It crawled up to near double digits on Saturday, April 1, so Max and I took the Tiger by the tail and went for our first ride over to The Forks of the Credit.
On our way over to Erin we were stopped at a light when a truck passed us carrying an spanking new Africa Twin – very nice. The truck driver was giving us thumbs up and we gave ’em right back.
We stopped at the Busholme in Erin for a warming lunch; 8°C on a motorbike will cool you off quickly. It’s now on Max’s places to eat memory map. After a quick stop at Holtom’s Bakery we headed over to the Forks and did a lap…
The ride from Belfountain out to Highway 10 was lovely – clear of speedbumps (both on the road and the four wheeled kind). It was cold and there was still a lot of snow runnoff crossing the road, but I could let the bike go as fast as it felt comfortable without having to worry about some Ontario numpty in a box in front panicking that the road actually has curves on it.
On the ride back to Belfountain for my first coffee of the year at Higher Ground, we quickly caught up with just such a numpty driving a Subaru WRX… and he was driving it like he stole it his grandmother. Baffled by every bend in the road, this toolasaurus in his rally car practically stopped every time the road got interesting. Max and I, two up on our fourteen year old adventure bike almost pulled off to let this guy have his moment of sheer driving brilliance. I guess that’s why you buy a forty thousand dollar rally car knock off and then drive it out to one of the few twisty roads in the area. Soon enough we got to Higher Ground where only the very serious people were out. The parking lot was littered with half a dozen BMW adventure bikes, a Ducati Multistrada and two Triumph Tigers once we got there. Ours was the oldest bike by ten years. There were a lot of peaked adventury helmets and Klim clothing. Everyone felt very robust and adventurous.
Off the bike it was twelve degrees and sunny, so looking at all the bikes and chatting with the other riders was a nice break from the frost bite at speed.
We wrapped up our coffee break and took Mississauga Road north past the ski hill still thick with snow before heading back home a bit wind burned and out of practice saddle sore, but happy to have gotten the first two up ride of the year in.
Loading up at High Ground for the Ride home.
Mississauga Road north behind another four wheeled speed bump
A veil of beautifully scalloped clouds followed us all the way home.
All taken from the 360Fly4k suction cupped to the wing mirror and edited in-camera.
With winter reluctantly letting go of our necks, I’ve been able to sneak the odd ride in amidst the ongoing ice rain and snow. I recently got a Ricoh Theta V. This has the same camera and resolution as the previous (and much cheaper) Theta S, but has much better in camera processing that allows it to take 4k video and make photos without as much lag. What that means for the ongoing on-bike photography experiment is that I’m able to capture photos faster and catch moments that might have been missed before. I mainly focus on still photos doing this, but I’ll eventually get around to taking some 4k video as well.
For the past month or so I’ve been able to sneak out between wintery blasts and catch some early on-bike shots using the mounting rig I built last year (a flexible octopus gripping tripod and an extended threaded rod that allows me to place the camera further away from the bike). Here are some shots from the ThetaV:
Perhaps telling, I thought I’d grabbed the ThetaV but realized after I has the ThetaSC. No real difference in photo or lens quality. For on-bike shooting I’d suggest the cheaper and lighter SC, unless you’re big into 4k video.
Photos in this set run from March 24th to April 13th. Even last weekend I was still seeing patches of snow in ditches, though last Saturday was the first time I got back from a ride and didn’t have to wash all the salt and crud off the bike before putting it away. It’s still fleece and leathers season if you’re riding in Canada in early spring.
As always, Photoshop and Lightroom do a good job of picking out details that can often be quite dark when they come off the Theta. I typically screen grab images at about 1080p after framing them in the Ricoh software, which lets you move around within the image and find the best angle. I’ve been able to collect higher resolution images off a 4k monitor. The software for the Theta is very screen focused. It’d be nice to have a maximum resolution option for print.
In addition to the photos, I’ve got some more digitally abstracted shots that head more into art than photography. I still think this is a great way to catch the dynamics and immediacy of riding. I’d love to be able to test the process in more extreme riding conditions, like at a track day.
