Speed, Luck, and Time

From the Throttle to the Hobble

Youth

In the 1980s, in my teens, I wanted nothing more than a Suzuki Katana, all angles and attitude. By twenty I had my first taste of the barely civilised excess of a Suzuki GSX-R750.

Back then I was convinced horsepower was a kind of secular grace, bestowed not on the meek but on the mechanically devout. If you understood it, if you respected it, it was meant for you. The rest of the world simply had not been initiated.

I did not just love horsepower. I thought it belonged to me, as if it had been waiting patiently for my worthiness.

And tied to that was the larger delusion, immortality.

It was not that we thought death was impossible. It just seemed unlikely and, more importantly, misdirected. It happened to the unlucky, or the careless, or someone who miscalculated in a way we never would. We believed in our reflexes the way believers trust scripture.

The immortality of youth was not bravery. It was ignorance layered over resilience. We healed quickly enough to mistake recovery for invulnerability. If we survived a particular corner or decision, we took it as confirmation of judgement rather than luck.

Many did not get that confirmation.

Some names exist only in old photographs. Some bikes were never rebuilt. The margin between those of us who grew older and those who did not was often measured in inches and timing, not virtue.

At fifty-eight, cold and damp weather runs an audit on my body. Old injuries, half remembered crashes, years of throwing myself at the countryside, surface in my knees, lower back and shoulders like quiet accountants. I hobble first thing in the morning when the temperature drops. There is an accumulated record now, a ledger of consequences that teenage me would have dismissed as hypothetical.

Back then pain was temporary and abstract. Now it is historical.

That is the shift age brings. Horsepower no longer feels like a divine gift bestowed on the righteous. It feels conditional. Borrowed. The machines still offer power, but my body negotiates the terms.

At seventeen I thought speed proved I was meant for it.
At fifty-eight I understand I was simply spared, often by luck, sometimes by instinct, rarely by wisdom.

The impetuousness of youth made us feel eternal. The damp in my joints tells a different story. Somewhere between the throttle and the hobble is a more honest account of what it means to have survived.

Grown Up Things

By the mid-1990s I had my first mortgage. By the end of the decade I was a father and a husband.

The bike went into storage. It became impractical, a word that enters a man’s vocabulary sometime between his second child and his first term life insurance policy. I had acquired responsibilities more important than me. I developed opinions about mortgage rates. The most dangerous thing in my life was a petrol driven lawnmower.

When I became a father, and more to the point when I became the man the bank and the family both depended on, I understood the expectation. There is that line, “When I became a man, I put away childish things,” from the First Epistle to the Corinthians. It suggests a clean break, a moral upgrade, as though maturity is simply deletion.

From the outside that is probably what it looked like. The bikes went. The risk narrowed. Sensible car. Sensible hours. If you had inspected my life, you would have found no visible trace of the old compulsion.

But the truth was closer to addiction than reform.

An addict can appear clean. He can function, pay bills, raise children, show up early. No tremor in the hands. No residue in the bloodstream. The behaviour stops, but the appetite does not evaporate. It waits.

That was what it was like with motorcycles, with speed, with that teenage conviction that horsepower meant something metaphysical. I did not stop wanting it. I quarantined it.

Internally there was never any doubt. Not once did I believe I was over it. I was simply not using at that time. You do not become an ex-addict. You become an addict who has reasons not to use.

Fatherhood gave me those reasons. Provision gave me those reasons. Responsibility built a perimeter fence around the old appetite. I stayed inside it as long as I could.

But beneath the discipline was absolute certainty. Not hope. Not fantasy. Certainty.

One day I was going to use again. That knowledge did not make me reckless. It made me patient.

From the outside I had put away childish things. Inside I had preserved them at low heat, like coals banked overnight.

It was not long before the internet and broadband arrived and I discovered motorcycle forums.

They were brilliantly narrow. Entire arguments about oil viscosity. Four-page debates about carb jet sizes. Men from across the world posting grainy photographs of motorcycle parts as if they were medical scans. There was little performance of personality, just solid information and occasional dry sarcasm. In retrospect it was group therapy combined with serious technical knowledge.

It was my gateway drug, a way back in. A forum full of fellow addicts, most of whom were openly using again and dressing it up as a legitimate hobby.

