Full Transcript:

0:00:15 – Bret Tkacs
Welcome back to Around the Wheel with Bret Tkacs. Today I have Patreon supporter Zak Parrish. Patreon supporter Zak Parrish. Zak Parrish pilots an Africa Twin 1100, Africa Sports and his bike is a DCT model we are going to be diving into not to make a funny out of this, but diving into sand and gravel and really loose surfaces. Zak, what makes Zak so special today is Zak is just like most of you that are listening today. Zak, why don’t you give us a little background on how we ended up in today’s conversation?

0:00:50 – Zak Parrish
Somehow I knew you were going to talk about the whole diving into sand thing, but that’s a whole other thing. So I started off riding a 1977 Yamaha 125 Enduro that I bought off my next door neighbor for like 50 bucks and rode it until it fell apart and that bike was like the Terminator. It was amazing. As I got older, I eventually decided to get a real motorcycle that I could take on the street and get a license for, and my first one was a Suzuki SV650S a 2005. That thing was fun. Oh my God. It was so good. It was like it’s like an F16. It’s so nimble and it’ll just go wherever you want it to go.

But I rode that for seven years and wanted to get something different, but I was still into street bikes. So I got drawn to the Harley Davidson V-Rod. So I had a 2012 big black thing that makes you feel like Batman or Judge Dredd, and I rode that for seven years and then wanted something different yet again and this was about this time last year. And I rode that for seven years and then wanted something different yet again, and this was about this time last year, and I discovered that adventure motorcycles actually existed. I didn’t know about them. I’d only been looking at low slung or really fast and powerful things, and I saw the Africa Twin. They had just announced that there was a new one coming with a whole bunch of really cool hot features, so I pre-ordered one of those. I took delivery in April and now here we are.

0:02:07 – Bret Tkacs
When we get into talking about sand, there will be things about clutch versus not clutch, and you went with the DCT, which is going to make this a very special conversation. Why did you go for the DCT? You’re an experienced rider, so obviously the clutch is not something you’re afraid of.

0:02:21 – Zak Parrish
No, not at all. In fact I get a lot of satisfaction from, you know, handling the clutch and shifting gears. I started off really just morbid curiosity. I went to the Honda dealership and I just talked to me like hey, I’ve heard about the Africa Twin and I had only just read about DCT and there’s a lot of really mixed opinions on that. So I test rode one and about halfway through my like I don’t know 30, 45 minute test ride I was like you know what? This is a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be. I totally get why folks eschew them and just want to focus on they want to do all that shifting themselves. That makes perfect sense to me. But there is something to be said for when you just want to get out and you just want to ride around and look at the scenery, not really having to think about that.

0:03:05 – Bret Tkacs
Yeah, I don’t want to make this just a talk about the DCT specifically, because we could probably have a conversation about that. I love understanding why you wanted to go that way. One of the things I’ve heard people say about the DCT that I think is so far off the mark is that the DCT is for novice riders or for beginner guys or guys who struggle with the clutch, and that, to me, is the absolute biggest fallacy about that motorcycle and that particular technology out there.

0:03:34 – Zak Parrish
Now that I own one, I agree with you. I think I went into it thinking that might actually be a thing and that I was handicapping myself. But you come to realize very quickly that it’s really just a different way to ride. In fact it has its own very unique challenges, particularly when you get off the pavement and you have to really pay close attention to your throttle inputs, because you don’t have that clutch bailout and you can get yourself into a lot of trouble very quickly with just a simple bump in the road that you weren’t ready for.

0:04:02 – Bret Tkacs
Whiskey throttling on a DCT really only kind of has one scenario you get to ride it out and whatever happens at the other end.

that’s the only surprise. But there’s definitely yeah, there’s no safety valve on that. So that’s what we get into body position and the concept that a lot of people know from when I was doing the motor truck series about the weightless rider and how critical and important that is. And I think that’s going to segue us into what our primary chat is. You went out and you’re in North Carolina and I’ve been there. There’s a lot of sand in North Carolina and you went out and did some riding and discovered that that is a skill set unto its own. So let’s kind of dive into this. And what kind of issues are you running into For those that are listening and for you most specifically? Let’s see if we can work through those and make you better.

0:04:57 – Zak Parrish
Sand is one of those things that you just don’t run into on a street bike. In fact, I’m going to walk that back just a little bit. Once you get really into the core of street riding and you understand what those high traction environments feel on the bike, and then you know hopefully you never have, but in my case, like I, have laid a bike down a few times and your brain and your body and your nervous system builds up this immediate reaction to losing traction on the bike and everything about you just screams oh my God, we’re about to die, because you know what that feels like to lose traction and have the bike go down. So sand is one of those things where it’s not like gravel, where gravel will kick you over an inch or two and it’s a little startling the first couple of times you do it, but that’s fine. Sand is just this constant throw. It just constantly moves underneath you and if you’re not ready for it or heaven forbid it comes on a turn that you weren’t ready for.

0:05:52 – Bret Tkacs
I still haven’t quite figured out exactly what the bike wants me to do in those situations. And there’s two different situations we’re talking about here. So one is on the street. The sand on the street is dangerous and that’s what we know as street riders. It’s just there’s no way getting around that. You need to be vertical, you can’t be going through fast with a lot of side angle, you’re going to slip. And the other thing that’s really scary about sand on the street I do think you’re right, this is something that we carry with us when we live the street and we start trying to really do off-road riding, and that is the fact that if we slip on the street not just sand but also gravel the chances of regaining that traction if it’s a large patch is fairly small, unless it’s just a really kind of a little hop or a little skip where you can hook back up. Once you start sliding you’re gone. And I also think this is why, when we get into gravel, people freak out, because a hard pack gravel road to me is far more concerning and far more dangerous than dirt and gravel on a trail, because it’s hard packed underneath with loose surface on the top, and if it’s thick gravel I’m good with it. It’s that thin gravel, just that spattering across the top of a hard packed road, whether it’s asphalt or hard pack, that’s really dangerous because there isn’t a recovery to that. If we’re already sliding, we’ve already made the mistakes and we’re paying the penalty now. That’s one issue. Getting into the deep sand that’s where we start having to change the way we look at the sand and start trusting the machine more.

