The Right to Choose

Keep your face. Wear a helmet with full face protection.

My belief is that we all should have the right to choose what we feel is best for ourselves. Life experience combined with education and information gives us the tools we need to make a decision for our own lives. This is true when it comes to wearing a helmet while riding also. I choose to wear a helmet because my internal advisor tells me this is what’s smart to do. In North Carolina you don’t have a choice. In Colorado, where I started riding, you do. Throughout my life I have bumped my head and fallen off of bicycles enough to know that just hitting your nogan on something at a slow speed hurts, and can do a lot of damage. I have also seen what falling off a motorcycle at high speeds can do to your head, even with minimal protection.

I choose to wear a high quality, full face helmet for protection, because I would like to keep my face if I go down and live through it. I say this because the consequences of no face protection could literally be, an erased face; complete removal of the jawbone and nose. I saw a picture of a rider that this happened to and the visual still sticks in my mind. This rider lived, but I’m sure went through years of painful surgery to restore his face.

I choose to wear full body protection for the same reason. My back, elbows, shoulders, knees, hips, all get protection. I had a boss once who was a pro bodybuilder. He decided to get his tan one day by riding down the freeway in shorts. He went down and slid on the hot pavement long enough to remove most of the skin from one side of his body. The full body scar he has to live with now ended his bodybuilding career.

We all need to make our own, sound decisions on what we wear when we ride. What are you willing sacrifice if, or should I say when, you go down on your motorcycle, and live to tell the story. I for one would like to tell my story with the nose on my face and the skin on my body.

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