I’ve hesitated to post this because I get the sense that competition is generally sneered upon in Ontario classrooms these days. With earnest people saying everyone is a genius and anyone with the urge to pick up a tool is a craftsperson, something like Skills Canada might seem like a cruel and unusual way to show that as obviously incorrect.
I’ve always had a competitive streak and think there is real value in both winning and losing, but losing really bothers me (hence, competitive streak). This was written on a long flight back from Edmonton as I struggled with failure. Contrary to popular belief, I consider this to be a good thing.
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Can you feel the heat? Skills Canada Nationals is a pressure cooker of excellence!
I was in a foul mood when I started writing this, but by the end I’d thought my way out of the frustration, which is the most I can ask from a reflection…
I’m at a loss to explain how we can be so dominant in provincial competition and then fumble Nationals. Two times now we’ve taken the time and expense to come out to Skills Canada Nationals and have come up short. In the latest case I could not have possibly arranged things any better. From coop to employment opportunities to multiple in-class opportunities and supports, my current candidate had every tool possibly on hand to achieve success, but we haven’t. This is the worst possible time to ask me (on the plane, flying home, empty handed), but I’m feeling tired, frustrated and struggling to understand why I’d go through this again.
4am wake up for a 10am departure – moving hundreds of
people, many of them with hundreds of pounds of tools
is a logistical challenge.
A consistent issue with leaving our small town to come to nationals is circumstantial. In our first go around, the social pressure around missing high school prom proved such a distraction that my candidate arrived with a pocket full of angry texts and little chance to focus on preparing for the coming battle. In this year’s case, a sports injury in a pointless local game the week before the competition led to a week away in wheelchairs and on crutches. In both cases small town life conspired to produce the kind of static that knocked capable technicians off a medal. But maybe there is more to it than that.
I don’t think the competition is particularly technically challenging. There is nothing asked that my competitors aren’t directed to and encouraged to get a handle on. This has worked so well provincially that we’ve medalled the past three years (two golds and a bronze), but at Nationals both times the wheels have fallen off the cart. That we can do so differently at two near identical competitions suggests that our issue is psychological, not technical.
Team Ontario is a monster!
So, what about Nationals is so overwhelming? The assumption (I think) is that Nationals will be next level, but Ontario provincials have many more competitors from many more schools. Getting out of Ontario is by far the most difficult part, and we’ve managed it twice. The people we face at Nationals aren’t IT unicorns; they’re kids, all with less experience in competition. In some cases they only had to show up to get to Nationals because there were barely any provincial competitors. I’d assumed that our previous ‘blind’ Nationals experience (where we placed 4th anyway), had prepared us for this one. My candidate was more experienced, more focused (barring sports injuries and school plays) and had been given many more opportunities to develop their IT skills than our first go around, yet subjectively we’ve underachieved. Our best hope now, prior to knowing the scoring, is a tie with our last attempt, but I fear that might be too much to hope for.
Got the kit…
Last year we blew provincials and didn’t go through. I lay the blame for that entirely at my own feet. The change to a Toronto based venue meant a cruel and unusual commute that made us exhausted and late; we didn’t have a hope of peak performing (yet we still managed a medal). This year we did back flips arranging hotels and finding ways to minimize the financial burden on our competitors in order to ensure our best shot, and that worked. Leading up to Nationals I made sure everything was taken care of and any possible need was filled prior to sitting down to compete.
Expectations are perhaps the killer here. Our first time around I took Nationals to be a reconnaissance. We’d already over achieved to such a degree at Provincials that I was just happy to be there. Sure, a medal would have been nice, but understanding the contest was my real goal. That we came so close to getting a medal had me convinced we were moving in the right direction. This time around my previous champion gave a detailed rundown of what to expect on Nationals and we didn’t go in blind, yet we have failed to capitalize on that information. This could mean it was bad information, but I doubt that. It could also mean we simply didn’t make the time to make use of that information because my two competitors have an unhealthy competitiveness between them. We have underperformed, yet the competition was described as too easy, and we knew what was coming. How are we bottom half? With the medal ceremony behind us, I’m left wondering where we are, and, as a coach, I don’t like the feeling – the lack of understanding feels like a failure on my part.