I did a little video on the Bret Tax YouTube channel on rake and trail. For me I was just okay, let’s just prove a point. How can I do this? So I rode down the mountain hands off the bike, talking in front of me because that’s how I talk best is if my hands move and just talking about rake and trail and how stable the bike is. And I also did it on the freeway at speed, but I chose not to put it into that video. But knowing that that bike is stable and that’s one of the things I’ve started doing over the years is I keep testing and checking my faith in the motorcycle. Because even though we understand the dynamics of it, the rake, the trail, the engineering, that it’s all there, that somehow this bike is supposed to stay upright and we’re not supposed to fall. We still pretty much have to have some faith because that’s kind of invisible to us and I started off by just taking my hands off just slightly off the bars to see how far I would take the hands off and how far I could ride. And that’s just on gravel roads initially, or on pavement, and then it was hands out to my side and then it was standing up and hands in the air and I kept kind of evolving my trust how far I can get away from this bike and allow it to ride. And then also on surfaces, hands off, going through gravel, through potholes Well, what about hands off going downhill with big rocks? And so I’ve kept evolving.

As I become comfortable with something, I push the window a little bit farther. This is one of those keys to overcoming the challenge that you’re talking about Getting in the sand and having that fear is going. Okay. I don’t want to dive in so far that I’m in pure panic mode where my body is like no way this is going to happen. My brain is so overwhelmed with concern and distrust and fear and not understanding the lack of experience, because it’s a combination of all this that makes me go. This is really a scary situation. But find something where there’s something recoverable, where you go. Even if my faith isn’t true and I go through this little patch of sand, I can still recover and then go oh, the bike actually worked. The problem is you’re carrying that idea of sand and dirt and loose on the street over into that deeper or more real off-road environment.

0:09:32 – Zak Parrish
You’re absolutely right. You do take a little bit of that fear of sand or immediate low traction kind of jumping out at you on the street along with you. I think you can kind of adapt to that, particularly in those scenarios where you know you can just plow straight through it. Where you’re already vertical, you’re already going in a straight line, you know you can really just commit and after the first couple of times noticing okay, the handlebars are going to joggle a little bit, we’ll be okay After that.

The next stage is how you start handling turns and then when you combine the two. Next stage is how you start handling turns and then when you combine the two, where sand suddenly shows up on a turn and not necessarily one that is nicely bermed either. It’s just you’re, you’re riding along minding your business in the woods and suddenly there’s a a four inch deep hit of sand that you have to go around it and I I’m not quite sure yet what the bike really wants me to do to handle that. So the situation I found myself in I was taking the Africa Twin through some trails that we have here as a motocross park and right now I’m not quite convinced that the Africa Twin is really happy on single track stuff because it is so heavy.

But that could have a lot to do with my current skill set as well. I’m not going to count that out. Also, it was like over a hundred degrees and it was miserable, but I did find that as I was trying to maneuver as soon as like there’d be a turn and a little bit of sand, that front end would want to tuck, or I wasn’t quite sure exactly where my body positioning should be to handle those kinds of things.

0:11:05 – Bret Tkacs
You’re absolutely correct. We don’t fall over when we go straight. If we go through deep sand in a straight line, that front end will wiggle back and forth the bike tracks with it. If we stay relaxed, if we keep our momentum, chance of getting to the outside are almost guaranteed. It is the corners that we fall down on and, as you put it, the berm is easy because the berm means that when I go through the corner as the bike leans, as long as I lean at the same angle that that bike basically stays teed into the ground. When we’re riding straight up and down, we’re square to the ground. And if that berm comes up and I lean equal to the berm, then I’m still square to the ground. It’s just pushing the force straight down. Then I’m still square to the ground. It’s just pushing the force straight down. Slipping off of that is really really low. But without those berms and if you’re on single track trails and you’re on a big bike now, all of a sudden you do have to worry about that slip, especially if it’s off camber and this is where we get back into that idea of the weightless rider. And on the Africa Twin, the DCT specifically, it is extremely critical that you stay in front of that force that’s pushing you and the way I was.

I actually came up with this when I was teaching in India. I teach a lot of formulas as a motorcycle instructor and as an adventure rider instructor or dirt bike instructor. And it’s like okay, you go up a hill, you lean forward and you do throttle, and we talked about that. Okay, you go up a hill, you lean forward and you do throttle, and we’ve talked about that. Or you go through a corner and I turn, I want to look through, and but what occurred to me was, as riders, there’s so many variables. Then you have to go. Well, what formula am I supposed to use? Well, how much? Well, how much am I supposed to go forward going up the hill? How far do I go out of the bike when it turns?

And I started realizing we can find out if we just sense where the balance is. And the way that you do this is if you were to let go of the handlebars at any given time, what would happen to your body? And if you find yourself falling in any direction, then you’re not in the best spot. You’re not neutrals. That means if I’m leaning through that corner and the bike’s underneath me and this is what we do as street riders is we’re used to leaning with the motorcycle and when there’s momentum that throws us out, it turns out. The physics are the same for street or dirt, it’s just we have different forces. We’re counteracting.

Now, on the street we go very fast and when that motorcycle leans in the corner, it wants to stand back upright and the farther you move to the inside of the bike, the more you neutralize that centripetal force that tries to throw you out. When we’re on a trail, even when we think we’re going fast, we’re going very slow in comparison to a paved surface and letting that bike roll underneath us. We have to stay up on top so that we’re neutralizing the gravity that’s trying to pull the bike down. Stay up on top so that we’re neutralizing the gravity that’s trying to pull the bike down. Now the slipping is the real concern. I don’t mind falling, it’s the slipping. What happens when that front end slips? What happens when that back end slips?

