I took an Adventure Motorcycle Riding Class at RawHyde

[Music] [Music] so we just showed up at the rawhide training camp here with my dad jerry and we are taking a adventure bike training course here so we're just north of castaic lake they got a whole like compound here so yeah check it out so the class we took is called intro to adventure it's a two day course we showed up there friday night and we rode all day saturday and sunday they have rooms like bunk houses or some private rooms there on site but jerry and i decided to bring his motor home and just sleep on site [Music] rawhide is definitely affiliated with bmw motorcycles so the majority of the bikes there are the gs either 1250 or some of the smaller cc bikes as well they do offer bmw rentals but you do have the option to bring in your own bike as well jerry just recently picked up the yamaha tenera 700 and then my uncle had a husqvarna 701 that i borrowed it's technically somewhere in between a dual sport and an adventure bike i was happy i was fortunate enough to ride through the different bikes while i was at the training course i got to ride a little bit of the gs 1250 the tenera 700 and also the husky so the day started off with some classroom style instruction from the man himself jim hyde who's the founder and owner of rawhide adventures i gotta say the caliber of instructor at this course was really really high all these guys had a ton of experience in the adventure touring world i could tell they were all there just out of a love and a passion for the sport the most familiar behavior you have on the motorcycle you guys are on street riders to tighten up your turn you lean in right you just lean that bike over lean in with it so the first few exercises were all geared towards having more confidence in your ability to manage the weight of a motorcycle so the first thing we did was learn how to pick up the bike properly when it falls down we learned both how to pick up the bike alone and how to do an assisted pickup the next exercise we did and i don't have footage of this is we had to walk around the bike with the kickstand up and basically balance the bike as we walked around the full circumference of the bike and this is basically to illustrate how easy it is to handle the weight when the weight is properly balanced straight up and down after that we did some friction zone exercises where we started with the bike and both walked alongside of it using just first gear in the friction zone with very little throttle next we straddled the bike as you see here in this footage and we put our right hand on the brake master cylinder and didn't use any throttle and again this was just to get the friction zone going we basically used just the engine power at an idle and using the friction zone to walk the bike up a really small incline and then back the bike down backwards by pulling in the clutch and just walking it down clutch control and feathering the clutch is super important in adventure riding and really all off-road riding it really takes a lot of finesse so there was a lot of emphasis on clutch control and really finding that friction zone and feathering the clutch in and out because this would set us up for a lot of the tight technical terms that we'd be doing for the rest of class [Music] all right so we're waking up day two and the first day was really cool we started off with a lot of like basic stuff we started off with some of these exercises and drills that really helped us manage the weight of a bike you know things like walking around the bike and holding it up and you know really getting that center of gravity straight up and down so you aren't carrying the weight the weight of the bike is carried by the tires so and then we did a lot of braking things they wanted you to get the feel of you know braking and skidding your rear wheel and then also skidding your front wheel which can be kind of sketchy you just skid it for a second they didn't have you you know skidded completely to a stop and then they had you use both brakes and do a panic stop where you you know stopped using both brakes and made sure that you locked them up and skid just so you get the feel of it and so you don't you know panic in you know a situation where you're really using it there we go nice after we kind of learned the balance of the bike being acclimated with the weight and how to manage that and clutch management and also braking then we started going into like some turns and so things like 180 degree turns and just really tight turning and proper body placement and you know where to you know look use using your head you know where to visualize and look through the turn basically and then after that we rode some trails and where we kind of used all those skills and combine them together and you know put them i guess into a little bit more of a real world application [Music] they had this pretty cool like little what they call an obstacle course where like i said you kind of combine all of your skills all together and you know do some tight turns go through some narrow trees go over some rocks they have one of those teeter-totter style wooden boards which is pretty cool [Music] then they had us do like some some figure eights which was a lot of fun so you know the goal was to try to get the steering completely locked out both directions so that really takes a lot of you know finesse and balancing it kind of combines a lot of skills all together in proper clutch control and would they would put five or six guys in a figure eight at the same time so really a lot of it is what we're doing is is first gear you know really good bike control uh both clutch body positioning counter weight balancing with your body and you know proper braking as well just a lot of real finesse stuff at slow speeds now we're going into day two i think day two we're gonna get out and do more like actual riding where we're you know traveling a little bit and trying to combine all these skills all together and yeah i'm pretty excited for it so we'll see how it goes [Music] so we started off day two with kind of a refresher and we started on what they call the meadow which is kind of like a ribbon track where you're doing these tight 180 degree turns and they opened up a second portion of the track where it was more of like a hill in the woods where it was more of an off camber terrain and so it added a certain degree of difficulty to what we had done the prior day and i got to start off and do a lot of the stuff the second day on the gs 1250. the gs i actually felt like was a little bit easier on the flat terrain and the technical stuff with the boxer engine on the gs you have almost like these two wings that go out either side and help you balance a little bit more so the standing up technical tight turns the the heavier bike was actually easier so you know a lot of people are always thinking like the heavier bike is going to be harder in every situation when that's really just not the case at all that and a lot of it is just how you fit the bike as well i felt like i fit the gs a little bit more where i could stand up