Braking practice is one thing, but when you add wet road and an emergency vehicle cutting into your path unexpectedly, I can see myself locking up the rear like that too. I love riding in the rain, so I need to add panic braking in the wet practice ASAP. I think panic braking practices need to be done often enough (at least once a week) or you’d loose the muscle memory.
10 days ago I locked up my rear brake going down a steep hill… 6 hours into my Saturday ride in the hills, I decided to check out a new road (Black Rd) which I haven’t ridden, on the way back. When I got to the intersection, there was a car facing me, at the stop sign, waiting to turn right on Black Rd. Not wanting to get behind that car, I turned left in front of it, and headed down Black. It was around 7:40pm, getting dark and hard to see in the twilight. I was going a little fast, wanting to stay ahead of the car, wanting to go home, feeling confident of the DRZ, but also feeling tired from being out about 6 hours by then. Black Road turned out to be quite steep, and I wasn’t riding it too well (w/ the semi-darkness and fatigue). On a steep decent, I saw a tight left hand corner coming up, and lightly applied both front and rear brakes. I felt the rear started to skid, and skid, and skid, but directional stability was still good, with just a tiny bit of slow wiggle, and felt quite controllable. I was still on the front brake and slowing down gradually, thinking, “let’s see how this skid ends”. I finally came to a controlled stop, on the shoulder at the outside bend of the turn, a few feet from a power line pole. That woke me up. Of course, when shit like this happened, I turned off the bike, parked it, to reset my brain. I walked back to check the length of the skid mark – 40 paces -> 80 ft! I touched and felt the pavement; instead of feeling rough and gritty w/ embedded pebbles, it felt smooth and glassy, as if they put a layer of sealant to smooth out the pebbles. Certainly it was a braking error on my part, but that wasn’t the best pavement for traction in a steep downhill. It wouldn’t be fun in the rain…
Before heading downhill on Black Rd, I went from a very tight road (5-30 mph), to a twisty road w/ sweepers (30-55 mph), to an even straighter road w/ high speed sweepers (45-60 mph), so I was riding progressively faster. When I turned onto Black Rd, which was very tight and steep, and the daylight was fading, immediately it didn’t feel right, but my brain was still stuck in the go-fast mode and ignored all the warning signs. That was a major mental failure.