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RIDING A MOTORCYCLE

Your parents drum a lot into you: specific safety rules (I want to call 911 when I see kids running around with lollipops in their mouths); the proper orientation of utensils in the dishwasher (points down, do you want to impale yourself?); and that motorcyclists are profoundly anti-social people doomed to an early death.

“Dangerous” checks out, at least relative to automobiles. In 2014, there were roughly seven times as many fatalities per 100,000 registered motorcycles as there were per 100,000 registered motor vehicles. And I won’t apologize for the fury those deafening choppers arouse in me.

Still, I’m a single, childless 40-year-old man. Surely I ought to be able to laugh in danger’s face. Toronto’s Rider Training Institute (RTI) and instructor Jonn Elevazo were nice enough to let me do just that in an intro-to-riding course, conducted in a parking lot on Polson Pier.

Part of me had thought to find someone who would give me five minutes of intro and let me rip. How hard could it be? But by the time Elevazo explained my bicycle’s rear brake lever was my motorcycle’s front brake lever, that my bicycle’s front brake lever was my clutch, that the gears went one-neutral-two-three-and so on, and that the rear brake was under the ball of my right foot, I was glad I had gone for RTI’s by-the-book “building block” approach.

Step one was being pushed around on an unpowered Yamaha TW200, like a seven-year-old on a bicycle, while National Post photographer Tyler Anderson tried half-heartedly to suppress giggles. But the payoff was great. Within three hours I had mastered the friction zone, executed some solid low-speed manoeuvres and then opened it up a bit. Annoyingly, Tyler had left by the time I found myself slaloming through pylons like a boss in training. But it happened. I have a certificate to prove it.