This might sound like whinging or poor sportsmanship, but I didn’t spend all the time and money and stress to not place again. This isn’t even a case of gold or die, just knowing we were there or thereabouts would have met my expectations; I don’t think that’s an absurdly challenging goal. If we didn’t want to be competitive, why did we compete?
Pre-contest huddle.
One of the more surprising aspects of this trip was just how different my competitor was. On our first go I had what looked like an Eastern European rock star who had the swagger to go with it. He had the technical chops, but his cockiness also meant he’d tackle problems aggressively and with some verve; he wasn’t intimidated by anyone or anything. I suspect that fourth place finish was as much the result of that fearlessness as it was his technical skill.
This time around I had an anxious perfectionist who I couldn’t read very well and (I fear) I didn’t coach as effectively as I could have. Maybe, in this case, a less acerbic approach might have served us better, but my approach to coaching and teaching has always been to encourage an independent and experiential approach to the challenges of technology. I give students the gears if they make a silly mistake, but never penalize them for it. The ones who stick around end up resilient, self-aware and technically superior. I don’t baby students and hand them answers, I’d rather see them struggle to a solution themselves. The result is a technician who might not know all the answers, but damn well knows how to find them.
Like herding cats…
Except at Nationals.
This time around I had a university bound, academically strong student for whom this was just one of many feathers in his hat. This is his second national final in an ICT related field in as many weeks. At the CyberTitan National Competition, on our first go at it, we placed as high as I’d hoped we would and that trip was (I think) a great success. My expectations here were actually similar this week, to finish in the top half, but we’ve failed to do that. There were only 7 competitors in the national IT & Networking final – three provinces and all the territories failed to produce candidates who could meet national standards – so finishing in the top half would have meant a medal.
My first national finalist was a college bound kid who had been on the verge of failing in the years before and found his way out of that mess though finding his genius in info-tech. He ended up going to college for IT and considers his Skills experience a vital piece of his career (as he should). I never once heard my first champion say, ‘it’s just IT’ when someone asked him what competition he was in, but I heard that too many times this week. Downplaying the field of study (I fear) when competing at the national level in it was a reflection of the doubt that plagued this medal run. At one point I heard, “I don’t understand why I’m here with all these people” (meaning experts in their skilled trade). I thought it might have been false modesty, but it in retrospect it was doubt, which is a disaster when you’re in a pressure cooker like Skills Nationals. Maybe I should have identified that and talked about it earlier, but if years of straight ‘A’s in computer and software technology courses, multiple provincial medals, full time summer employment as a network technician, a top five finish in the related cybersecurity contest nationally, detailed notes from all the competitors who came before and a coop in IT wasn’t enough to instill some confidence, I fear nothing will. I don’t think this result was a deficit of technical skill.
Watching mastery across such a wide range of skills
never gets old. If you get a chance, go to Skills Nationals.
This year in electronics we took a giant step backwards, to the point of me wondering if we were ever moving in the right direction. My competitor was crushed by our poor result and this prompted me to chase down her judges and request some clarification on our results. She’d actually ended up in the medals on the two toughest categories (building circuits), which helped restore some confidence. Then we got clarification on what we missed, which has shed such a bright light on what we need to do that I can’t believe we won’t be contenders next year. Her response to all of this was stubborn anger. I can work with that. One of the judges encouraged her to hang in there saying, ‘it’s the failures that toughen you up and eventually make you a champion.’ It’s that kind of thing that makes me want to do the hours and hours of volunteer work it takes to build up to winning provincials again and perhaps going through another exhausting and potentially hope crushing week at nationals.
Maybe one of the things I need to be doing when I’m looking for candidates to take on this overwhelming challenge is to look for the tenacious scrappers who can’t, won’t and don’t stop. Maybe that was missing this year. A student following in his brother’s footsteps for whom things had fallen into place, winning medals even when he claims the whole thing was a disaster was suddenly doubtful of his place in the competition. I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe that judge is right – it’s overcoming the setbacks that make you commit to the competition and fight with conviction. Win or lose, if we left everything on the competition floor I’d be happy with the result, but something stopped us from doing that this time. Perhaps it was the injury, perhaps it was nerves, perhaps I’m just the wrong coach for a this particular student, which is a shame for us both.
