Seat of the Pants Performance Comparisons

A few years ago, when I was still capable of riding half-quickly and competently off-road, I was riding with a group of Twin Cities Dual Purpose guys north of the Cities. The “route” was a convoluted collection of gravel and paved roads with the occasional single-track and deep sand trail tossed in to provide the illusion of a dual-purpose outing. It might have been one of the first opportunities I had to test my new-to-me WR250X somewhere outside of my daily 6 mile urban commute. It turned out, there was more than just a riding competency and bike capability test available on that ride. One of the other guys had recently bought a used WR250R that had been barely-used and farkled up with a loud “performance” pipe, a Power Commander fuel programmer, a hacked-up air box, and the original owner had removed the AIS and EXUP systems and the “flapper-valve.” Pretty much all of the “performance” weirdness every kid who ever bought a WR might do without any of the nasty riding crap actual motorcyclists would have done first. Both of our bikes had been owned by such children and the WR/R owner had yet to begin the long process of returning the bike to original status and peak overall performance. I got after that immediately and my bike was all the way back to bone stock the day of that ride.

After 30 or 40 miles of the group ride, we all stopped for lunch and the WR/R guy and I compared notes. He was pretty tired of the exhaust noise and wondered if any of the modifications had actually improved the bike’s performance. You might figure, I always assume any “improvements” made by shade tree goobers is a downward evolution. Having been an engineer for most of my career, my appreciation for amateurs is very limited-to-non-existent. We decided that, when the opportunity presented itself we’d “performance test” the bikes on every sort of terrain we’d be riding on for the rest of the day. In our case, “performance testing” mean drag racing the two bikes at every opportunity. Mostly, a drag race eliminates skill from the equation; the outcome is pretty much determined by the bike with the best powerband and peak horsepower. As an unintentional handicap, I was spotting the WR250R about 50 pounds, since that bike’s owner was at least that much lighter than me. He was also a decade younger and a much better, more aggressive rider, for whatever that is worth.

To cut to the chase, the end result was no surprise to me and disappointing to him. On pavement, my WR250X consistently held the advantage. We would start out neck-and-neck, but after 3rd gear my WR/X would begin to pull away until around 70mph when the WR/R began to fall into the distance. On gravel, the results were mixed; pretty much whoever got the best start would end up in front. In deep sand, I got my ass handed to me, mostly based on his skill and my cowardice and, probably, that 17” front wheel that tends to plow into the sand. I was year or two away from having my left hip replaced and, by then, anything that required a firm foot on the ground was out of the question.

So, our shade tree, seat-of-the-pants evaluation of the usual collection of silly “improvements” kids make to the WR/R/X Yamahas was that more is less. You’d hope that doing all of that crap would not have made a 250 slower with an additionally 50 pound load, but it did.

Some of those modifications are, and should be, highly illegal. Yamaha did several things to make the WR/R/X bikes emissions legal, for the US, EU, and Japan. Defeating emissions controls is a federal and state violation and I despise the fact that our states and cops are too lazy and incompetent to enforce emissions violations. In fact, I resent having to pay taxes for cops who don’t care about exhaust noise but pretend to be enforcing the peace (and quiet) of the communities that employ them. Imagining that a low tech sheet metal worker could out-engineer Yamaha is pretty hilarious, at best. The only “tuning” aftermarket pipe manufacturers do is “noise enhancement.” They know you imagine louder being faster and play to that market.

Some of the other “improvements” might actually do something useful, if the entire bike was re-tuned to compensate for the huge change in intake and exhaust pressure curves. However, most goobers are done with their project once they tack on the expensive crap and wouldn’t consider spending another $1,500 on dyno testing and tuning. So, like the 99% dumbasses in The Marching Morons, they mistake noise and an unpredictable and peaky power band for improvement and degrade the motorcycle while wasting money on junk that just irritates the general public, wastes fuel, adds more pollution to the environment, and devalues their motorcycle investment.

The fact is that you can pretty much assume that every dollar you “invest” in aftermarket performance modifications will result in a fifty-cent reduction in the resale value of the motorcycle. You might, occasionally, find a kid who will pay inflated money for a farkled-up mess, but you’ll have to be astoundingly lucky to stumble on to one of those characters who actually has money.

Blissful Ignorance?

When I started planning for the possibility of a hip replacement, I did what all geeks do in situations of ignorance; I went to the internet for advice. What I found was a lot of stories about hip replacements gone badly, unhappy patients, people who had gone from misery to more misery, and lots of legal sites trolling for patient-clients. That was a year ago. So, I decided to live with the pain and hope for the best. I made it through the summer, surviving a slightly lower MSF class load but ending the summer feeling my years and miles.

