Five months without riding

I have been living in the States now for almost 6 months...and I haven't riden since I moved here. For financial reasons, I decided agaisnt buying a motorbike here, but, God, I miss riding!

Losing weight sometimes has a downside

Back in January I hit my highest record weight: 94 kilos. Belgian food can kill you, let me tell you. I decided I had to do something about it, I needed to get back in shape. I needed to start going to the gym, rather than simply paying the gym's fee...

And so I did. At the moment I am 83 kilos and counting (hopefully). I was able to build back muscles and lose a lot of fat. I still need to lose around 5-7 kilos, but I feel great.

But if you are a biker with a lot of protective (and expensive) gear, losing weight has a phenomenal downside: all your gear is far too big. I had bought a leather protective jacket (my first motorbike leather jaket!!!) back in November, and I was waiting for April-May to start using it. Well, now it is far too big. It still has the label on it, I never never used it once. It is useless. 350 Euros thrown down the toilet.

Same thing for my summer mesh Clover Air Tek trousers, which I bought last year...and for the Dainese winter jacket. But at least I used those for one season...

The problem is that this gear now fits so loose that the protections at the elbows, the knees and the shoulders move around, and do not provide any guarantee of protection in case of a crash. The only item which I can safely wear is a Spidi Spring-Summer jacket which I bought back in March, when I had started already my diet and my exercise. I had bought it two sizes too small...as an incentive for me to get thiner...it worked, so now it is the only thing which I can use.

Now I am facing a dilemma. I am one of those bikers that use protective gear all the time, even in very hot weathers. I always wear a back protector and an harmoured jacket at the very minimum. Depending on the lenght of the journey I add harmored trousers and boots.

But what shall I do now? Should I buy new stuff? Should I contact the manufacturers of the products I own (some of them really only one year old) and see whether these products can be adjusted? Or should I just sit and wait until I am sure I can keep my weight? And what should I do in the meantime?

Don't get me wrong. I am extremely happy of my new shape. I think a man decides in his mid-thirties how fit he will be for the rest of his life. So it was important for me to go back to practicing sports and eating healthy as I had done before coming to Belgium.

But on the other hand, what a waste of money!!!! Even the boots are now too large!!!

Riding behaviours

I have always wondered to what extent the bike you are riding influences the way you ride. I have always been riding enduro-style bike, and I have always considered myself a very cautious rider.

I never lost sleep over how to cut the perfect corner…I am more interested in the comfort the bike has to offer for long journeys or for commuting, or in elements of the design rather than in the top speed or absolute power.

However, I found myself riding in a much more aggressive way with the Mana than I have ever done in the past.

The Mana is much more powerful than anything I have ridden before, and it is the first naked I have. And I am starting to appreciate why so many riders talk about the importance of cutting the corner in a certain way…when I enter the tunnel which takes me home, with a steep turn, I am smiling at my ever more daring attempts to find the limit of the bike, pushing down with my knee…

I have started to use a lot more my weight to incline the bike, and I am in general riding faster than I used to. Faster than I probably should. I discovered myself losing grip over my rear tyre exiting from a turn. Opening the throttle to the full with the Mana is not a good idea, I realized…nothing happened with the V-strom (even if it is a decently powerful bike), but a lot can go wrong with the Mana when you do it…

A few years back, I was driving a sports car, an Alfa GTV…and I was definitively driving faster and more aggressively than I am now that I have a different type of car.

Big deal, you might think. Well, for me it is. I always thought that I could control myself on any bike, that deep inside I was a cautious rider. I am realizing that maybe I was so cautious because I was always riding easy going bikes, and not powerful naked.

Again, nothing major, I am not racing on the streets. But I wonder whether a Harley 1200 Nightster or a Triumph Scrambler or Bonneville would have been closer to my traditional riding styles…

And I am definitively increasingly determined to take riding classes. Yes, I have been riding for 20 years now. But I feel I could benefit so much from riding classes. I will find out what are the options here in Belgium…

Why Mana?

Over the past few days that I have been riding the Mana, a lot of coworkers have been asking "what is that fantastic motorbike you own now??". However, a lot of friends of mine have also been asking "why the hell did you buy the Mana?". From their point of view, with the same money I could have bought a motorbike that would have kept a higher value...a BMW, for instance.

It is true that from that point of view, buying a Mana is probably a bet. Aprilias are not famous for keeping a high value when they are sold second hand. And on top of that, the fact that this is an automatic bike, a completely new model, and one whose reliability is not proven yet all add to the potential low value when I sell it. All true: but thinking about this when you buy a new motorbike is like refusing to sleep with a beautiful woman because maybe, in ten years, she will leave you. It only means you lack the passion.

When I was shopping for a new bike to replace the scooter I was using in Brussels, I had a couple of criteria in mind:

• It had to be a motorbike: I had grown tired of the scooter I had bought two years before, very practical and everything. It was great, but it wasn't a motorbike. I am a motorbiker, and I need a motorbike. It is that simple.
• It had to be practical, but not as ugly and as boring as a Honda Deauville. I needed something with space to put my stuff though.

• It had to be funky. It had to had the looks.

I never liked sports bike. I never liked the innatural position your body needs to be in while riding...so I was actually looking either at a new Enduro/supermotard or at an "old style" new bike.

I excluded the enduro option, because I already own a fantastic enduro-style bike, the V-Strom. The perfect bike, if it wasn't for those turbolences which kill my head as of 80 Km/h...I looked at the Yamaha MT-03, which really looks marvellous, but it has a zero score in practicality.

So I was looking in particular at the Triumph Bonneville or the Triumph Scrambler. I was that close to buy the Scrambler, as I had found a bike shop which had a fantastic offer, but then I tried the Mana.

And in spite of the fact that during my test-drive the bike actually broke off, it was love at first sight. A real motorbike, practical, with lot of space, which allows me to go to work without ruining my shoes with the gear pedal, and which has the looks and feels like a real power monster.

I understand: the Mana is probably the motorbike that for its futuristic features is the furthest away from the Triumph Scrambler or the Bonneville. Which are both great bikes, and which sooner or later will find their way to my garage.

But for the moment I am with her.

I like this!

My post on the first impressions on the Aprilia Mana was translated into Korean!! Thank you Lewis!!

Yet another blog about motorcycling??

That's the question I kept on asking myself before opening this blog. I have been blogging for around 10 months, now, in Italian, my native language, about a bit of everything, but especially about two topics: my experiences in riding my motorbikes and politics. And then I realized that most of the information I was posting in Italian on my other blog could actually be of interest to many motorcyclists who are non-Italian speakers...and that's why I am here.

I have the privilege of owning two motorcycles and of riding them in very different settings: I own a Suzuki V-Strom 650, which I bought in April 2007 new, and which I keep in Tuscany, in a small village near Pisa where my parents still leave. I go there every second weekend during the summer, and at least once a month during the other months. I tend to ride the V-strom for pure pleasure, on the hills of my region or for longer summer trips around Italy.

And then I own an Aprilia Mana, the automatic naked bike which was launched in Italy in November 2007. I have had the Mana just for ten days now, and I keep it in Brussels, in Belgium, where I live. I use it essentially as a city bike, to go to work every morning, but I plan to use it for longer weekend trips around France, Belgium and the Netherlands...

Before the Mana and the V-Strom I had many other two-wheelers, but let's not dwell in the past...for now!

In this blog, as the title suggests, I will be posting about my trips with the two bikes, itineraries, scenic roads I know, and about the experience in riding the Mana...I also intend to post the translations of a few posts that I have written for my other blog, about motorcycle products and things like that. So let's go.