I have just completed the motorcycle rider course that was required for me to become a legal bike rider in Florida. I have been riding for quite a long time in Italy but I had never gone through a formal training program on the subject and I was amazed at the number and quality of concepts I managed to learn during this three days experience.
There had been things I had been doing instinctively without me knowing the reason why I was doing them and there had been concepts that were just missing and that are instead very relevant to perform a safe and pleasant ride. But what surprised me the most was the level of challenge involved with the course.
The training and testing range where I got my motorcycle license.
I had gotten the idea and maybe somebody even told me that it was just something you had to do in order to get your paperwork straight but there wasn’t much to it. Quite on the contrary the type of actions we were supposed to learn and perform with our bikes were challenging even for an experienced rider as me.
Also the precision of those actions and the time involved in the training itself, over 12 hours of actual exercised and tests, was quite surprising. Note that some of the students who attended the class and that eventually passed it had never rode on a bike before. The training was actually organized in a long series of consecutive steps, each one building on top of the previous one and leading from the very basics up to the most complex actions.
The bike that got me though the training and the tests. I had never used it before.
It was amazing seeing that under the challenge of the program, people would actually move from nowhere to being able to ride and control their vehicle to an high standard and that this was accomplished by the vast majority of the people attending the course.
The coaches were really good and the program has been tested nationally on many thousands of people, yet the most important things was that never during the training the coaches indulged with the thought that some of the students would not make it. They simply knew it could be done and that we could do it. On our side, we felt challenged to measure up to other students and to simply show we could also make it and it simply happened.
Roberto Mazzoni
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