I didn’t do well in school. You can count the number of ‘A’s I got on one hand. Things generally have never come easily to me, I have had to fight for them. I dropped out of college, out of an apprenticeship and struggled to get into and through University. I’m good at many things, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a natural at anything. The things I’m good at are the result of determination and stubborn disregard for failure. It’s that kind of tenacious student that I’m best able to help because I can identify with them. I find the honour roll perfectionists alien and don’t always know how to work with them to bring out their best. Perhaps the best thing I could have done here was to send another teacher instead. If I could go back and rerun this week over and over again Groundhog Day style, that would be one of the variations I’d try.
I’m most effective helping the stubborn, scrappy student I have much more in common with attain their mastery than I am trying to aim an honour roll kid at gold. Those scrappy students also play to my love of underdogs. As I said earlier, perhaps expectations are what make this so difficult to take. This time I thought I’d brought a howitzer to a knife fight. As fixated as I am in this moment on failing to medal again, in less fraught moments I’m more about a good struggle than I am about winning – but it’d sure be nice, just once, to sit on this long road home with something tangible to show for it.
***
A week after we got back we had an interview with the local paper. When asked what I thought something like Skills Canada does for a student I immediately went to the degree of resilience it develops. I truly believe that competition is good for us all, and that competition has to involve winning and losing. At the opening ceremony the MC asked the audience of hundreds of competitors who was going to win a medal, they all started cheering – the unspoken disappointment was left hanging in the air, you can’t all be winners. More people come home disappointed after Skills Nationals than satisfied. That’s no bad thing. My goal as a coach is to find ways to help competitors put their best foot forward. This year has taught me a lot about how I can better do that.
T’was a foggy morning out in the wilds of Southern Ontario, Canada. I took some photos with the big camera before leaving, then grabbed the Theta360 for some foggy road photos…
Riding River Road on Easter Monday morning. The day promised to warm up, but it was cool in the valley. With little traffic and miles of winding road, the Tiger was frisky and I was ready to explore some corners.
With the ThetaV 4k video camera wrapped around the rear view mirror, I proceeded down the hill on Prince of Wales Road to River Road before heading east. The Theta seems to kick off when it hits two gigs of video. 4k video is heavy and you reach two gigs after only five minutes, so here is five minutes of riding down into the valley before it chokes on itself.
I couldn’t stop at the Terra Nova Public House (closed for the holiday), but on the way back I went back to my happier medium of still photography and set the ThetaV at its one photo every four seconds rate to catch some corners, which I then chased down on my way back through the valley to Horning’s Mills. Later in the year it’ll be quite busy, but on this early spring holiday, there were only a smattering of other vehicles and the corners were open and empty…
Riding through the desolation of winter before spring green is back.
Neutral throttle in, winding it on through the apex and out the other side. The Tiger is a settled, athletic thing for such a big bike.
Some Photoshopping to give it a painted look. That scalloped sky followed me all the way home.
I ride an hour out of my way just to find that magical sign.
It was sunny this morning, so Max and I thought we’d try and squeeze in a ride over to The Fork of the Credit and back. Once we got going it was cloudy and 5°C instead of the 7-8 partially sunny degrees we were promised.
So, with a windchill of -3 we got there shivering only to discover it was idiot-in-a-car day on The Forks. They’ve removed the speed bumps so every bosozoku dingdong from the GTA rushed up in his Fast & Furious car to make a traffic jam.
Many of them seemed particularly confused by the hairpin, especially the mouth breathing fuckwit in the Ford Focus who came around the corner half in our lane. Once again my assumption that anyone in a hopped up turd-mobile is next to useless saved us. I wasn’t riding the hairpin so much as sticking to the outside of my lane – as far from the Eminem clones who can’t drive in their own lane as I could get. Even on this cold day, driving a car still feels like a poor alternative to riding a motorcycle.