You have to be in the position where the bike is going to slip into before it slips. That’s really the key, as that bike leans in, especially on the DCT. Not only do I want to be to the outside of that motorcycle. So my body’s directly above the contact patch at a minimum. So I’m to the outside, the bike leans into the corner, but I also want to be forward and outside the bike. That way, if at any time I hit a bump, I end up with a little throttle, I end up getting knocked back slightly, that I’m not using the handlebars as a reaction to grab a hold of, because that’s when we whiskey throttle. So it really is that forcing ourselves to go to the outside and up and thinking about if this motorcycle slips, where’s it going to go, and I want to be on top of that spot before it actually slips. So it moves into me and I regain that control.

0:14:46 – Zak Parrish
I think part of it too is just it’s getting your brain used to that. So I’ve done like some practicing of going around a corner in dirt or whatever I can find be it sand something fairly loose and I’m getting the hang of getting my body onto the outside of the bike. That’s all well and good, but you still do occasionally have that back end, start to drift a little bit, and I know that’s fine. Somewhere cognitively, my brain is well aware that that’s going to happen and that’s totally cool. Every other part of my experience as a rider tells me I’m about to dump the bike.

0:15:24 – Bret Tkacs
Well, as a drill to help overcome that one small fear. We’re talking about sand appearing on the trail and having a slip, which is different than just taking corners in deep sand, but on the one that you’re talking about, where you go, hey, when that back end starts slipping and sliding, I’m going into a fight with what I know is okay versus what my body thinks is not okay. And now I’m fighting for cognitive control over the fight and flight versus I’m in control and I’m thinking through this process Get out of the sand and do some slip and slide, do some sliding, do some rear wheel lockups where you get the bike kind of fishtailing, and it can be on anything grass, it can be on dirt, it can be on sand, it doesn’t really matter. But get those speeds up where you can just go down and just lock that rear end up and just slide the bike and get it comfortable with it. Then what you do is you start trying to deliberately kick the bike off balance and once you get the slide stable, you’ll lock it down, you start sliding, you want to come up with enough speed that you’re going to get a good 20, 30, 40 feet of slide. So you have some time to work with and then use the handlebars to upset the balance of the chassis and to get the bike to slide sideways just slightly. You want that fishtail. If you’re not able to do that, find a spot where there’s a light off camber. If you do the light off camber when you lock up the back end, you will get sideways slide. But start slow, don’t go in and go. Okay, I heard what Bret said. I’m going to do this here. We go 50 miles an hour. I’m going to do 150 foot skid and I’m going to slide sideways. No, no, no. Get a small section, a little place where you can lock up the back end and just get a little bit of that sideways slide. And that does two things. One, it reinforces your ability to go. This is okay. I’m not going to die the first time you fall down and this may happen I’m just going to throw it out there. Guys, if you’re listening, falling down while you’re learning, that’s okay. That’s how you find your limits, that’s how you stretch your limits. Crashing is bad, falling down is okay, but you want to reinforce that ability for your mind to go. This is okay. This is okay. This is okay. The failures you have are beneficial to you.

I got into dirt bike riding because I wanted to be a better street rider. In fact, I started racing on the racetrack because I wanted to be a better street rider. That was always my focus, and I still love travel, so I still have a lot of that in me. That’s how adventure travel came about. I wanted to learn how to slip and slide. I wanted to get comfortable with that loose feeling If I hit gravel, if I hit dirt. I wanted to feel okay with it.

And what I discovered is the first time that bike slipped out from underneath me. My brain went what the heck just happened? I had no idea what just happened. I just I was on the bike and now I’m on the ground. But your brain is going back through and picking up all those little details. Oh hey, this happened. And then I felt this, and then I did this and then I bounced on the ground. Okay, and the next time you go through, your brain picks up on it and says hey, I recognize this just before you hit the ground. And what happens? Each time you do that? It picks it up quicker and quicker and quicker, until we get to the point where it’s not something we’re just surviving. It’s something that we’re doing deliberately because it’s fun, right?

0:18:35 – Zak Parrish
Actually it’s funny in a way, because I remember a long time ago when I was a kid, I had a quad bike and of course that’s not going to fall over. You don’t have to worry about the balance aspect. But not too long after riding that like I was getting into just free fishtail you get on a dirt road and just kick the back end back and forth and I get the impression from the Africa Twin. If I wanted to, I could do that as well. I’ve just got to get over this block of feeling that back end do something other than be planted and not feeling like it’s going to kill me in the process.

0:19:02 – Bret Tkacs
Let me share you something about the Africa Twin. Most of my riding time is on a DCT, on the Africa Twin in India. That’s the only model they sell there, and I almost bought an Africa Twin. My big debate was do I go with a manual and get a recluse or do I go DCT? And I was playing around with that. I ended up waiting for a bit and then, of course, I went to the 790, which I don’t get to ride right now because it’s in the shop Honda. That would probably never happen.

0:19:32 – Zak Parrish
It was everything I could do not to make a commentary on that. You did buy a KTM, Bret, but anyway, sorry.

0:19:39 – Bret Tkacs
Yeah, well, we’re going to see how this all plays out. But the thing I discovered about the Africa Twin one is that DCT is so much fun to drift. The way that puts power to the ground, the way it spins up, it just makes me giggle. And the riding posture of that motorcycle is one of the most perfect balanced riding posture positions of any bike I’ve ever stood on For my six foot frame. I’m six foot, I’m around 180 pounds and it is absolutely ideal. I have never found a bike more fun to drift corners. Yeah, I’m six four and it fits me very well. Yeah, it is so much fun to do that. Having that bike kick out behind you and getting up forward on the bike is just, it’s a great place to be.

