Instructing at Harris Hill Road in San Marcos with Elite Track Days was fun this Monday. I was only able to do it because of the cancellation of the Armadillo Supermoto, which allowed me to shift my vacation day from Friday to Monday. The Nox did well, only being ever so slightly fussy about starting first thing in the morning. I'm learning to start it well before anything else happens, since it could be a process to get it running the first time of the day. After that, it usually settles down a little.
There were nearly as many instructors as students, due to very light attendance. The weather was damp at first, and then just humid, but the heavy cloud cover made for tolerable riding temps.
One of the things I've been fighting with all year is that I've been getting totally worn out about halfway through a track day. I used to do over a hundred miles during a track day, now I seem to do about 50 to 75. I THINK I may have figured out one thing that might be leading to that though. When I was instructing, and following or leading people around in the lower group, I could coast and putt around and not really work very hard to do anything. When I'm by myself, and really working on things, then I'm really putting a LOT more effort into it.
Now you can very reasonably make the argument that I wouldn't be putting so much effort into it if I was really good at being fast, and that's somewhat fair. I've been working awfully hard at getting faster, rather than just coincidentally becoming faster.
So what happened after I'd spent most of the morning and early afternoon just generally putt-putting around? I went out and got a knee down twice on the Nox, which I was thinking was rather tippy and tall to be getting a knee down on at all, especially given that I don't tend to throw my shortish legs out very far to begin with.
Take-away: if you notice that you're getting really tired, and working hard at the track, take a few sessions and just putt-putt around and play with different things instead of working on "going fast". It's easy to forget that at some point, I "just got fast" as someone put it once describing how hard they were working to keep up with me after being so used to just passing me easily.
Oh, and btw, motocross boots really are better for motards than road-racing boots. I don't know why, but they felt immediately and obviously better on my motard than my street boots did. Go figure.