After I got back from my Lake Superior Circle with my brother, I was struggling. In a 1/2 mile walk, I was literally dragging my left leg for the last couple of blocks. After a day of work, I could hardly get out of the car and seriously considered spending the night in the garage rather than deal with the pain of trying to get my lame leg out of the car. Even with fairly consistent dieting and a year of physical therapy, I'd gained 30 pounds the previous year because it's tough to seriously burn calories without a working lower half. Last year, I added a lot of upper body cardio exercise to my routine and cut out even more of the casual part of my diet to get rid of about 25 pounds of lard, but I hit a plateau and the next 30 pounds stuck to me like it belonged there.

By early October, I'd come up with a surgery plan and started looking for a doc to perform it. I wanted a "resurfacing," in spite of the fact that is is a "new" procedure in the US, most US docs won't do it for over-60 patients, and, worst of all, the procedure wasn't invented here (it's Australian, like an awful lot of sports-oriented surgical procedures). Of the six guys who do resurfacing in Minnesota, five wouldn't talk to me at all because of my age; including the surgeon who had trained the other five surgeons. I made an appointment with the one guy who considered me a possible resurfacing candidate, but after reviewing my hip deterioration (too much bone loss) and making a judgement of my physical condition he said he wouldn't consider a resurfacing for me. In the end, I scheduled surgery for mid-December and started looking at how a total hip replacement would affect my life.

While I was considering the new plan, I looked into the company that made the prosthesis my doctor favored, the various surgical options, and anything else I thought was related. I know two guys who had hip replacements and their recovery has been less-than-inspiring. One has serious non-hip-related bone conditions that probably explains his progress and lack of same. The other is a classic American "patient": disinterested in the procedure's details, half-hearted about his doctor's physical therapy and medication, diet, and personal habits recommendations, and downright squeamish about the surgery. That seemed to be a characteristic of a lot of people who were complaining about their surgery's results. I kept looking and found two other people who had had hip replacements and were doing magnificently less than 6 months out from being cut. Both of those guys were conversant in the details of their surgery, were monster physical therapy junkies, and almost overwhelmed me with their insight of all aspects of being cut in a clinical environment and being in control of the recovery afterwards. They both set a standard of patient participation that I hoped to emulate.

Using their model, I went hunting in the weeks between being scheduled for surgery and the actual surgery date. I loaded up on background materials. One of the more education things I found was this Edheads hip replacement "video game" (link at left), which puts the player in the surgeon's seat. As a reference, neither of the poorly recovering patients could stomach playing surgeon (my favorite part of the video is the "pop" sound effect the animation uses when the leg dislocates from the pelvis socket) and both of the high-functioning ex-patients thought this site was the coolest thing on the web, although both criticized the procedure's technique as "out-dated."

Last month an old friend complained that "doctors are always treating symptoms with drugs etc. but never going after the root cause." I have to disagree, doctors have been going after the root cause, at least, since I was a kid. We've had the food pyramid, the diet plate, anti-smoking warnings, anti-lardass warnings, years of "get fit" encouragement, and everything short of boarding up fast food franchises and covering them with poison ivy, but Americans are uninterested in the symptoms. We want easy solutions. Blaming our health problems on unnatural food is like blaming our tanked economy on poor people; it requires a surreal perspective on reality and a massive math incapacity. Blaming the medical industry for focusing on repair procedures is as rational as blaming auto mechanics for buying tools and fixing busted cars instead of giving driving maintenance lessons. We're fat because we eat too much garbage and we exercise too little. We have crap-loads of problems recovering from surgical solutions to our poor health because we're lazy, ignorant, and squeamish (wimps, in plain language). I'd like to think that motorcyclists are an exception to this rule, but there is some serious pork on those Hogs and too many of us use our motorcycles like overpriced wheelchairs.

At four months out, I still have a ways to go to consider myself "recovered." I'm still old, overweight, and weaker than I should be. The older I get, the harder it seems to be to recover from anything. If I work everyday for a month to improve my physical conditioning, but take a couple of days off to relax on a weekend, I've lost ground. From here out, I suspect that will only get worse. However, this picture of John Turner (at 69), from 50 Athletes over 50 Teach Us to Live a Strong, Healthy Life, has been stuck in my head for more than a decade and it's evidence that if you have a little luck, work at it hard, and don't give in to gravity, you can go down fighting. We're all going down, eventually, the trick is to do it with style.

Back in the late 90's, I watched Dick Mann celebrate his 60th birthday by slaughtering the over-500cc competition on the vintage motocross track at Steamboat Springs. I'll never been Dick Mann, but I could do a lot better job of being Thomas Day.