Now, what it isn’t as good at is the single track. And you were talking about going out on the single track and you get that Africa Twin, especially the adventure sports model, with that big tank. That is a monstrous motorcycle on a single track trail. As long as it’s moving, it’s pretty good, and that’s why I chose the 790s. I sold my dirt bike and I wanted to dual purpose my adventure bike for a while, that Africa Twin. When it comes to slipping and sliding to get in that bike, when you finally get around to just drifting that back end, whether it’s with the brakes or with power. You don’t have a better motorcycle that you can do that on.

0:21:05 – Zak Parrish
So you’re saying start out, do some straight line slides, get up some speed, lock up that back wheel, see how far that goes. Slowly grow that into sliding out that back wheel via braking. The next question then becomes the transition of. There’s really two ways to slide out the back wheel on dirt or on soft, it could be sand or gravel, whatever. You can do it with braking or you can do it with power. Yes, so do you ever actually just do like a power slide on power when you’re not just playing? Is there a practical aspect to it, or are you just doing that when you’re having fun?

0:21:39 – Bret Tkacs
For power slides. It’s almost universally fun.

0:21:43 – Zak Parrish
I mean, I love fun. Fun is awesome.

0:21:44 – Bret Tkacs
Yeah, it’s almost universally fun. I’m just messing around, having a good time, giggling and playing. Because on these big bikes if I’m traveling I probably have luggage and weight. It makes it a lot harder to break the back end consistently. I don’t really do that as a practical as much the brake sliding, on the other hand, I do. If I have to turn around on a tight trail I can slide that bike halfway around. It makes as half the turn. Now it’s not a U-turn, it’s a turn from a stop. If I’m coming down a trail or down a road and there’s a tight turn at the bottom, I can lock up that back end and slide the bike so as it comes down it stops square, point in the direction I want to go. There are a lot of times I do like sliding the back end. I can justify it as a practical use, but as far as power slides, for me that’s mostly confidence and giggle factor.

0:22:40 – Zak Parrish
I was morbidly curious because I know you can do it and I’ve done it a couple of times by accident. After I pulled over, caught my breath and realized I was still alive after doing it, I was wondering if there was something practical to that. So, coming back around turning on sand or loose traction really loose traction environments, let’s talk about that.

0:23:00 – Bret Tkacs
Let’s get into one very specific. Sand is kind of our underlying theme here. Let’s stick with sand and let’s get ourselves out of the patch sand or the surface sand and get ourselves into the really deep nasty stuff. Turning on sand you can turn, but we don’t really turn in the sense like when we’re on solid ground. We turn like a boat on the water. It’s more like you cut in, you have to turn and it has to take time. Also, you have to keep that front end up on top of the sand. The rear needs to keep moving so you have power going forward, but that front end you want to keep up on top. When the front end buries into the sand, that’s when we bite it. When our weight shifts too far forward, then that front end can bury because it can’t self-center, it can’t self-correct and we fall down. If I roll off the throttle and the weight pitches forward, the front end can bury. And then, because it’s constantly doing that left and right, even when you’re turning, that front end is still doing a little oscillation as it goes. That’s when the body position stuff starts changing.

We mentioned on a surface sand where we’re waiting for a patch or we’re not sure if we’re going to slide that. We kind of move forward on that Africa twin and we move to the outside of the bike. I’m moving up and over the corner of the tank In deep sand. I can’t really do that because now I’m weighting the front end too much. I’m going to bury that front end in. Now I need to get farther back on the bike and what I do is I wedge my. I generally use my knees and I wedge into the seat so as I lean back on the motorcycle I’m not holding on with the handlebars. That’s a major no-no.

0:24:36 – Zak Parrish
Yeah, that actually answers the question that’s going to come out of that, which is if you have to move your weight really far back to keep it up off the nose of the bike, are you not kind of falling apart on the whole weightless rider thing, because it seems your next natural thing is going to be to put back weight on your handlebars?

0:24:51 – Bret Tkacs
Remember the weightless rider thing comes back to that concept that I believe in, which is, as a rider, we’re in three states of action. We’re either proactive or active or reactive, and we can only move from one to the next Anytime I’m riding. In the moment I’m active, which means my next state is reactive, which is what happens just before we crash. So my goal is to always be in that proactive state. In a very deep sand, especially turning sand, my anticipation, what I think is about to happen is that I’m going to get a sudden slowing in the sand, especially during turning. You hit a large ridge or kind of a deep spot, you fall into a little bit of a trough and the motorcycle can slow relatively rapidly and more than you expect that throws you forward. And more than you expect that throws you forward If you’re already in a neutral position, where you’re really there and you’re like, yeah, I can let go, I’m perfect, I’m in the middle. When that happens, you’re going to be thrown forward on the bike. You’re no longer in balance, you’re out of position. I mean, that’s what dabbing is about. Dabbing is about getting back into position. Now we have a problem.

That balance point that I talk about isn’t a fine pinpoint spot. When you’re here, the bike is perfectly balanced. It’s an area, there’s a region that you can be in. I see this all the time when we’re standing up riding. Oh well, I’m standing straight up, I’m balanced, yes, but you’re right on the back edge of balance. The first time you hit a bump you’re back. If you lean slightly forward, you’re still balanced. But now when you hit a bump, you’re still in that area of balance. And that’s what we’re doing in the sand is. I’m going to go all the way to the back edge. I’m going to get as far back on that bike as I can get and still be in some balance, or just even maybe just slightly outside of it. So when I get that sudden slowing, I’m not thrown forward and I need to be light on the handlebars because those are trying to track the ground and if I have my hands gripped around the handlebars, we’re hosed.

0:26:51 – Zak Parrish
Right, you’ll be fighting it because it’s going to want to wiggle and fight its own course through the sand?

0:26:56 – Bret Tkacs
Yeah, and that’s the other thing. People believe they have to be in control. In fact, they think they’re in control. We’re not in control. You ride a five 600 pound motorcycle through the sand. The bike’s in control. You’re making suggestions? Yeah, that makes sense.

