Greetings everyone,

I'm a newbie on this forum and to the motorcycling world as well. Just hit 400 miles on my '09 250 and had my first mishap today.

Left early in the morning to visit the insurance company and get my coverage all in order. Can't ask for a better day to crash I suppose. Then proceeded to go practicing on this pretty tame rural road nearby. And on the way home, 3 streets from my house I ended up taking a turn too fast and lowsided my bike.

All I remember really was leaning the bike too much and feeling the pegs scrape and then losing the back end and going sliding for a bit. There was a little bit of gravel on the road but I don't think it contributed much to me crashing. My body position on the bike was awful and I don't think I was leaning off at all.

I feel pretty stupid for crashing only 400 miles into my riding career. My gear did its job for the most part, will definitely invest in some nicer gloves however. The cheapy alpine stars gloves I had were too short and left me with a small scrape on my wrist.

Oh well I guess lesson learned. Once my new brake pedal assy. gets ordered I'll be heading back out to give it another go.

Welcome aboard! It always makes for a good story when you walk away with minor injuries :D. Glad to hear your alright.

Word to the wise: Gravel is evil, as evil as sand and ice and wet leaves and wet pavement striping and oil and transmission fluid and antifreeze and...you get the idea. Anything that is not bonded firmly to the road's surface will by default roll/slide/move when a cornering tire goes over it. The tire grips the gravel just fine, but gravel doesn't grip the pavement worth a darn. If you were scraping pegs and hit even one piece of gravel that could be enough to trigger a lowside easily.

Welcome...Glad you're OK...Got the first one out of the way, now remember that everyday you ride...Learn from your mistake...:thumbup:

How's your bike???I hope it's not to bad...

I just got these gloves from Cycle Gear for $25...The leather is thick and soft...

The bike is ok mechanically I think, rode it home fine, heres the list of damages:
Bent Brake lever
Scraped bar end and mirror
Brake Pedal assy. sheared off
The lower fairing has a few scuffs
Front turn signal gone
Exhaust has many scratches

and I just noticed the fuel line seems to have come off. I'm going to have someone more mechanically inclined than myself take a look over to see what I have missed. Will shops offer this service, just an inspection? I did get the kawi extended warranty but I doubt that will help me here.

Did manage to keep my head up though, not a scratch on my new helmet. :D

Sucks to hear! Doesnt sound too bad, so thats a good thing....
Can kinda look at the bright side, get that crash outta the way early. Now you can look forward to some nice riding with out the fear of that first one :)

Glad to read that you're OK !! :thumbup:

Sucks to hear! Doesnt sound too bad, so thats a good thing....
Can kinda look at the bright side, get that crash outta the way early. Now you can look forward to some nice riding with out the fear of that first one :)

I actually thought of that while I was getting myself dusted off. It is oddly relieving.

Welcome to the forum!

I crashed my bike only 6 months after buying it, so don't feel bad. Crashing sucks, but at least you didn't crash into someone else like I did! My crash was really minor too. I was wearing all of my gear and there wasn't a scratch on me, just small bruises on my legs.

Buy better gloves for sure and get back out there! :)

Don't worry, crashing gets easier every time, or is it the meds gets stronger. I don't remember.

Sorry to hear you crashed. Just learn from the experience and move on. If you dwell, it will just make your riding worse. I haven't crashed (knock on wood) and I don't plan to, but I have had a few scary moments in my year-long riding career. I shook it off, learned what I could from it and moved on. Had I dwelled, I could easily make the same mistake again by trying too hard to avoid it.

About the gloves, and I'll admit, I'm an Alpinestars gear whore, so I might be slightly biased, I have a question: Did the glove protect the part of the hand it covered? If so it did its job. I only point this out because A*'s is far from cheap gear (price-wise or quality), so I hate to see you knock the glove for not protecting your wrist if it wasn't designed to protect your wrist.

As far as gloves with the most protection, well you generally want to go gauntlet-style track gloves for that. They cost more but the trade-off is better protection. If you simply want the convenience of quick-on/off for commuting and riding around town, then you lose that extra protection when you go with a short cuff glove.

I'm not intending to kick you while you are down, so to speak, but it would be silly of you to go buy another glove of the same style from another brand, only to have the same problem if you ever go down again (which you won't). Hope you get to feeling better soon.

Welcome and Sorry to hear of your crash...I'm a newbie, so crashing my bike is definitly a fear/concern of mine...hopefully I will learn from reading about others unfortunite incidents. Thanks for sharing...I just learned form your experiance.

Welcome Shawn. Sorry to hear about the mishap but glad your ok, a bike can always be fixed or replaced but luckily this sounds minor and that your already on your way to fixing it up. This is a good reminder to everyone to wear good gear all the time, ATGATT as they say. Just wanted to note that the MSF course is a great idea if you haven't taken it yet.

About the gloves, and I'll admit, I'm an Alpinestars gear whore, so I might be slightly biased, I have a question: Did the glove protect the part of the hand it covered? If so it did its job. I only point this out because A*'s is far from cheap gear (price-wise or quality), so I hate to see you knock the glove for not protecting your wrist if it wasn't designed to protect your wrist.

My bad I should have worded that better. Didn't mean to knock the brand, I just elected to purchase the cheapest gloves I could find. The gloves held together with no tear through. Which I think is pretty impressive since they seemed like a real lightweight pair of gloves.

Sucks to hear! Doesnt sound too bad, so thats a good thing....
Can kinda look at the bright side, get that crash outta the way early. Now you can look forward to some nice riding with out the fear of that first one :)

+1 I'm dreading my first crash and I haven't been out yet!!:o

We had an odd 60+ degree day here in the northeast yesterday, even though there's still a ton of snow around that hasn't melted completely. By the end of the day I had already heard of 3 bike crashes, all of them caused by sand & gravel.
Having lowsided on sand & gravel myself, I know well that this is probably the most dangerous time of the year to be a motorcyclist in this area. The roads (especially intersections) are covered with leftover sand from numerous snow storms that won't be cleaned up for weeks. While the first warm day will naturally get you thinking about a quick ride, you'll also probably be called upon to use those rusty riding skills for the first time in short order too with the roads in their present condition. Will you call on everything you learned last season and avoid a mishap? Or will the long winter layoff be your undoing? Too much of a crapshoot for me. I'll wait until they clean up all that garbage on the roads before my bike leaves the shed for the first time this year.

Hey WTFBuck, glad to hear you're alright. Always sucks when your bike goes down.

I'm always more worried about my bike more than myself. LOL.

Get back on the bike as soon as you can and stay safe!

be thankful you learned the importance of gear having it instead of being out there with a helmet t-shirt shorts and sandals (so. fl.). if there was gravel there was absolutely nothing you could have done except spotting it sooner, if it wasn't the gravel you let off the throttle instead of staying on it and then increasing it, which is scary learning. hell, it took me a year to counter steer by rote without thinking of it. glad it was an 09, not a 12. i came home the other day and am used to sugar sand and sort of wavering through it in first only to find upon the turn there was new loose blacktop a homeowner had put down. i slid right out on it unprepared for the surface, ended up doing a 180 degree skid and having a skid elsewhere. you just went somewhere we all go to sooner or later and between your brain on its own and your own concentrated awareness, you'll increase your road condition awareness and pre-situation decisions earlier. God bless your o.k. and don't let it deter you from a gift few take advantage of. Ride on.
oh, that skid remark.we irish know how to put our undies on that way, yellow in the front brown in the back.