At night, once the house was quiet, I would go out to the workshop I had built in the garage. Not far, just twenty paces from the kitchen. I was not vanishing, I was checking something. Out there sat whatever unloved 1980s relic I had dragged home. I told myself I was restoring history. In truth I was restoring a version of myself.

Rebuilding an old engine is honest work. You cannot sidestep a seized head stud. You cannot fudge valve timing. Either it works or it does not. Compared with the rest of my grown up life it felt almost spiritual.

Other like minded souls were performing the same ritual in their own sheds. We never said we needed it. We just asked and answered technical questions. It was camaraderie without confession.

When social media began to replace forums, I spent the second half of my forties, along with my Dutch friends, rescuing oldskoolsuzuki.info from slipping into oblivion. We did that because we felt an obligation to those who still wanted it and needed it. I am glad we did, and I am glad it is still doing what we worked so hard to ensure it would continue to do.

Wisdom

Now I am fast approaching sixty. The children have gone. The mortgage has gone. The time I once fought to steal is suddenly available in broad daylight.

The forums are all but gone, replaced by social media streams that seem less interested in carburettors than in outrage. I can find a hundred opinions on politics in seconds. Finding a coherent, technically useful thread is far harder. Algorithms feed content designed to trigger a response. Friends’ groups live in echo chambers. Division has replaced unity.

I have more bikes than ever now. They share one thing in common. I can maintain them all myself. Some I built from scratch, some I have rebuilt extensively, but mostly I maintain them and I ride them.

Now it is different.

I am riding more miles in a year than I probably did in my entire forties. Proper miles. Crossing half the country before breakfast. Taking the long way without apology. Loading the bike and disappearing for three days, camping under cold, indifferent stars with like minded souls who ride well, drink well and laugh heartily round an open fire. This life fulfils in a way no thread ever did.

The garage is no longer a refuge. It is a workshop in the literal sense. Maintenance and repair when required. The stable kept fit because the point now is not rebuilding but riding. The machines exist to move.

I am not pinned between a garage bench and a glowing screen any more. If I want to ride, I ride. Midweek. Early morning. No need to justify it. That freedom is both gift and warning.

Because I know it is conditional.

Bodies change. Health shifts without consultation. Friends disappear. Weather closes in. The window is open now, but I am not naïve enough to believe it will stay open indefinitely. That awareness sharpens everything. While I can swing a leg over and feel steady, that is exactly what I intend to do.

I want the real world. Damp tents. Campfire coffee. Engines ticking as they cool. Conversations that do not require Wi-Fi. Laughter that does not need punctuation. I am grateful for the online years. Those forums were a lifeline. We built something solid there, an informal, unsentimental support group disguised as mechanical advice. It mattered. I will maintain my commitment to keeping oldskoolsuzuki going, because I know how important it remains to many.

But for me, this phase of my life demands something else.

It demands that I exploit the freedom I worked decades to earn. Not recklessly, but deliberately. Use the miles while they are available. Share roads with people whose faces I can see and whose hands I can shake.

I do not feel the urge to narrate it any more. I do not feel compelled to post proof of motion. The validation I once got from a reply notification now comes from riding an open ribbon of tarmac with like minded souls, knowing I am going to laugh and drink round a fire tonight and then do it all again the next day.

At forty-five, rebuilding a bike felt like reclaiming my youth. At fifty-eight it feels more like negotiating with gravity. I make old man noises getting on and off my bikes. I have friends who no longer ride, not because they do not want to but because bodies make decisions pride cannot override.

Mortality is less abstract now. It sits in the garage with me, somewhere between the toolbox and the paddock stand.

That sharpness makes things clearer. The ride itself matters more than the build thread documenting it. The conversation and a cigarette at a roadside stop beats any online exchange. Standing with friends of a similar vintage, helmets off, laughing about how much our bike gear shrank over winter, feels more solid than any digital affirmation ever did.

In my twenties motorcycles were a calling. In my forties they were therapy disguised as maintenance. In my sixties they will be something else entirely, a deliberate choice to remain engaged with risk, skill and other human beings in real space.

I still enjoy the shed. I still enjoy the smell of fuel and warm metal. I simply no longer pretend I am rebuilding youth. I ride not to escape life, but for life not to escape me.

The irony is that we spent our middle years escaping into garages and forums to cope with adulthood. Now that we finally have time, we realise what we were really after was not escape at all. It was presence, with a machine that demands attention and with like minded people who understand why that demand still feels necessary.