Feakin' Stupid

So, yesterday I was out riding around town, doing eBay errands, checking in on friends, and enjoying the fruits of Minnesota's end of global warming.when I realized that I should be wearing hip pads. What the f.&*k! I just got a brand new, titanium socket and ball, which may or may not be stronger than the old flesh-and-bone attachment, and my Darien's are protection-free. The guy who bought my Super Sherpa told me a story about his mother-in-law falling and bending her hip replacement so badly it had to be removed. I say again, what the f.&*k! Holy crap and other expletives. Getting one of these things out after it has ingrown for four months has got to be godawful surgery. Putting something back in that mangled hole is a whole 'nother story. So, I ordered some hip pads from Aerostich and I'm wearing pillows on my ass till they get here.

Cuttin' to the Bone

I'm on two legs now, walking around the house and using a cane when I go out for distance (1.5 - 2 miles a day average last week). Five weeks out from having my leg cut off and the jury (me) is still out on whether this was a good idea. I am a miserable cripple. I hate being unable to put my own socks on, let alone tie my shoes. My left leg jiggles like my belly, something that drives me crazy (both the leg and the belly). I lost about all of my muscle mass in the surgery and that comes back glacially at my age.

There is a great website, Edheads - Virtual Hip Replacement Surgery, that provides a complete look (less gore) of the procedure. Too many people, in my opinion, minimize the severity of this surgery and toss themselves into the hands of surgeons without a second thought. Go through the whole procedure, then decide how you feel about getting your leg cut off compared to whatever pain you're experiencing and disability you're suffering. If you don't have the stones to do the virtual procedure, I suspect you won't do well with the real thing. Lots of people don't.

I was in the garage earlier today, moving the battery tender from the V-Strom to the WR, and trying to imagine being able to swing a leg over either bike. It's impossible today. It's more possible today than last week, though. My wife cautions "patience." Patience, my ass. I want to ride something.

Doin' It for 45 Years?

If you read my last Geezer column in MMM, you know I've been on the tipping point for a hip replacement for a couple of years. I tipped over last week and had the old hip cut out and replaced with what I hope is a high tech prosthetics. So, I'm stuck in the house suffering the great views of a warm Minnesota December while my bikes wither away in the garage. What to do?

So far, that's easy. I have a handful of physical therapy routines to work on, I upped my Netflix DVD allowance so that I can choke on all of the western movies I can't get on-line, and I'm too doped up on morphine and oxycodone-actetaminophen to worry about anything for long. One of the movies that passed a bit of time was "Bustin' Down the Door," a documentary about the origins of pro surfing in the 1970's when the Aussies took the sport away from Hawaiian control and surfing went big-time worldwide.

There are two motorcycling-similar stories in "Bustin' Down." One was the reaction of the old-time, biker gangster types (called the "Black Shorts" and headed by a surfing Hell's Angel stereotype named Eddie Rothman in the film). Rothman and his gangbanger buddies view the beach and surfing as their territory and fought back against the Aussie invasion with the only tools they had; violence and intimidation. "If you can't beat 'em, beat 'em up" has been the gangbanger chant for centuries and, as usual, laws and the cops proved to be as useless in Hawaii as they are everywhere else. The gangbangers kept the Aussies out of championship events until 1975. The Aussies couldn't even get into major events in 1974. In 1975, they won every event they entered and major press attention (and big event purses) followed. Even in their own words, the Black Shorts characters were about preventing change, true conservatives. They wanted to maintain control of the dinky surfing pond they'd managed to create and the Aussies wanted to put surfing into the ocean. Literally, the Hawaiians were afraid to attempt the maneuvers the Aussies were introducing, so their solution was to chase the Aussies out of the sport.

In the end, the Black Shorts sort of won. Hawaii is no longer the hub of surfing. The Harley gangsters managed to pull of the same kind of coup in the US. By creating "Harley-only" race venues and through rules and intimidation, the 1960's US motorcycling gangsters drove anyone who wasn't a gangbanger to the other side. Today, the US makes marginally functional hippobikes and practically every country in the industrialized world makes real motorcycles. The conservatives won and the nation lost.

The other similarity between motorcycling and surfing was pointed out by South African, Michael Tomson, "Very few people can look through their life, and say they've been doing something for 45 years. What have you been doing for 45 years? I will surf till I die."

Before this surgery, my wife tried to reconcile me to the possibility that I'm going to have to quit riding a motorcycle some time. "You can't ride forever." I can't live forever, either, but I can keep riding for a lot more years and you may as well assume that I will ride till I die.