straight and have a better posture than on the husqva varna of course me being tall it really helps if you have risers on the bike which the gs definitely did the second day we were going up steep hills and i much prefer a lighter bike if i'm going up steep hills but for like 90 percent of the train we were going through the heavier bike in the bmw really didn't make that big of a difference and that includes the 10 array as well the 108 was really smooth and i liked it a lot but again the reduction in weight from the bmw to the 10 array really didn't make that big of a difference [Music] this is definitely not a class that you want to take as a beginner rider you definitely need a little bit of a foundation in how to ride a motorcycle whether that be you know dirt bike riding or on street riding because i think if you were to come into this class as a fresh rider you'd really struggle a lot you know these bikes are really heavy and we're doing really technical stuff and most of the guys here actually do have i think all the guys actually have a pretty good foundation of writing skills i mean for me it really has helped me really sharpen my skills as well yeah nonetheless it's a really good refresher and i definitely would not recommend you know something like this for a brand new rider yeah once you get off-road on on these real heavy bikes you know a lot of these real finely tuned technical skills really come into play so yeah if you're a brand new writer i would definitely start with like an msf basic writer course first and then use those skills and that knowledge for a little while before you then take on the intro to adventure writing like this course because yeah your skills will definitely be put to the test and you know your clutch management is definitely put to the test as well so yeah you should be writing for at least a year minimum before you try to take on an intro to adventure writing class like this having tip overs and dropping the bike was actually celebrated in this class the instructors told everybody to honk their horns when they see someone go down and that's for two reasons one to notify the other class members if someone went down to avoid further accidents and two is almost like a congratulatory honk that you learned something you made a mistake you learned something so i feel like the environment and atmosphere around making mistakes and pushing yourself to the limits was a good healthy one there's obviously a big stigma in the motorcycle world around dropping your bike can be can be an embarrassing thing but the instructors and their classmates really celebrated it because everybody makes mistakes we're all learning and we're all trying to better ourselves because when you was it yeah it was turning right you got your foot in and you rotated your foot and your knee and you were doing real tight ones this way okay good when you went that way this foot didn't turn in oh really yeah dude i pointed out to that guys because when you turn the foot in your whole body turn yeah when you did that you were able to dip your bar along there so when i was turning left i wasn't doing it i wasn't turning my foot in right right yeah you weren't turning your right foot in uh okay i gotta work on that yeah well that's what i'm saying you know what i mean everybody's got one direction that's different than the other yeah so we just completed our second day at rawhide this adventure bike training here and it was cool we kind of got to combine all the skills that we learned the first day and put them all together today we did some stuff like riding in the sand uh we did some hill climbs uh we did some stopping on a hill and going down hills and kind of had to navigate that what'd you think dad i thought it was great it exceeded my expectations had a really good time as they say no blood no oil so the bikes were great and it was a really good class a really good experience one of the instructors uh had like a man crush on jerry because of his balance technique he said he had the best balance of any student he'd ever seen do you feel like your skills have been improved although you've been a you know long time off-road rider uh i think my skills were greatly enhanced today but uh i think we're exaggerating things just a little bit on the greatest guy he's ever seen or anything like that no way well i didn't say the greatest guy he said he had really good balance for no guy i'm okay yeah so it was good definitely sharpened some skills and it was fun to you know we got to try a bunch of different bikes the instructors were pretty cool and so they let me try like a gs 1250 we had the yamaha tenera 700 that i rode and then we had the husqvarna 700. so i kind of got a taste of you know three different sizes of adventure bikes and so they they definitely have their pros and cons we we're doing some pretty steep hill climbs at the very end and you know the the 700cc like the tenere and the husqvarna were definitely better than say your gs 1250 but yeah all in all rawhide this is a class act this place is really really good if you're thinking about getting into adventure riding the intro to adventure riding which is the class that we took is definitely good i would highly recommend it you don't want to come here if you're a beginner rider though we there was a couple beginner riders here that had some on-road riding experience and they actually had to bow out like halfway through the class just because you know it's just too challenging and they're just dropping the bike a lot you are dealing with some really heavy bikes and doing some you know really technical stuff that requires a lot of finesse actually so you're going to want to have the basics down really really good but yeah really really fun all in all what other skills did we learned today dad we did we did breaking now let's see here we did the sand wash we did hills we did a lot of hill stuff we did stopping on hills yeah some tighter like 180 degree turns yeah we did like some 180 degree turns on like off-camber terrain that was pretty cool but yeah the setting in this place is really awesome as well it's like tucked away in the hills up here so yeah fun day [Music] so i definitely feel like my skills have been improved and that i'm a little bit more ready for the pan america now you know i feel like i could i had a pretty good grasp on off-road riding before but this has definitely been nice to sharpen my skills a bit so yeah i'm even more excited to get on the pan america and really just explore some of the stuff you know out in southern california that can't be done on a your stereotypical harley i'm definitely pumped for the pan america to come out [Music] i want to thank jim hyde and his crew for an awesome experience at rawhide and hope to see you guys on a future [Music] expedition you

Channel: Matt Laidlaw

Views: 23,263

Rating: 4.9506173 out of 5

Keywords: Harley-Davidson, Motorcycles, Laidlaw's, ADV Motorcycle, Adventure Motorycle, Matt Laidlaw, Motorcycle Training, RawHyde Adventures, Rawhyde Motorcycle

Id: h41e2DiDciY

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020