0:27:10 – Zak Parrish
I think the part where I struggle the most is just trying to figure out what that balance point actually means. Now I get kind of on the cognitive level, as we mentioned before, that, okay, I know I’m about to get into some deep sand, so let’s go ahead and start to get the weight back. The bike is going to hit that sand and I’m going to feel some G forces pull me back forward. That’s all fine and good. I now know, though, that, like, as I start to move across this sand, I got to keep that weight back, and I can only do that so much, because, eventually, you know like we’re not accelerating anymore, so there’s nothing to fight against. So are you like locking your knees on the seat and just kind of using your leg strength to stay leaned back Because you shouldn’t be doing with your hands, right? Does this make sense?

0:27:52 – Bret Tkacs
Yeah, no, that’s exactly what I do. One is with motocross boots. It makes it a lot easier, Right, If people are wearing adventure boots, and anytime you see a boot that says adventure on it, what that says is this is a really nice touring boot that looks like a dirt bike boot. That’s kind of what that that label means. But if you’re in a motocross boot or a very heavy, heavy duty boot, that lock in helps you out tremendously because you’re locked in not just at the knees but you can wedge back against the back edge of the foot pegs and then that wedges you into the seat and then, yeah, you’ve got to have just a little bit of strength at the quads to kind of hold your body as you’re hanging out just behind your knees.

But it shouldn’t be much. I mean, we should not be burning muscle. If you come out and your legs are smoked, something’s, either you really need to hit the gym or your chances are you’re doing something wrong. I mean, it’s right, I teach lazy riding. I believe in energy conservation. Conserve my energy. Let’s face it. We’re not young guys in this sport. If you’re in your 50s, you’re at the top of the bell curve and it drifts off left and right from there into the 40s on one side and 60s on the other. And yeah, we have to have a little bit of strength. But the biggest thing is being smart and learning how to wedge, learning how to lean against the motorcycle in different places so you don’t hold onto the handlebars but no, you’re absolutely correct, I do angle my feet and my boots so that I end up pinning myself on the back edge of the foot pegs and usually against a soft part of the seat.

0:29:26 – Zak Parrish
That makes sense A lot of the things that you read and a lot of the videos that you watch on trying to grow. These techniques don’t focus very much on how you’re using the bike itself as a tool of leverage. They talk a lot about keeping your balance, staying within a certain like cone of balance, or keeping yourself perpendicular to the earth as you lean the bike. There’s all kinds of fun things you learn, but there are little nuances to making those motions real on your particular motorcycle. That I think can be a little tricky to feel unless you’ve actually tried it or ask somebody like you.

0:30:02 – Bret Tkacs
And I think I’m unique within the industry. I know a lot of instructors and I’ve been doing this for 24 years, full-time motorcycle instruction and riding for quite a bit longer. Of course, I detail, I look for those little nuances and details of the things we’re doing. You can find some absolutely phenomenal, incredible, talented riders, but they cannot articulate the small details of what they’re doing. Paul, one of the other instructors, my right-hand man, Paul, was.

He always comes back to the whole gymnast thing. You know, if you look at these gymnasts, these Olympics, these are young girls doing a lot of this and there’s some big, fat Russian guy that’s coaching them. He can’t do anything. They can do not a thing, but he can see the details, he can provide them guidance on how to improve. And that’s what I’ve always focused on for myself is I don’t have to be better than other people. I don’t have to be the best rider. I have to be good at making other people better than they are.

And that’s one of the reasons I was concerned, to be honest, when I did the started doing the Mototrek series. You know, if I do this, why would anybody come to a school with me? Why would anybody come and do one of the adventure tours with me. If I’m giving all my secrets away, because I give away a lot of small details and what happened, of course, is more people want to come, and it’s because, although you can know what you’re supposed to do, you can hear what you’re supposed to do, but have somebody see you and identify the small nuances that you’re missing or what you need to modify because of your body type or your physical ailments or limitations, and how to work around those.

And that’s what keeps me interested. That’s why I’m still doing this. That’s why I like working with old guys on adventure bikes, because we’re not smart enough to give it up. We have too much money to be smart about it. So we go out and buy these adventure bikes and everybody has a story. Everybody’s got a bad something, a missing something, history, they bought a bike too tall, they bought a bike too small. There is something, and it’s fun because I have to work really hard to help each individual overcome those specific challenges, and that’s what I really enjoy.

0:32:21 – Zak Parrish
I am waiting to hear when your next schedule is popping up. I actually would have tried to get in there this year, but of course things happen. But no, I really want to be able to have a ride where somebody who knows what they’re doing and can articulate it can ride along next to me and go like, okay, well, here’s where you screwed up, or here’s where you’re struggling, or here’s what you’re fighting against. I definitely see the value in that sort of thing.

0:32:45 – Bret Tkacs
You mentioned the schedule and I I’m just about ready to post up. By the time anybody hears this, that schedule will be posted up and they’ll always find it on my website. You know the Bretcaxcom. I’m doing extra camp next year, so I’m not just doing two, I’m doing three. I still have the we’re limited on our time, that we don’t have snow in the high mountains, so I still only have a couple of training tours each year that I do here in Washington, but I’m also looking to try to do things in the winter and I love travel. I love international travel. This year in February I’m doing the Nepal tour and I’ve got a couple of spots.

I lost a few people due to COVID, Not like they passed away, but you know work and schedules and you know we had to move it from November to February and so that just didn’t work for everybody. But the idea was to really give people a chance, not to put a curricula out, not to come out and say, hey, I’m going to teach you how to do all these different things and most of these all but one of the riders going right now is a former student of mine. As soon as they heard I’m going, they’re like I’m in, let’s go. And what they know is that the goal is let’s go, have a good time, let’s adventure, and if there’s a challenge, if there’s a specific challenge, let’s work our way through it. And that’s the value to them. And doing that in an environment where we get to explore a very unique country where we’re getting out of our comfort zone for what’s here at home. I’m dying to do that more often and I’m also looking at possibilities of trying to do a few things elsewhere in the US.

