New rider needs help

If you ever feel like I helped you in any way and maybe you owe me a solid, I’d like to cash it in for a favor for this rider. I was cruising around reddit and ran into the aforementioned post by a motorcycling hopeful who’s taking the BRC and doesn’t seem to be super-confident.

This whole thing is supposed to be fun, right? So I was hoping the do-gooders among us might be willing to pile into the comments section as an impromptu cheer squad, because by the sound of it, it seems like fun might be in short supply in this scenario. Assuming class starts near the end of a workday, we’ve got a few hours, it would seem.

Editor's note: And if you happen to be a new rider stumbling across this days or months from now, maybe you can be encouraged by some secondhand support.

When I started motorcycling, I succeeded mostly by dint of perseverance. And I don’t mean that in a good way — I was simply too stupid to know when to quit. I had little or no help, and life was harder than it needed to be. That's a pretty rough way to learn, so maybe we can help someone ride a motorcycle, not a struggle bus.

At Common Tread, we’ve written before about the dearth of new riders. I don’t know how to fix that problem on the macro level, but I absolutely know how to fix it on the micro one, and I try to do that often.

Maybe the big fix starts with a thousand little notes.