Just in case the twisty road wasn’t difficult enough, there was also a car parked at the top of the switchback with a drone hovering right over the road. As a qualified drone operator, it’s this kind of stupidity that gives the hobby a bad reputation. He could have easily set up and flown so he wasn’t a potential hazard, but he didn’t. It’s a shame. Getting some aerial media of the road is a great idea, just do it with some sense.
We got back to Belfountain and ended up turning around and going the long way around back to Erin and Holtom’s Bakery. The big row of traffic blocking up the only road through the tiny village is yet another win for the the four wheeled crowd. Between being unable to drive in their lanes, blocking up villages and otherwise being pests, our cold trip out to The Forks underlined car culture in all its glory.
Escaping up the back way on Mississauga Road away from Belfountain.
That might have been our last ride of 2018. Since then winter has descended:
From three short days spent in Yellowstone in August of 2018. At over seven thousand feet elevation, there was frost on the ground the day we left (hence the atmospheric, morning fog in the sunrise photos which have been worked over in Adobe Lightroom).
Life inside the caldera of the super volcano is odd. The grass has a strange hue and the animal life in the world’s oldest national park is wonderfully shocking.
Photos taken with the Canon T6i. Some of the snapshots and gifs were done with the OnePlus5 smarphone. Variations can be found on my Instagram account and in Google photo albums.
The dream March Break trip? Load the Tiger into the back of the trusty Ford Transit Van and head south to a place where the weather won’t suck all week; it will here. While snow is flying during the most pointless school break in Ontario, I’d be driving one thousand kilometres south to Virginia to chase the waterfalls my cousin suggested in January.
The drive down has us doing an eleven hour slog to Roanoke, Virginia on some back roads through the Allegheny Forest and down through the Adirondacks into the Appalachian Mountains before finally landing at the Hampton Inn off Interstate 81 just outside of Roanoke.
Once in Roanoke we’d put our feet up for the night and then take one of three routes over the next three days.
The weather is lovely: mid-high teens all week, rather than the zero degree snow we’ve got going on here all week.
Yeah, it’d be cool, but it wouldn’t be painful, and the roads would be salt free and winding through the mountains. To top it all off those waterfalls would be plump from all the run off. It’d be a photography and media making dream. The mountains would be blooming in early spring and I’d have the cameras on hand to catch that moment on two wheels.
Each day we’d loop back to Roanoke before heading out in a different direction the next day. Thanks to all the mountain roads there would be virtually no overlap between loops with each offering unique sites. Having the same base camp also means the bike will be light on gear and ready to explore the mountains.
Leaving on a Monday morning, we’d be in Roanoke Monday night and ready for a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday of motorcycle riding from waterfall to waterfall before making the ride back north into the snow and darkness on Friday.
It’s not a crazy expensive week. Under five hundred bucks for hotel then gas and food money. Two long distance highway days would be all about gas and quick food stops. $200 would feed the van, another $60 would cover the bike. Five days of food on the road could probably be done for $250. All in that’s a thousand dollar holiday. The three days in Virginia would be all about slow lunches and dinners and riding between photogenic waterfalls.
Of course, the ongoing issue is not having the bike delivery system. Mid-winter isn’t the worst time to be a motorcyclist in Canada. The worst time is the end of the off season when the snow is fading but the winter weather hangs on week after week, prolonging the caged life.
February isn’t a giving month for motorcyclists in Canada. Last year, with the twenty three year old Kawasaki in pieces, I was unable to get the thing out on the warm weekend we had in December, and couldn’t even get it going when the snow finally cleared in March. Since the Tiger was only getting regular maintenance done, it was turn-key ready when we suddenly had a warm break in February. With snow melt running across the road and the temperature a heady 7°C, I enjoyed a foggy ride in to work, and a slightly warmer ride the long way around home in the afternoon:
Once home I power washed the sand and salt off the Tiger and parked it up again. A single day on the bike blew off the cobwebs and renewed the promise of things to come.
It crawled up to near double digits on Saturday, April 1, so Max and I took the Tiger by the tail and went for our first ride over to The Forks of the Credit.