I used to train over on the East Coast a lot. We just lost our contract for the military. I did a mentor training so we would travel all over the country training special forces guys. We just lost that contract and so that makes sense. We’re spending all this money on COVID. It turns out Captain Kirk took my money, so it sounds like the space force that was just stood up. Everybody has to put into the pot and we got trimmed off of that. But the good news for those that are interested in doing things with me, especially for adventure riding, is it really frees up a ton of time that I couldn’t free up in the summer to do other training events or in the winter to try to get out and offer some different events. So I’m hoping to have more stuff but also do some special stuff.

You know, do a day where we just go out in the mud. I did a class years ago called Mission Impassable, and it sounds as much fun as it is. Our goal was to go out in the mud. I did a class years ago called Mission Impassable, and it sounds as much fun as it is. Our goal was to go out and get stuck and work our way through it and what techniques and what methods and how do we work together to get through this challenge of the day, and it was set up to be progressively more challenging, with different things that we should be able to get through with technique and then to the point where we were shoveling out a rutted road because the 1200 GSs didn’t fit. They would drive down and their cylinder heads would wedge into the mud walls. It was an absolute hoot. It was an absolute hoot, so I’m hoping to be able to offer that kind of stuff here in the future.

0:35:37 – Zak Parrish
I feel like I do that kind of thing in my Jeep all the time, eventually fall back on my winch, and I don’t have one of those on my motorcycle yet.

0:35:49 – Bret Tkacs
You are certainly one of the individuals that may benefit if you could ever find one of those worn winches, because when we first spoke, you reached out to me. You know your bike’s nickname, the lawn dart, yes, and I saw the video that you put online of you riding through that park and, sure enough, it looked like, oh, that’s a nice soft sand field and we’ll just go to the other side. And your bike just instantly stopped.

0:36:09 – Zak Parrish
It was a storage pit.

0:36:11 – Bret Tkacs
It was buried past the fender.

0:36:13 – Zak Parrish
Yep, yep. So that sucked, by the way. But no, and you know what? I think the big takeaway from that is don’t ever just go up over a berm if you don’t know where you are, because I didn’t really know what was on the other side. I was hot and I was miserable and I came up over the top and yeah, you come over and you’re like, oh okay, it’s just some sand, I’ll be fine, and like, just comes to a dead halt.

0:36:36 – Bret Tkacs
Sometimes we lose sight of the reality when we’re watching these movies or reading magazines and you see pictures and, let’s face it, the most glorious video is always the worst technique. If you cross a water crossing perfectly, and you can stay up on the feet and you know how to manage your clutch and you pick the right speed, it just doesn’t look exciting. And that was one of the issues, tim, when we were making the motorcycle. He goes, yeah, can you make it more exciting? I’m like, well, no, I’m not going to crash to make a video, forget it, can you do it on your back wheel.

Yeah, can you make it look harder? I’m like, well, no, that’s kind of not the point here. Well, I think the takeaways for those that are listening is there’s several different things that we have to overcome. This is just kind of a review of what we talked about, which is one is we need to understand where we are on the motorcycle and gain more experience and just repetition.

The more we repeat, the better we are at predicting what’s about to happen, whether it’s sand or gravel, and getting up into that weightless rider spot, finding ways to wedge yourself on the motorcycle. So you’re not holding on to the handlebars, your hands are always loose, you’re only touching the handlebars to touch the controls. The bike will want to balance itself, whether we’re turning in deep sand, whether we’re turning on light sand. It wants to keep going through. And then the last thing is we need to become comfortable, being just a little uncomfortable. If you’re always in your comfort zone, you’re never going to push yourself over that limit. If you don’t want to slide the tire, you better start trying just short skids and then longer skids and then long, if you’re not constantly challenging yourself and just to the near limit, not blowing through the limit, but just right up on that edge until you can become comfortable and understand and respond and predict and then push it just a little bit more.

0:38:23 – Zak Parrish
I will ask you this though when you hear people talk about sand and gravel and all this, you always hear the same phrase, and I think to a new rider it sounds great, but it doesn’t make the most sense. Everybody says steer with your feet.

0:38:39 – Bret Tkacs
Oh, do we have to do that? That’s in another entire 45 minute chat. Okay, okay, okay, but let’s, so, let’s, let’s just get back that there are. I’m going to address that, but I’m going to address it, but let’s just keep it.

It’s not just the feet, it happens for on road riding. You know, guys are like, okay, hang off the bike and you drop your knee. If you take, like, the motorcycle safety foundation, they have a class called the advanced rider course and and they they say, okay, so when you corner you want to go in and down, or wrist to chin, so you’re supposed to go forward on the bike and lean where your wrist is over your chin. The problem is none of those actually explain what you’re trying to accomplish. If I go wrist over chin to hang off, if I’m on a sport bike and I move down inside the bike into the proper position, I’ll be there. But if I do that same technique on an adventure bike, it’s wrong because you’re not accomplishing the physical aspects that are supposed to happen. And weighting the feet is the same thing. If I’m on a motorcycle and I’m trying to make the bike turn and I want to stay up on top of the bike, the bike rolls underneath me. If I lean to the outside of the motorcycle and all of my weight is on the outside foot, then I’m going to say, oh, I’m waiting the outside foot. But in reality what I’ve done is I’ve rotated and should actually be your outside knee but we’ll come back to some other talk. I’ll address that. Just because of where I put my body, I’m going to feel pressure on that foot, but in a different scenario or a different rider, they may not shift out. They may use their inside foot to push themselves to that position. Therefore saying, oh, I’m waiting the inside foot. So it’s not actually about waiting either foot. That is a symptom of what we’re trying to accomplish and we get a lot of that kind of advice from riders hey, do this. And it may be true partially.

