairly drunken state, I mounted my Yamaha 305cc Scrambler, rocketed away on a secondary highway with a 80% curve ahead. Reaching the curve at high speed, I couldn't hold the line and the bike tracked wide and I ran off the road into a concave monsoon drainage ditch, half a meter deep with 90º sharp edges to the concrete. Imagine this: I was thrown off the bike and landed in the ditch in perfect linear alignment with the ditch. What happened to the cycel? Well, it landed up lying upside down on top of me, with the engine still running full bore, with the entire 140kg of the bike supported by the handlebars straddling the monsoon ditch. Not a single kg weighed me down. After collecting my wits, I crawled forward along the ditch, stood up, hit the electric kill switch on the bike, and collapsed with heartfelt thanks that I had miraculously escaped being crushed and mangled in the crash.

Since that time, I have modified my behaviour and have had thousands of accident km of safe motorcycling in Canada and the US on a Yamaha 650 Seca (1982), Yamaha XT225 (2006), and Yamaha FZ1 (2009). To state what you may already have guessed, one simply must stack the odds in your favour by: taking a motorcycle training course which I did years after "teaching myself", using 1st rate protective clothing, driving mostly during the day and in the dry, favouring rural over urban travel (if an option), watching the booze gauge, using high quality tires, and adjusting speed to the conditions.

Have fun!
John McEachern (age 71)

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