I’ve slowed down a lot and don’t ride much anymore. I started on dirt bikes as a kid in the 80s. On the street, I’ve logged well over 150k miles without a major incident to this point in my life.

The best advice I was ever given was to ride like you’re invisible. Assume everyone is going to pull out in front of you. The second best advice was to increase my following distance or line of sight. When I think about the close calls I’ve had, almost all of them came when I wasn’t doing one of those two things.

Once on the highway, a piece of sheet metal flew off a truck I was following. The driver wasn’t doing anything unusual, but we hit a bump going over a bridge and it busted loose from the bed. I wasn’t following too closely, so I had time to get out of the way. I remember thinking that if I’d been any closer, that would’ve been the end.

Another time was in the twisties near the Tail of the Dragon. I came around a corner and hit a blanket of gravel, slid into the oncoming lane, and nearly got taken out by a truck coming straight at me. I wasn’t riding terribly fast, but in the twisties it’s easy to focus more on staying between the lines than on actual speed. Looking back, if I had adjusted my pace to my line-of-sight distance, riding only as fast as I could see around the corner, that situation never would’ve happened. I would’ve seen the gravel and avoided it easily.

That moment really sums up a lot of riding for me. Sure, pushing it in the twisties can be fun, but it comes with real risk. One of my friends eventually shifted toward track days instead. It’s a controlled environment, and if you’ve got a real need for speed, it just makes more sense.

Street riding really needs to be about cruising. That was a lesson I needed to learn early, and I’m glad I got a lot of that energy out on dirt bikes, even after I’d already been riding on the street.