Here’s an example happened to me. So I attended Shane Watts. Shane Watts is a ISDE champion. He does a off-road school called Dirt Wise. Highly recommend it. It is not for adventure riders, it is strictly a dirt bike school.

I’ve spent years and years and years training street riders and I’m always talking about where to put your eyes. Get your eyes up, look through the corner, don’t look where you’re at. You want to look where you want to go, and this is something most of us are probably familiar. Anybody listening to this podcast is probably educated enough that they’ve heard. You want to look where you want to go. And Shane yelled at me because I was looking too far through the corner, Like, what are you talking about? That’s where I want to go. He goes, yeah, but that’s not where you want your bike to be. Now, where your tire is.

He had to teach me to look into the rut that I was riding into because I was going to berm ride. So, yeah, I would look through the corner, but I would then use my eyes to target my wheel placement by looking into the rut, placing my tire there, and then, once the bike started to drive, then I could pick my eyes up and look down the straightaway. I had to untrain something. I was just going based on what I was taught, and it all made sense to me. But in that environment, in that moment, that wasn’t the right technique. And if we’re missing details, if we’re missing elements, if we change the environment, we have to change the way we think of the things that we do, which is why I don’t like teaching formulas. That’s why I like teaching what’s going on, what are the dynamics of you, the rider in the land, so you can adapt those as those different environments and situations change. Yeah.

0:42:06 – Zak Parrish
And I’m sorry to bring up a totally different. Well, I mean it’s a related topic. I wasn’t trying to get us off into a whole other thing, but we just got done talking about how great you are with articulating things and nobody has ever really explained that. It feels very relative. Folks say I’m waiting the outside and I’ll try to do that, but it feels like I pushed off from the inside and so there’s always a weird trade-off in there somewhere.

0:42:28 – Bret Tkacs
And coming back to the sand thing, oh, you want add throttle. Everybody’s heard that from somebody, whether they believe it or not.

0:42:34 – Zak Parrish
Well, and the other side of that too is, I feel like a lot of those types of advice you get, like add throttle or whatever, start to fade away once you’re playing on a DCT bike, Because a lot of those add throttle things come with the caveat of but if you add too much, be ready to grab your clutch and pull some of that power back off the back wheel.

0:42:56 – Bret Tkacs
And you don’t always have that option on every motorcycle out there, and that’s where the DCT, as a modification, the number one thing I’d be looking for is a rear handbrake. Yeah, I know that Recluse was in the process of making one for the DCT.

0:43:07 – Zak Parrish
I don’t think it’s out yet. Yeah, last.

0:43:09 – Bret Tkacs
I looked, I didn’t see it. That’s what would make that bike perfect is just having that rear handbrake, because where normally we add throttle and then we feed the power out with the clutch, which you would end up doing on the DCT, and what I end up doing, except you have to use the foot brake, because anybody listening no, the parking brake on the left hand grip is not a rear brake. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a precise, powerful handbrake that you could use to finally control the release of power, because what happens on the DCT is you put power into the transmission so it goes to the back wheel, and then you feed that power out by releasing the brake. All your slow maneuvering skills, all your detail skills that we’d normally use a clutch for on DCT, you end up using the brake instead. Well, you have any other questions for me?

0:44:01 – Zak Parrish
What I could use more than anything. Or like I need ideas for drills. I need practical things that I can go out and do, because I don’t have the option right now of getting training. It’s not a thing in the world we live in right now. I need things that I can do that will start to build up that muscle membrane. I can come up with a few, but hearing them is always good too.

0:44:23 – Bret Tkacs
First of all, anytime you ride the bike doing sand or low speed U-turn stuff, if you can put a camera on yourself, it’s always a win, because when you see it right and you see it wrong, you’re more likely to be able to identify that, but when you’re on the motorcycle you can’t sense it.

0:44:42 – Zak Parrish
You mean separate from me, like tripod or elsewhere, exactly.

0:44:45 – Bret Tkacs
Tripod or a friend or something where you can really critique yourself, and that can be a huge, a huge benefit. In fact, I’ve had a few people send me videos out of India and stuff going, hey, I just can’t figure this out.

0:45:04 – Zak Parrish
And they’ve sent it and I’m like, oh well, do this, this and this, and they’ll send follow-up videos and I don’t try to share that too much because that’s not scalable. Yeah.

0:45:09 – Bret Tkacs
It’s not scalable, yeah, I mean, unless people were paying for individual and I I’m just not trying to push that, you know that’s not my thing. But so definitely video, personal video, anything that allows you to get comfortable with the movement and the sliding. So definitely the inline brake sliding the sand, just going through sand over and over and over and over, so that you can get a database of experience. When you see something, what’s going to happen, how experienced is it For you? Some of the low speed maneuvers, doing things where you use trees or even put out cones on the ground, and going around the low speed stuff, things that are very, very technical, because with the DCT that’s one of the hardest processes.

At speed, the DCT, most riders will do better on a DCT than a regular bike. But at low speed, that’s where you start going. Man, it would be kind of nice to have a clutch. You have to learn that change. So I would do some low speed, really getting to use that modulation, the brake and the brake release with the throttle over the top of it. The other one that I would suggest is the one that I mentioned that I do, which is the hands-off activities and any chance you get because cause you don’t have. Well, you do have cruise control.

0:46:23 – Zak Parrish
I do have cruise control. The bike is very fancy.

0:46:26 – Bret Tkacs
Yeah, you’re set. That’s why, actually that’s the reason, I didn’t buy the Africa 2000. The cruise control was a deal breaker for me. But if you can get out on the road, I do street cornering like 15, 20 mile an hour corners, hands-off, where I’m going down these hills, where there’s s turns, one after the other after the other, but they’re all evolution of understanding the balance of the bike, making sure my body’s in the right place and and understand it. So downhill is easy. You can just kind of coast down the hills, use your rear brake for speed control so you don’t touch the handlebars. When you have cruise control it’s nice because you can set it on roads and actually ride them. Probably not something I should recommend everybody to do.

0:47:04 – Zak Parrish
I get it, but anytime I’ve done it on the street, because the bike is actually incredibly well balanced when you’re moving. I put my my hands up on the tank just to kind of see how it works and I think I got that idea. Watch, you were doing a video where you had a gopro apparently on your face and you were talking with your hands. Yes, yes, and I was like I wonder if I could do that. And, yeah, I can get pretty far and I can shift my hips and I can get the bike to wiggle back and forth and all that, but the question is I haven’t tried that on the dirt, yeah, but can you take a 90 degree turn?

No, sir, no absolutely not, and. I could do one on my mountain bike, but my mountain bike is not 600 pounds and is not powered by a 100 horsepower engine and that’s when you start getting that trust is when you start taking it’s again, getting out of that comfort.

0:47:46 – Bret Tkacs
Most of us can go straight, we can wiggle back and forth, go, yeah, this bike is stable. Can you do the same thing in a corner, downhill, uphill, dirt street Street’s? Usually better to start with that, but definitely getting into that position where again, going through a little bit of sand and seeing, can you go through it with hands off? If you’re going down like a regular dirt road, it’s got a nice patch of sand in it, not like deep, massive sand, just something that makes a bike squiggle and squirm just a tad. Can you ride through it with your hands off? Will you still trust the motorcycle? And the more trust you get, the more you realize and this is the real value the more you realize that you don’t have to control it, the more you can relax and you can plan ahead and you can get proper suggestions to the bike. But as long as we think we’re in control and we’re holding on tight, we’re the only reason it’s not falling down and in fact it’s probably the opposite. That’s when you’re still always going be in kind of that novice state. You’ll never quite get to that Zen master rider state. So I would focus on doing those kinds of activities, the ones that really get you into that squirm, that squiggle.

The other ones you can do is doing a lot of narrow track riding. Put down a two by six ride the length of a two by six ride, the length of a two by six ride, the length of a two by four. Stack those two by sixes. I used to make drills where they were maybe six. Two by six is tall and I would ramp them like two inch, two inch overlap, where you’d ride up it and down it and up it and down it on the same 14 foot. Two by six or two by eight, do that same thing and then pause in the middle and then keep going, because if you miss it you just ride off the edge. It doesn’t hurt anything, you’re not going to fall, you’re not going to get hurt. But the first time you do that your brain goes oh, this is really scary.

If you and I were to put two by fours out and go, let’s walk across this, don’t touch anything, balance on the two by four, you and I would both do that successfully, no problem. Now elevate it a foot and put some cinder blocks underneath it. How well will you do it? Now raise it 10 feet over a pool, now raise it 10 feet over concrete, now put it 100 feet in the air, and what you’ll find is that board has never changed, but our ability to be successful does, and so that’s what we’re trying to do is become so comfortable, so competent. But if you go over that board enough times, at any elevation, you’ll eventually become comfortable with it.

0:50:11 – Zak Parrish
And that makes sense. Now that the temperature is no longer in the triple digits. I want to go back out to that park that I shot that video and get a little more practice out there. But they also have a junior motocross track that they’ll let me take laps on if I want to. So it’s got some nice up and down. You don’t have to get air on it if you don’t want to. But what I’m really interested in taking is they got a lot of the high banked turns that are really gnarly deep sand, grit, mud, dirt at the bottom. You know it’s MX stuff. I’d love to see if I could actually make it through that without laying the bike over too many times. But that’s coming soon.

0:50:51 – Bret Tkacs
Well, let me know how it goes. Seriously, let me know how it goes. It should be interesting. It was fun watching your video going through.

0:51:01 – Zak Parrish
Did you actually watched?

0:51:02 – Bret Tkacs
that I watched parts of it. I didn’t watch. I didn’t sit down with popcorn, watch the whole thing, but I watched little sections. Basically, I was looking for your lawn, dart.

0:51:10 – Zak Parrish
Yeah, so I tried to put in the description like just here’s a link to the end, if you just want to watch me do something really dumb on my motorcycle.

0:51:16 – Bret Tkacs
But yeah, I wanted to see the lawn dart and I was like, oh wow, that really does look pretty mundane as you approach, of course, cameras always flatten everything out. Nothing ever looks as gnarly on camera as it does in the real world. I’m aware of that. But yeah, it didn’t look all that freaky and I’m like okay. So you probably saw a little more of the wave and the silt on it than I did.

0:51:41 – Zak Parrish
But yeah, I certainly didn’t see anything that would just go hey, sudden stop, yeah, so no, it just coming over the top, like I looked down and it’s almost like the world goes into freeze frame and you go, okay, so this is a sandy plain, no big deal. You can even see some footprints in it, but I had no idea that I was going to do that.

0:51:57 – Bret Tkacs
Yeah, that was fantastic picture, though. Fantastic picture, yep, Zak, I really appreciated you coming on to Around the Wheel and having this chat about sand and talking about the Africa Twin. I think the people listening hopefully they’ll enjoy some of the stories or at least giggle at some of the things that we came up with, and hopefully we gave them some things to work on as well. Everybody listening again the round the wheel every first and third Thursday of the month. As long as I can keep it up and I have people doing this. All of my guests are coming from Patreon. These are supporters at the fan club and, above some magnificent people coming on with experienced world travelers, pilots, and I think one of the most valuable talks so far has been Zak, who is just coming to the table, is going. Look, I’m an experienced rider. I rode as a kid. I’ve ridden Harleys. Adventure bikes are none of the above. And how do I keep myself upright? How do I not get myself hurt? And, Zak, thank you again for coming on to the show.

0:53:01 – Zak Parrish
Bret, thank you so much for taking the time to talk through this and the videos. You’re making All of your efforts. They’re greatly appreciated. Please don’t stop.

Transcribed by https://podium.page